26th September 2022

It's a Monday and we're round Simon's for Firefly: The Game.
It 'aint' the time to misbehave, it's actually time to play a Sandbox board game in the world of the cult short lived sci-fi show, Firefly.
Now with the requisite joke quote out of the way, it's time to get down to business.

• Cards: Firefly: The Game uses cards to power the game play and a lot of them too, about 400 cards in fact! Mostly in 13 decks at my counting!
  • Story cards: Objectives and winning criteria will vary from game to game and the story card selected at the game start will determine the objectives.
  • Starter Cards: There are 2 types of starter card and each player will have one of each
    Leader cards: These are captains that each player will be given. Leader cards are illustrated and are also similar to crew cards, they have professions, skills and special abilities.
    Drive Core cards: Each player will also have one of these which are placed in the respective slot on their ship board. The drive core determines how far a ship can move.
  • Supply cards: There are 5 decks of supply cards, 1 deck corresponds to a specific sector on the maps. Supply cards are broken down into 3 types.
    Crew: These are characters that can be hired by players. Crew have various stats, including profession, skills and special abilities. Crew can be 'moral' (Or not.), they also have a hiring cost.
    Gear: These can be weapons or other items which can be assigned to crew.
    Upgrades: These cards can be assigned to the player's ship to improve it's capabilities or add new ones.
  • Contract cards: There are another 5 decks of contract cards, again 1 each for each of a specific sector. Contracts represent 'jobs' or 'missions' that players can undertake. Usually this is a delivery of some sort or committing a criminal enterprise.
  • Nav cards: There's a mere 2 decks of nav cards! One deck for Alliance space and the other for border space.
    When player's move their ships through space, they will draw a card from the relevant deck and resolve it. Mostly these have no effect but sometimes they will be an encounter or problem to overcome. Sometimes it'll move the Alliance ship (Bad news.) or the Reaver ship (Really bad news!).
  • Misbehave cards: This is the final deck! Players be frequently directed to 'misbehave', this involves drawing and resolving these cards. They represent crimes or capers that players will need to successfully complete. Usually players will be presented to 2 different capers which will present a different task each to achieve.
• Tokens: Firefly: The Game also makes use of a lot of tokens.
  • Cargo/Contraband: These square cardboard tokens each fit on to 1 space in the ship's hold and can be shipped or smuggled.
  • Passenger/fugitive: Again these are square tokens that fill 1 space on a ship board.
  • Fuel: These card tokens are oblong and half the size of square tokens, thus 2 can fit in 1 space in a hold. Fuel is spent to power a ship's drive core.
  • Parts: These are also oblong tokens and are spent to fix problem with a ship.
  • Disgruntled tokens: These round card tokens feature a unhappy face and are used to track crew when they become unhappy.
  • Goal tokens: These are also round tokens. Story cards will have multiple goals that must be completed. Whenever a player completes one of the goals, they acquire a goal token.
  • Warrant tokens: When a player commits crime or misbehaves badly, they may acquire one of these round tokens. It means that the authorities have noticed the player and may make life hard for the ship or crew.
• Models: There are no meeples here, instead there are little plastic models to represent space ships.
  • Firefly ships: There's 4 firefly ship models on stands, 1 in each of the player colours.
  • Reaver ship: Used to represent Reavers who prowl Border Space, these models are also on stands.
  • Alliance ship: This model is relatively and suitably huge compared to the others and represents an Alliance cruiser.
• Money: Firefly: The Game uses paper money! That's both unusual for a modern game and also pretty cool.
• Dice: There are 2 dice that come with the game. They are normal six-siders except the '6' has been replaced with a firefly ship logo, although it still counts as a '6'.

I don't usually talk about this because it has no impact on the game itself but Firefly: The game has a huge footprint, i.e., it takes up a lot of table space.

How's it play?
Setup

• Board: Put out the game board and complete the following steps.
  • Ships: Put the Alliance and Reaver ships in their respective starting spots.
  • Supply cards: Sort the supply cards into their 5 types and shuffle each into a face-down deck. Finally draw 3 cards from each deck to form a discard pile for each supply deck.
  • Contract cards: Also sort contract cards by type and shuffle them into 5 face-down decks. Again draw and discard 3 cards from each deck for create their  respective discard piles.
  • Nav decks: Sort the nav decks by type, then shuffle the remaining cards into face-down decks.
  • Misbehave deck: Shuffle the misbehave cards into a face-down deck.
  • Story card: Shuffle all the story cards into a face-down deck and draw one. This will be this game's objective.
    Alternatively, players may collectively decide on a story card to use.
• Players: Put out the starter cards and shipboards. Players then roll off with a die to determine the order in which they choose their starter cards and ship boards.
  Then in reverse player order, players choose where to place their ships on the game board.​
  The player to last put their firefly model on the board starts the game as the first player.
  Next, give each player 3,000 credits, 6 fuel tokens and 2 parts tokens. The tokens should all be placed on cargo spaces on each player's ship board.
  Finally, all players draw 1 contract card from each contract deck, giving them 5 contract cards. Players are allowed to keep up to 3 contract cards in hand and may have up to 3 active contracts at a time.

