Over the past couple of days I’ve had some gaming sessions with friends and I’ve been able to try Firefly: The Game from Gale Force Nine. It’s a game that I’ve been interested in playing for a while but due to its length I’ve only managed to play one and a half games. So, I’m not going to give it a full review because I feel as though I need to play it more and experience a few other things about the game before I review it fully, but I’m not sure when I’ll get to play it again so I thought I’d just give my first impressions.
I was never a huge fan of the show and movie. I’ve watched them and enjoyed them but they’re not something that I return to again and again, having said that I do like the theme and space games always catch my attention. In Firefly: The Game each player is a leader of a ship and is traveling through the ‘verse to try and meet the game’s objective. There are a number of different scenarios, including a solo one, but I have only played one scenario. Throughout the game you will be dealing with various people, completing missions for them (some illegal, some immoral), visiting ports to buy upgrades for your ships, equipment, and hire crew in order to help you meet the objectives of the missions and the overall scenario while avoiding the Alliance and the Reavers. The first player to meet the goals wins.
There is a lot more to the game than that but I won’t go into an extensive overview here. Basically there are four things you can do on your turn, and you choose two of them – fly, where you either move one space or choose to full burn to get across the galaxy faster, buy, where you purchase things from ports, deal, where you accept jobs, and activate/complete jobs, usually by picking up or dropping things off. After you complete a mission you have to pay your crew but you get all the money after that. A lot of the the game is based on skill checks so it’s important to look out for what skills your crew and equipment will have.
It’s interesting that at first it seems like a pick-up-and deliver game but actually it’s a race, and one of the things I found is that it’s tempting to get caught up in completing jobs rather than actually try and achieve the requirements of the scenario. The scenarios say they should take two hours but I don’t really see how that’s possible, unless you know every card. Three hours is more reasonable, perhaps longer depending on how people do. While it can drag it’s also fast-paced and turns move fairly quickly, especially as players’ turns can overlap since there isn’t much in the way of interaction. Mostly you’re concerned with your own ship and you don’t get to deal with the other players.
The length is really the biggest problem because if you get off to a slow start you can see that you’re not going to do very well yet you have to sit there and play out the game, which can be frustrating. There also comes a point where you get a crew in place and things start ticking along, and you have enough money to not do jobs anymore or really bother buying anything else. This can mean the game ends in an anticlimax, although I imagine if a few players were even then it could be quite a tense finish as they race to the completion of the final goal.
While I like Firefly I don’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the show, and since there were only a limited number of episodes the game has to draw on a limited pool of characters, so not many of them are recognizable or memorable. I’m sure fans would get a kick out of a lot of the cards but for me they were just cards in the game. I did, however, really like how all the ports had different card backs, it gave a nice feeling and was more enjoyable than drawing from a generic equipment deck, especially when you know what type of things each port generally has. The different people you do jobs for have identities as well and you quickly learn who pays the best, but of course these will come with higher risks. At the beginning of the game you choose a captain to lead your crew, and this gives a bit of difference between the players, although I was disappointed to see that the ships are basically the same. However, I feel with the different crew cards and different abilities of the leader you can form different strategies from game to game, like taking missions from certain people, or visiting certain ports.
As well as the length I feel the other big downside to the game is the space it takes up. The board could have been smaller. There are a lot of components and while they’re all well-made and of good quality (the cards all feature images taken from the show, and since we had the show playing on the background there were a few moments when we caught the exact image on the card) but you really do need a big table, especially as when you get a lot of crew and equipment it’s difficult to keep track of everything. The other thing is that it uses paper money and, well, while it’s quite good quality paper money it’s still paper and it’s not ideal. The other big complaint I had with the components were the disgruntled tokens (sometimes your crew may become unhappy and there’s a danger of you losing them). The tokens do not fit in with the rest of the aesthetic at all.
Overall though I enjoyed it. At first it seemed daunting but once I began playing it flowed nicely and seemed intuitive. It was quite an easygoing game, but I’m sure once players get used to the cards and everything it will become more tense towards the endgame. The length is really the biggest obstacle because you need to set aside a good chunk of time to play it, especially for your first few games. I do anticipate that the length of the game will decrease the more it gets played but I’m definitely interested in playing it again.
