This is Firefly...
I’ll touch momentarily on the production values before I get to the
game proper. They are, as always for
Gale Force Nine, Spectacular, there’s no other way to describe them. The ship counters are well crafted, the card
counters are solid and well coloured, the cards you’re using for the various
parts of the game are as good as any professional deck of cards that you’re
likely to pick up, and as the images used are all from the TV show, it’s as
close as you’re going to get to running around the ‘Verse yourself.
The game strategy is simple, get a job at one place, pickup whatever
crew or cargo you need to do the job, deliver the crew or cargo and get
paid. The game works on the premise of everyone
having the same goal to work with, so everyone knows what the score is before
the game starts and everyone has a clear idea of where all the other players
are. It’s possibly to play the game any
way you like, you can take all the illegal jobs that require you to misbehave
(such as I did), or you can stay on the right side of the law and take less
profitable (but less dangerous) jobs.
My first handful of jobs all required that I misbehave to get them
done, and this is where I learned a fundamental of the game. If you haven’t got a good crew behind you,
don’t misbehave... I spent a good few
turns sitting there stuck while Sue and John were Zipping around the Verse
because I didn’t have the right calibre of crew.
Once I got clear of the first one, I started stocking up on what I needed.
As long as you have the funds, you can buy any amount of gear or crew
that you need, but you only have a limited number of spaces on the ship for
both, so choose wisely. Once you’ve got
over the idea of only one of a particular action in a turn, the game starts to
pick up. If you’ve burned into the
middle of nowhere, there’s nothing else you can do, so you start looking at the
planets in range when you’re making jumps so you won’t end up sitting in space hoping
for nothing to find you.
On the subject of the two NPC ships in the game, the Reaves and the
Alliance cruiser, neither made much of an impact in our game, and I suspect
that you have to be running around in open space for some time before they
really start to cause a problem. I liked
that cards have to be drawn for every movement past the first when you’re
travelling any distance, each one increasing the possibility of something
happening, it made the game seem more claustrophobic, the universe less empty
that the board would have you think.
Overall, for fans of the TV show (or the film, which we shall not refer
to again here), it’s a good reminder of all the good things that there were,
you can easily spin a game into something like the Arabian Nights (http://millionwordman.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/arabian-nights-game-review-bridge.html)
and have a great time doing it. For those
who aren’t fans of the TV show, it’s not a bad game, but you won’t have half
the fun that those who’ve watched the TV show will have.
And the solution for that is to go buy the TV show, you have no idea
what you’ve been missing...