On to play
Firefly: The Game doesn't have set objective, instead it has differing story cards, one of which will be used during a game. Each story card will have a series of goals that must be completed and whoever does them all first, wins!

Firefly: The Game follows the usual turn structure with the active player taking their turn before play progresses to the player on their left.

• Actions: During the active player's turn, they can perform 2 actions as described below. They may perform 2 different actions or repeat the same action twice.
  • ​Move: There are 2 types of movement a player can chose when moving their ship.
    Mosey: The player can move their ship 1 sector, this is slow but safe movement. If a player is adjacent to their destination, they'll probably mosey there.
    Full burn: Now this is more like it. This requires the player to spend a fuel but allows them to move their ship a number of sectors equal to the range of their drive core.
    There's a consequence for doing this though...
    Every time their ship enters a sector, they must draw a card from the nav deck for the region of space they entered.
    Nav cards mostly have no effect and allow the active player to continue moving but some will give them encounters to resolve or problems to address, usually in the form of a skill roll (More on skill rolls below.) or may force them to full stop which means their movement for that action ends. Sometimes it will allow the active player - or another player move the Alliance or Reaver ship a space and sometimes it will pull the ship directly on to the players sector, in which case they must deal with it.
    The Alliance ship will search the player's ship but won't do much to a player unless they're carrying contraband/fugitives or there's a warrant on the ship or crew. In this they'll lose the contraband/fugitives and may lose outlaw crew, they'll also have to bribe the Alliance to get rid of warrants.
    Encountering Reavers is much simpler, if deadlier. They Reavers will kill all passengers/fugitives and kill some of the crew too! However, if the player has the right crew and fuel, they can evade the Reavers.
  • Buy: If the player's ship is in a sector with a supply deck, they may buy stuff!
    Players may look through the pertinent supply deck discard pile for cards they want or draw from the deck until they have 3 cards, then they may buy up to 2 of them. returning any unbought cards to the discard pile.
    Additionally, the buy action also allows the active player to purchase fuel or parts.
    ​If for any reason, any of the crew has disgruntled tokens, the active player may spend credits to remove them with shore leave.
  • Deal: When the active player is in sector with a contract deck, they may use an action to look at 3 cards from either the discard pile or drawn from the deck and keep 2 of them to complete at a later stage of the game.
    Players can also buy or sell contraband if they have a 'solid' reputation i.e., good reputation in that sector.
  • Work: The active player may spend an action to work, there are several types of work that can be undertaken.
    Cash: If they active player is in a sector with a planet, they may spend an action to earn some credits.
    Job: Each active job a player has will require several steps that need completing in order to finish that contract. An action may be spent to complete a step, sometimes this requires a skill roll.
• End turn: Once the active player has completed their 2 actions, player progresses to the player on their left.
• Other rules: There are a whole bunch of situational rules, some of which are touched upon below.
  • Skill rolls: Many tasks and actions will require a skill roll to complete. Some tasks will offer a choice in how to resolve it with differing difficulties and outcomes. Some tasks may also require certain prerequisites before rolling.
    Difficulty: A skill roll's difficulty is determined by a number, the higher the number, the harder it is to successfully complete.
    Bonuses: A player may gain bonuses from various sources, predominantly, this will come from characters. Every point a character has in the relevant skill will be added to the roll. Gear cards may also add to a skill roll.
    ​​​​​Roll the dice: When a skill roll is attempted, the active player rolls a single die. If the result (Plus any applicable bonus.) is equal or higher than the difficulty, they succeed. If the active player rolls the firefly icon icon it counts as a 6, then they get to roll the die again and add it to the result of the first roll (Which will be a 6.), thus, no matter the difficulty, there's always the possibility of succeeding at the roll.

Endgame
Firefly: The game works hard to replicate the feel of the show and to a certain extent, it does this very well. It successfully captures the feel of hustling round a system, wheeling and dealing, dodging authorities and making profit.
All of this though, is only half of what the TV show was, the show was also about the family you make and the stories they collectively create, stuff that's quite hard to replicate in a game and is missing here since players are each playing separate crews. Having said that, there's definitely a bit of emergent gameplay and some elements of storytelling going on here but his brings me to one of my bugbears about the game.

When you're playing it feels a bit like a single-player game that happens to have other players in it. There's a little bit of interaction here and there that comes from sending the Alliance or Reavers after other players or trading and crew poaching but it doesn't feel significant.

Firefly: The Game is sandbox game that appears to offer a lot of choice, is a lot of game with a lot of rules and rules exceptions and also a lot of components which I feel will be off putting to more casual gamers. A fan of the show who isn't a gamer will probably find Firefly: The Game hard going at the start.

