Here’s a moral dilemma for gamers: Someone has been helping you toward your win condition in a game for the last few hours. You have the opportunity to win now, but the player who has been helping you this whole time tells you this will cause him to lose, and he asks you to wait just one more turn. You could potentially lose in the meantime. Do you play to win and end the game now?

This was the situation last weekend when I was playing Battlestar Galactica at Ben and Lizzy’s apartment with a few other friends of theirs. Ben started the game as the Cylon Leader, which meant that we all knew he wasn’t a human and wasn’t exactly on the humans’ side—my side. The Cylon Leader’s victory condition is kept secret, and could include that the humans need to win.

This was the case for Ben that night, and so Ben was helping us the entire game to flee the cylons, make the FTL jumps, and even find out who among us was secretly a cylon (frakking toasters).

It was close, but we were finally about to make the last FTL jump. But just before pulling the trigger, Ben pleaded for us to wait one more turn. His victory condition, unknown to us at that point, was for the humans to win, but our population and some other resource needed to be within two values of each other; jumping at that moment would have caused our population to drop out of the acceptable range.

It was a good bet that we would be able to jump on the next turn without incurring the drop in population, but there was also a possibility that the crisis card could doom us, and we could end up losing. The rational decision, made within the Magic Circle (of which I’m a strong proponent) would have been to jump right away and win.

Normally, I would have argued for us to just make the jump, but maybe I was getting a little into the story of the game, and I ended up agreeing with Lizzy and the rest of humanity to wait a turn and see if we could bring Ben along to the winners circle with us.

So we waited, we jumped, and we all won. Except the cylons. Frakking toasters.