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In my first (and so far only) session of Battlestar Galactica1, I played as a human, and an unfortunate string of events led to Fuel dropping to 1 while we had traveled measly 6 Distance.

On the next jump2 our Admiral drew two Locations, both of which cost Fuel to reach: one of these Locations costed 1 Fuel, but it gave 2 Fuel after the jump.

I thought we were saved - Battlestar would jump, we would drop to 0 Fuel but gain 2 Fuel immediately after, and the play would continue. However, the Admiral - a BSG veteran - said the latter Location would still result in a loss because humans would lose the instant Fuel dropped to 0 and it didn't matter if that Location gave 2 Fuel after the jump.3

Was that ruling correct? Do humans lose the instant any resource drops to 0? In other words, do the rules actually protect from such edge cases and the "you lose the game if a resource is at 0" check is supposed to happen at a specified turn phase (like, say, end of turn)?


1 For complexity's sake, we were playing with Pegasus and Daybreak expansions.

2 (Caused by a Cylon Leader to whom I, in a stroke of unadulterated genius, had given Executive Order.)

3 After which he promptly used a special ability to discard the Locations, drew another one, saw that it also costed fuel and declared that - as is customary in BSG - humans lose.

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The humans do not lose the moment a resource drops to zero. They only lose if a resource is zero at the end of a player's turn.

From the base game rulebook:

If at least one resource is depleted to 0 or less at the end of a player’s turn, the game immediately ends and the Cylon players win. This is the most common way for the Cylons to win. Note that it is possible for the human players to reach 0 of a resource type and then increase it during the same turn without losing the game.

I don't believe the expansions change this.

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    Because reaching zero is the most common way for humans to lose, reaching zero and increasing before turn end is also very common! Dec 11, 2017 at 13:35
  • @BrendanEnrick I think that it's happened once in my hundreds of games. The issue is that resource losses usually happen as part of the crisis or cylon ships activating, or during a cylon player's turn, at which point it's normally too late for a player to correct it.
    – Samthere
    May 11, 2018 at 7:42

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