Despite the breadth of rules, the game is fairly straightforward in what it asks players to do.

One of my other bugbears is that players will often find themselves delivering something, this might be legal or illegal or performing a crime/misbehaving. All of this will involve travelling around and risking running into the Alliance or Reavers or other obstacles and so on.
The consequence of this is that because the game is so single-player driven that ultimately, it's a race to complete the goals as efficiently as possible and even though it's meant to be have open sandbox gameplay, players are being somewhat funnelled through the game by those goals. I.e., the game-winning goals are all the same, it's how those goals are achieved that will differ between player.

The game also has a fairly long playtime, we played a beginner story card with a low player count and it still took 2 hours. Although, to be fair, that's not really uncommon with this style of play so it comes with the territory but be prepared to commit a few hours to a playthrough.

If you're a fan of the Firefly TV show and are prepared to prepared to invest some effort learning the rules time to play, you'll probably enjoy this.
Personally, I'm not sure how I feel about Firefly: The Game overall, it was a fun experience and my decisions generally felt meaningful, it also fairly involved and having players run around dong their own thing also felt a little unengaging. However, if someone else wanted to play it, I wouldn't object.

23rd March 2022

It's a Wednesday night and we're round Simon's for an evening of gaming.

'You see, in this world, there’s two kinds of people, my friend – those who write dodgy blogs about board games, and those who read dodgy blogs about board games. You read dodgy blogs about board games!'

Western Legends is a western themed open-world sandbox board game where players are free to pursue several differing roads to success.

What's in a game?

• Board: The board displays a map of fairly nondescript desert landscape which is populated with various western features such as Red Fall town or Cliff junction. The entire map is divided up into irregular spaces. Many of these spaces also contain icons which represent different businesses or areas of interest, including general store, sheriff's office, bandit hideouts, prospecting sites and more.
  There are also spaces for various decks of cards and money and across the bottom is a scoring track for VPs (Unsurprisingly called Legendary Points.).
  Along the left edge are tracks for 'Marshal' and 'Wanted' points. These respectively track the fame and notoriety for lawmen and outlaws, a player cannot have a score in both of these tracks at the same time.
• Player boards: These themed boards track weapons, horses, cash and items for each player's character, as well as damage they've taken.
  The player boards are double-sided but the only difference is the spaces for legendary tokens if you playing with that optional rule.
• Cards: Western Legends uses quite a wide variety of cards.
  Character cards: There are 12 different character cards in Western Legends, each one based on a historical figure. They are double-sided and the front has a portrait and information on that character's unique ability while the reverse gives a brief biography of the individual plus lists starting location/items.
  Each character also has a set of personal objectives displayed across 4 cards which are used in the optional rules.
  Story cards: These cards are also double-sided. On one side a story card displays a in-game objective and some spaces to place player discs. The flip side of a story card is an action that will be triggered when that card is completed.
  Fight cards: These are used when a player fights an NPC. They each contain a special move and despite there only being 13 of them, each also has a rank from a normal deck of cards such as 'queen of clubs', these ranks tend to be quite high so as to challenge players.
  Poker deck: This is a typical deck of 52 cards, as well as having the usual suits, each one also has a special action that can be triggered. This deck is used both for the special actions and combat.
  Money cards: Western Legends uses cards for dollars.
  Item deck: This deck of cards contains all the cowboy accessories that any player could want; weapons, mounts, whiskey and especially hats! Each item has a cost and a number of these are double-sided and can be upgraded to the improved side.
• General Store: This is a card holder for the item deck.
• Tokens: Western Legends also makes use of a wide variety of tokens.
  Cubes: The traditional little wooden cubes that come in player colours and are used for the game's 3 scoring tracks.
  Discs: These wooden discs are used to track story objectives and also come in player colours.
  Wound tokens: These round tokens have an image of a blood drop and are used by players to track damage they have received.
  Gold nuggets: Little acrylic shapes in a gold colour.
  Sheriff's badge: The first player token.
• Poker chips: Strictly speaking these are just more tokens but they are actually look like poker chips.
  Cattle tokens: There are 2 types of cattle token, used to represent the 2 ranches in the game. These are also double-sided, listing a reward on the reverse (More on rewards below.).
  Legendary tokens: These poker chips are used in conjunction with personal character goals.
• Dice: There are 2 six-siders in the game, they are not the usual numbered dice though and have a bunch of specific icons that refer to gold and cash instead.
• Minis: There are 13 plastic miniatures that come with the game, each has it's own look and pose.
• Plastic rings: There plastic rings in each player colour as well a brown ring (Sic.) for the sheriff and grey ones for bandits. These rings clip on to the base of any miniature.
  It means that any miniature can be used for any character.

The quality of the components in Western Legends is high, the cards, boards and tokens are all well made, the dice are plastic but nicely rounded and finished in a cool looking black and gold colour scheme. I like the gold nuggets and always appreciate the usage of wooden components. The plastic miniatures are unpainted but have a reasonable amount of detail.
While essentially unnecessary, the general store tray is eye-catching and looks great on the table.

