Firefly Board Game: First Impressions

Due to the holiday (and my general feeling of being overwhelmed by work and children) there was no official MEK OP event this weekend, although some members were talking about meeting at our FLGS, Three Suns Unlimited. Instead, I stayed home and played some two-person Firefly with my wife.

Firefly is a pseudo-RPG with a strong thematic tie-in to the short-lived TV show of the same name. You control the crew of a tramp freighter which cruises around a small map with a localized star cluster, looking for shipping jobs and performing acts of petty crime on the side. You can upgrade your ships, hire crew, and equip them with new gear. There's no "leveling mechanic", but otherwise it's all standard RPG fare with the standard dice-rolling skill tests, here using a d6. Run quests, get money, buy more loot.

The game has the standard strengths and weaknesses of other games of its type. It does a superb job of matching the feel of the original show, which is an impressive feat given that the show lasted for barely half a season. Virtually every bit of dialogue has been mined for some kind of event card or character profile. Any extra who appeared for 7 seconds is probably in this game on a mercenary card somewhere.

There are a few nice mechanics here. Every time you complete a quest ("job"), you have to make an extra pay-out to your crew. This motivates you to run jobs with the smallest crew possible, and forces you to keep looking for harder jobs to pay your growing crew. The game creates a strong sense of self-pacing, even aside from the incentive of competing with another player.

The most original mechanic is a couple of hostile ships representing the Alliance (law-and-order, trying to catch smugglers and criminals) and the Reavers (psycho space marauders who just want to kill everyone). The two ships move based on decks of cards that you're forced to draw as you move your own ships. Eventually each deck has a card that will teleport one or another of the ships directly onto you, causing lots of nasty effects. This creates an unpredictable timer that tends to go off right as you're about to execute some brilliantly devised scheme, rendering it all for naught.

Whether you like or dislike this kind of random mechanic, it certainly is a faithful representation of the thematic source material. By the end of the game, you'll really feel like a harried freighter captain, abused from all sides by demanding underworld figures and constantly on the run from the law.

There are a number of mechanics missing from the game that I would rather enjoy seeing included. The map is always fixed, and playing every game on the same fixed map starts to feel repetitive. (This is one of the reasons I'd like to design a random-map game of my own, if I ever find the time!) There are underutilized game concepts that feel like they might be vestigial bits of some earlier design of the game: ships have a printed "purchase cost", despite being all identical and coming for free at the start of the game, and the "stash" cargo storage area on your ship is literally referenced by only a single card in the entire game.

The level of randomness in the game is high. Sometimes the dice will reward someone for using an ill-conceived strategy, but punish someone else for playing cautiously. Screaming at bad die roll results or ill-timed event cards is an expected outcome of play.

The production standards for the game are uniformly high. Everything is beautiful, down to the money, and the game sells at a fairly impressive price point below $50. If you have any interest in the old show, it's highly recommended as a nostalgia trip.