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. What's in a game?
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. Firefly: The Game has a lot of components and I mean a lot, generally they're are all good quality. Tokens, cards and boards are what you'd expect from a modern. Yes, the Dice are plastic but also with well rounded corners so that's good. I like the paper money too. The models are cool, it's a bit bland that all the player ships are the same firefly class models but otherwise they're good quality, the Alliance cruiser is definitely the standout components. A mixture of photos and illustrations are used throughout the game which is a wise move. Often, games that use a lot of stock photos in place of art look quite cheap. Here though, photos are mostly reserved for portraits of characters from the show so it works well enough in this context. Despite the game's level of detail, the iconography is kept to a minimum and isn't overwhelming. Most game information is relayed through text. Even so, the amount of events, tasks and the like that occur in the game will keep players referring to the rulebook. How's it play? Setup
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.
Endgame Whichever player completes the final goal on the story card first... wins the game! 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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI play, I paint. Archives
March 2024
Categories
All
|