The use of art is solid throughout the game and fits the western theme very well, illustrations feature on all the cards and are high quality, the character card portraits are the standout here. The board also looks good, with its map-like artwork.
All-in-all well presented.

Quite a few icons are used in Western Legends, most of it is clear and easily comprehended. Players will probably end up referring to the rulebook on several occasions, however, it's likely that this will be as much to get a handle on rules as to decipher the game's iconography.

How's it play?
​Setup

• Players: Players should take all the components in their player colour.
  Character card: Randomly deal 2 character cards to each player, then all players should choose one and discard the other out of this game.
  Miniature: Each player should choose a miniature to represent their character and clip their plastic ring to it's base and put the miniature in its starting location as per the character card.
  ​Player board: Every player should take a player board and put their character card on to it's space, then follow the instructions for the character's starting items and position on the trackers.
• Board: Put out the board and put the money cards, cattle tokens, dice and gold nuggets on to their allotted spaces.
  Poker deck: Shuffle the poker cards into a face-down deck and put them on their allotted space.
  Fight cards: shuffle the fight cards into a face-down deck and put them on their spot.
  Story cards: Shuffle the story cards into 2 equal face-up decks and place them in their allotted spaces.
• General store: Put out the general store then put all the item cards in their spaces.
• Sheriff: Clip the brown ring on to one of the unused miniatures, this is now the game's sheriff and should be put in the sheriff's starting spot.
• Bandits: Clip all 6 of the grey rings on 6 unused miniatures, these will be the bandits and should be placed in the bandit starting spots.
• First player: Whoever's character is furthest along the wanted track becomes the fist player. In the likelihood of a tie, determine the first player by other method as seen fit by the players.

On to play
Before discussing how a turn plays out, some rules needed to be explained.

• Marshal/wanted tracks: These tracks are mutually exclusive and a player cannot have a score on both tracks. A player with a score on the marshal track is considered a marshal and a player on the wanted track is a outlaw.
  Marshal track: As a player progresses along the marshal track, they earn cash and will on occasion earn VPs. Finally at the game end, they will earn bonus VPs depending on their finishing position.
  If at any time a player with a score on the marshal track carries out an action that would increase their wanted score, they remove their marker from the marshal tracker and put it on to the start of the wanted track, they're now outlaws!
  Wanted track: Players on the wanted track cannot move up the marshal track.
  As a player moves along the wanted track they will occasionally acquire a poker card. More importantly, they will acquire VPs every round, the further along the track, the more they acquire!
• Sheriff: The sheriff can start the game 'inactive'. However, when any player moves on to the wanted track (Which could be right at the start of the game.), the sheriff become active.
  The sheriff can be moved around the board by playing certain cards and if he ends up on the same space as a outlaw character, well, then it's bad news for that outlaw, see below for more information on this.
• Story cards: Each story card has a criteria and 3 circles. When a player meets that criteria, they put one of their discs on an available space on the story card.
  When all the spaces on a story card are filled - as determined by player count, the card is flipped over, then at the end of the turn it is resolved. completed.
  This will provide some flavour text and a reward for all players who contributed (Put a disc on the card.) to its completion. It will also respawn a number of bandits if they've been captured.
  Finally, the player who filled in the last space and flipped the cards gets whatever bonus is listed on the card..
• Wounds: Characters have a poker hand size of 5, every wound they take decreases their hand size by 1. When a character has taken 3 wounds, their hand size is reduced to 2. Smaller hand sizes limit a players choices during actions and combat.

Actions
Beginning with the first player and progressing to the left, each player takes their turn. The bulk of active player's turn will consist of 3 actions, which can be taken in any order or multiple times. Most of the actions a player can take will be contextual to their location or proximity to other players or NPCs.
The turn order is a follows:

• Turn start: Any start of turn effects are triggered now. Then the active player may acquire $20 or 2 poker cards or $10 and 1 poker card. Finally the active player chooses which items to use for their turn.
• Move: The active player may spend an action to move 2 spaces across the board. alternatively, if they have a mount, they may use the mount's movement of 3-5 instead.
• Card action: The active player may spend an action to use the ability as described on any card they have in their possession.
  If the card used is a poker card, it's discarded once the action is completed. Character and item cards are not discarded after use.

Contextual actions
There a large number of contextual actions available in Western Legends obviously depending on the situation.

• PvP: If the active player is in the same space as another player, then they may enter into a fight with that other player. While there are 3 types of conflict here (Arrest, duel and rob.), they are broadly speaking all are resolved the same way. The active play must declare which type of conflict they are initiating.
  Resolving conflict: The active player must play a poker card from their hand face-down, then the targeted player chooses whether to play a poker card of their own face-down, if the targeted player does not play a card, they immediately lose the conflict.
  Players then reveal cards which might have special abilities that are triggered, after this, values are compared and the highest wins!
  There's also some rules for the start of combat and reactions once the fight has been resolved.
  Arrest: To arrest another character the active player must have a score on the marshal track and their target must have a score on the wanted track (Can't arrest someone who isn't wanted!).
  If the active player wins, the wanted player goes to jail and the active player's score on the marshal track increases.
  The wanted player gains a wound and a poker card, they are then sent to jail and lose their wanted score and any cattle tokens they had as well as half their money and gold.
  Duel: If the active player wins a duel, they immediately gain 2 VPs. The targeted player gains a wound and a poker card.
  Rob: If the active player wins a robbery, they increase their wanted score by 1 and can take half their victim's cash or gold as well as their cattle token if they have one.
  The targeted player gains a wound and a poker card.
  Losing: In all instances, regardless of what type of fight it was, if the active player loses a conflict, they gain a wound and a poker card.
• PvE: Any character may try and tackle a bandit and outlawed characters may try and deal with the sheriff. These conflicts are dealt with in a manner similar to PvP conflicts, except the NPC draws cards from the fight deck instead to generate their value during combat.
  Bandits: The active player may attack a bandit, when this happens, a fight occurs and the active player must play a poker card face-down as per a PvP fight. For this conflict, another non-active player draws 2 cards from the fight deck and chooses 1 to play face-down. The outcome is resolved as usual.
  If the active player beats the bandit, they can gain a marshal point or a VP unless they are an outlaw, in which case they must take a VP.
  If the active player loses, they gain a wound and a poker card.
  No matter if the bandit won or not, it is removed from play for the time being.
  Sheriff: If the sheriff moves on to a space with an outlaw or an outlaw moves into a space with the sheriff (Are you mad!), then a fight breaks out.
  Fighting the sheriff is like fighting a bandit except the sheriff player draws 4 fight cards!
  If the outlaw wins, the sheriff has been driven off and is relocated to the sheriff's office.
  If the outlaw loses, they gain a wound and a poker card, they are also arrested with consequences identical to being arrested during PvP.

Location actions
If the active player is on a space with an icon, they may trigger that action. There several types of location and some have multiple options.

• Bank: When the active player enters the bank space, they'll be presented with a couple of opportunities.
  Deposit: The active player may spend an action to sell gold nuggets they've acquired for both cash and VPs.
  Heist: The active player may rob the bank. This involves fighting the bank guard. Which is PvE combat as described above, with the guard drawing 3 fight cards.
  If the active player wins the fight, they gain a chunk of change and gain 3 points on the wanted track!
  If they lose, they still get 1 wanted point but also gain a wound and a poker card while fleeing empty handed.
• Cabaret: Players can spend an action and money here to straight-up buy VPs. that's some partyin' there!
• Doctor: A player may use an action and pay to remove all wounds, they also gain poker cards equal to the wounds removed.
• General Store: The active player may spend an action and cash to buy an item or upgrade an existing one.​
• Herding: If the active player is located at either of the 2 ranches, they may spend an action to acquire a cattle token. Then they need to deliver it onwards  to reap its reward. Where they deliver the cattle token will determine what reward they receive.
  Rustle: Delivering a cattle token to the other ranch will earn the player a wanted point and the reward on the flip side of the cattle token.
  Wrangle: Taking the cattle token to the rail station acquires the player a marshal point, as well as the reward on the flip side.
• Prospect: When at a prospecting site, the active player may spend an action to search for gold which is done by rolling dice. This will give the player gold nuggets, cash and sometimes nothing.
• Work: If the active player is at any site with an icon, they can spend an action to acquire some $10.

End of turn
When the active player has finished their 3 actions, the following events occur.

• Story cards: Story cards are resolved.
• Wanted track: VPs from being on the wanted track are acquired.
• Hand size: If the active player has more cards than there hand size, they must discard down to it.
• Legend points: Check to see if the endgame has been triggered.
• Next player: Play progresses to the player on the left.

Endgame
Play continues until someone reaches 15/20/25 Legendary Points (As decided by players for a short/average/long game.) which triggers the game end and all players get one final turn.
After this players tot up their final VP total (Legendary Points.) which comes from various sources.

• Legendary track: Players get VPs equal to their position on this track.
• Marshal track: Players on the marshal track gain their final VP bonus.
• Wanted track: The player who got furthest along the wanted track earns an additional 3 VPs, other wanted players get 1 VP each.
• Cash: Every $60 dollars accumulated earns a VP.
• Upgraded items: These will earn extra VPs.
• Wounds: Wounds actually deduct from a player's VPs.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

Overall
It might seem from this fairly lengthy write up that Western Legends is complex but this isn't the case. There are lots of options and choices in this open world game that players can take but the implementation of this through the rules is actually quite straightforward.
Western Legends has enough flexibility to give players interesting choices to follow and provide a varied experience but doesn't bog them down with too many rules.

This wide variety of choices provides players with several differing approaches to accumulating VPs and one of the interesting aspects is how these elements interact with each other and nudge players into also doing so.
For example:
Prospecting can be a good way to go, mining and selling gold nuggets earns both VPs and cash (Which can be spent for even more VPs!), provided that the player can get to the bank.
Outlaws will want to steal that gold for themselves (Or engage in other dastardly behaviour.), which in turn increases their wanted rating. For bandits, this is a good thing, because their wanted rating has the ongoing effect of constantly increasing their VPs.
Consequently, it means that players on the marshal track will be motivated to hunt down and arrest outlaws to prevent this occurring.
Players will want to watch what others are doing and if necessary, adjust strategies to respond to other player actions.
Having said that, the open nature of the game means that players could also simply avoid each other and it becomes a race to get to the Legendary Point threshold.
These differing playstyles means it's hard to describe what a typical game would be like to play because there really isn't a typical game.

Western Legends is also a bit of a RPG-adjacent game but handles those elements fairly simply. There are no experience points or levelling-up here, but purchasing item cards serves the purpose of increasing characters' abilities and thus money is a bit of a stand-in for experience points.
Additionally; from story cards and character objectives to tales that arise from emergent game play, ​the game is full of appropriate narrative beats. As a result, the game's old-west theme feels strongly implemented.

If I had a criticism, it's perhaps that the playtime feels a little long, however, I never felt like there was too long spent in downtime between turns.

As far as sandbox games go, I definitely think that Western Legends is one of the better examples. The implementation of the western theme is fun and fits well. If sandbox game are what interests you and you like the old-west theme and presentation, it's worth a try.

17th February 2022

​It's a Thursday night and we're round Simon's for some gaming goodness.

The game of the night was Star Wars: Outer Rim.
Turns out that playing a scoundrel in an open world Star Wars game ain't like dusting crops.

What's in a game?

• Gameboard: Star Wars: Outer Rim's gameboard is segmented into 6 parts and put together like some sort of jigsaw puzzle. When made, it looks like a semi-circle or perhaps... a rim or an... Outer Rim,! Geddit? Sigh.
  The board contains a galactic map that shows different routes to and from various planets and 'stops' between planets known as Navpoints. Close to each planet are 2 spaces for contact tokens apiece who will be on that planet.
  ​Each segment of the board will contain 2 planets with 2 contact spaces each (Except for 1 segment which only has 1 - Kessel.).
  Finally, there are 2 pieces that go at each end of the rim which also each contain 2 spaces for stacks of patrol tokens.
• Player board: This board has an unusual shape to accommodate a character card.
  5 tracks are displayed on the board, 4 for different types of reputation and 1 that tracks fame.
  There are spaces around the edge of the board to place/slot gear cards and mission cards.
• Ship board: These largish boards feature illustrations of more-or-less recognisable spaceships from the Star Wars setting. They come in 2 types (Starter and standard.) and share the same set of 3 numeric stats; Hyperdrive, Ship Combat Value and Hull. Each will also have spaces/slots around the edge to place, crew, cargo or mod cards.
  Starter ships: These identical boards are double-sided and each side has a slightly different starter ship.
  Standard ships: During the game, players will have the opportunity to purchase other ships. Their stats will have different values and different amount/type of slots. additionally, these ships each have a ship objective of some sort. When the objective is completed, the ship may be flipped over to the other side to a better version of the ship with improved stats. Levelling up if you will.
• Character cards: These are the 8 characters that the player will take the role of. As with the ship cards, there are a variety of characters here ranging from easily recognisable to lesser-known and each is double-sided and illustrated with the relevant character.
  Each character has 2 numeric stats, Ground Combat Value and Health and each character also has a special ability of some sort.
  Each character also has a personal goal, which when met, allows the controlling player to flip the character to the other side, levelling them up as they would with a ship.
  There will also be rules for setup at the start and finally, at the bottom will be several tags or words such as Piloting, Stealth, Strength etc. These come into play during skill rolls.
• Cards: As well as character cards, Star Wars: Outer Rim comes with a whole bunch of decks that power the gameplay.
  Databank cards: This deck is numbered and interestingly, they are not shuffled but always kept in numerical order for easy reference.
  Encounter cards: These cards will be split into 7 decks, 6 of which correspond to a segment of the board, the 7th deck corresponds to navpoints.
  Market cards: These cards can be bought by players and represent everything from ships to crew to bounties and are split by type into a mere 6 decks!
• Tokens: Star Wars: Outer Rim has numerous tokens.
  Patrol tokens: There are 4 of these card patrol tokens of escalating strength for each of the game's 4 factions, thus 16 in total.
  Contact tokens: There are 22 of these sort of rounded oblong shaped tokens and each one represents a character out of Star Wars,  on one side of each is a picture of the pertinent character. Every token also has a difficulty and which is represented by a green, yellow or red colour which is shown on both sides of the token - thus giving players an idea of what they'll be up against before revealing it.
  Credits: The game's currency is represented by these rectangular card tokens, I guess cash in the Star Wars galaxy is very square?
  Goal tokens: Fairly nondescript round card tokens.
  Damage tokens: These are hexagonal card tokens that display a 'hit' icon. They are placed on to a character or ship when they are damaged.
  Reputation tokens: These come in 4 types - 1 for each factions and are used on the player boards to track every player's standing with the aforementioned factions.
• Standees: Each character has their own illustrated standee.
• Dice: The game comes with 6 plastic dice. Unusually, especially for a high-profile licensed game, these are eight-sided! Furthermore, in place of numbers are symbols; 3 for Hit, 1 for Critical Hit and 2 Focus symbols, the remaining 2 faces are blank.

I've got no complaints about any of the game's components, they're made to the usual high standard that've come to be expected from modern games. There are no standout components but neither are there any bad ones.

Regardless of whether it's practical or not, the semi-circular board looks like eye-catching.
From an art perspective, it's clear that they've used some photo-referencing from the films for some of the illustrations and I think that's fine, it still looks like good artwork and means the game wisely eschews using actual photos anywhere. The quality of the art is good.

Star Wars: Outer Rim uses quite a lot of iconography, for stats, for factions, on the dice etc. Fortunately, much of it is pretty clear and self-explanatory, it requires little referencing to the rulebook. This is helped by the use of tags which is easily understood.

How's it play?
​Setup

• Board: Put together the board along with the end pieces.
  Patrol tokens: Sort the patrol tokens into their 4 factions, then create a stack for each with the highest value at the bottom and lowest at the top. Then place each stack on its allotted starting space.
  Contact tokens: Randomise the tokens face-down and place them face-down on their allotted contact spaces on the board according to the difficulty of each contact.
• Databank deck: Ensure these cards are kept in numerical order.
• Encounter cards: Sort the encounter cards into their 7 types and shuffle them into 7 face-down decks. It's probably a good idea to place the 6 planetary encounter decks close to the planets they represent.
• Market cards: Sort the market cards into their 6 types and shuffle them into 6 face-down decks. Then draw 1 card from each deck and place it face-up on top of its respective deck. When the displayed cards are bought from these decks, new cards a revealed and placed on top of their respective deck.
• Players: Give each player a player board:
  Characters: Players should choose or be assigned characters. They should take the character card and its standee. The character card should be placed on it's 'basic' side.
  Starter ship: Give each player a starting ship, the player can choose which one of the start ships to use.
  Setup: Every character has its own setup, which will tell them which databank card to take, what equipment they start with, what their standing will be with each faction and finally, where to place their standee at the game start.
• First player: Determine a first player, then give players credits according to their position in the turn order.

On to play
In Star Wars: Outer Rim players take on the role of outlaws, bounty hunters and scoundrels, the general scum and villainy of the galaxy I guess and the objective in Star Wars: Outer Rim is to acquire fame.
​There are varied paths to achieve this. collecting on bounties, delivering goods and other tasks or jobs that will occur during the game.
In their turn, the active player will perform actions in 3 phases before play moves on clockwise. These phases are Planning, Actions and Encounter.

• Planning: The active player may carry out 1 of the following actions.
  Movement: This will probably be the most common action in this phase and allows the player to move their standee/ship along as many planets/navpoints as their ship's hyperdrive stat. There are a couple of caveats here though.
  If a ship enters the maelstrom that surrounds Kessel, it must stop.
  If the player's ship enters the same space as patrol for a faction the player does not have good standing with (Positive reputation.), the player's ship must stop.
  Recover: If a player chooses not to move, they may remover all damage done to both their character and ship. If the active player had been defeated in their previous turn, then the active player must choose the recover action during planning.
  Do nothing: Not strictly true, if the active player chooses this action they perform  some figuratively nondescript work or task and earn 2,000 credits. I guess in the deeps of space around a navpoint someone does want their crops dusted or moisture farmed.
• Action: This second phase is pretty broad and the active player can perform as many actions as they are capable of.
  This involve buying cards from the market decks (And selling.), delivering goods/bounties and even trading with other players in the same space.
  Cards/missions that have the action tag have their action (Usually a skill roll.) completed during this phase.
  Actions can be very contextual, depending on location or other requirements.
  Curiously, buying market card is what determines if the patrol tokens move.
• Encounter: The kind of encounter the player has in the 3rd and final phase of a turn will depend on the location they ended their movement. A player only has 1 encounter per turn.
  Planet/navpoint: If a player ended on a planet, draw card from that planet's encounter deck and resolve it. If they stopped on a navpoint, do the same with the navpoint deck.
  Contact: If the active player ended their movement on a planet, they may choose to encounter a contact there. This involves flipping the contact token face-up and revealing it. Each contact will have a databank card that will need to be resolved, this could be any of a number of tasks . It may involve skill rolls, completing a delivery bounty etc. Often when the task is completed, the contact will join the player's crew.
  Patrol: How an encounter with a patrol will go depends on the players reputation with that patrol's faction.
  If the player has positive reputation, nothing will happen.
  If the player has a neutral reputation with that faction, they may choose to fight the patrol. More on combat below.
  If the player has a negative reputation with the patrol's faction, they must fight it.
• End turn: Once the active player has resolved their encounter, play moves to the player on the left.
• Other rules: There are numerous aspects to the game I've not mentioned yet.
  Skill rolls: Actions or jobs may require the player to make skill rolls. Each skill roll  has a tag associated with it and there are 3 levels related to that.
  E.G., if a action has the tag Piloting and the player has no cards in their playing area with that that tag, it is considered an unskilled roll. If they have 1 card with a matching tag it a skilled roll and they have at least 2 cards with matching tags, it's a highly skilled roll.
  When making a skill roll, the active player always rolls 2 dice:
  If it's unskilled, for the roll to be a success, there must be at least 1 critical hit results showing on the result.
  For a skilled roll, there must be at least 1 hit or critical hit result showing.
  ​Finally, for a highly skilled roll, if at least any 1 of any of the hit, critical hit or focus icons is showing on the result, then it's a success.
  Combat: The rules for combat are quite different to skill rolls and furthermore, the game does not differentiate mechanically between ship or ground combat.
  When a player enters combat they are considered they attacker and who or whatever they are fighting is considered the defender. 
  The attacker rolls a number of dice equal to the combat value they are using; ​ focus result may trigger special effects depending upon circumstance but otherwise, each hit counts a 1, each critical hit counts are 2, the result is tallied up and this is the damage done.
  The defender does the same.
  Whoever dealt the higher damage wins the encounter, ties favour the attacker.
  Finally, damage is applied. In some cases, each combatant deals their damage to their opponent in the form of damage tokens put on the ship's hull for ship combat or character's health for ground combat. Although some opponents such as patrol tokens either win or are defeated.
  Regardless of who wins or loses a combat encounter, if at any time, the damage tokens put on the hull or health of a player's ship or character exceeds that value, then the player is defeated.
  Secrets: Most of the time, cards a put into a player's area face-up, they do not have a hand of cards in the usual sense. Some cards will however instruct the player to keep them secret. The player can simply place these in their area face-down.

Endgame
Play continues until the any player reaches 10 fame, the game then immediately ends and they are considered the winner.

Overall
I haven't covered the entirety of the rules here but even so, from the perspective of complexity, Star Wars: Outer Rim isn't too bad or that complicated. You move a few spaces, perform actions, have an encounter and that's it.
There are a number of situational exceptions (Mostly coming from cards that are drawn.) that need remembering though, players will want to pay close attention to their playing area to know what they'll be good at, paying attention to their tags in particular.
The game also possesses some RPG aspiration here and makes use of very light RPG system, there's no XP as such but characters and ships can be levelled up after completing their goals.

Having said that, the rules will probably be a little too convulsed for non-gamer types.
I don't think that this is a game for Star Wars fans wanting a board game to play. It feels more like a board gamers who want a Star Wars game to play, which is not a thing necessarily bad and honestly, there's going to be a bit of crossover between the 2 groups.

Because of the fairly open nature of the game, it's quite hard to describe what players will expect and strategies they might employ.
Players will likely acquire jobs, encounters, bounties etc randomly to some extent, this will require them to adapt their strategies.
Optimisation, picking up and completing jobs while working towards other jobs is vital here, as this finding the most efficient route across the map, The board's unusual shape essentially funnels travel along 2 or 3 routes. All of this is provided of course, that all the pieces fall in the right place. This would include watching how patrols move and the reputation players have with their respective factions. There are also other paths to accruing fame points such as fighting patrols.
Players will also look to gain crew, improved ship and mods.

Additionally, there's nothing to stop players fighting other players, in fact, the game may sort of encourage this as circumstances ay put one player's bounty aboard another player's ship.

I'm not sure how I feel about Star Wars: Outer Rim.
One aspect that irks me is the entirely different set of mechanics used for skill tests and combat. 
Another is the shape of the board. For an open world game players are in essence limited to the choice of going one way or the other, clockwise or anticlockwise.
Yes. the board looks good and perhaps it makes sense within the context of the Star Wars setting but ,t feels like it's been done to nudge players to undertake tasks in a certain order, all in the name of game balancing or game play.

I also found the game a little unengaging. I think this was down to a mixture of what felt like a long downtime between turns and frequently slightly unexciting turns.

And as with a lot of open world games that sort try to implement a go-anywhere-do-anything theme. It feels like a bit more of an effort than it's worth. I wonder if it wouldn't be better to get a player to gamemaster an actual table top RPG instead.