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Firefly


Brick Bungalow

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Played this for the first time tonight. It's good. I'm still grappling with some facets. It's a game about completing contracts like Starship Traders or some of the better railroad board games.

You get a random ship combined with a random captain and the combination of their abilities gives you your starting profile. Everyone gets a few basic resources as well. There are variations to this within the expansions. Your ability to complete missions is enhanced (or made possible) by the acquisition of new crew members, ship upgrades and various bits of gear. These enhancements cannot be simply acquired at will however. Some are available by completing missions. Most will require you visit a particular zone on the map where the corresponding bazaar. You can also get lucky and acquire some resources via random encounter cards. 

Most player turns will require careful planning and some compromise. Your available actions must be done in a strict order with movement coming first so that it's (almost) impossible to complete a contract in one turn as most require both a pickup and a delivery (or some equivalent requiring at least two movement phases) You can always opt to move just one space with no cost or risk and sometimes its a good idea but usually you will need to move further. When decide to make multiple moves you must draw cards for each one. The cards correspond to the location of the zone you move to. Half the board is ostensibly lawful and patrolled by space cops who will mostly leave you alone as long as you aren't doing anything illegal. The other half is infested with bandits. Many missions force you to move through both. 

Each game has a randomly determined victory condition that will direct player focus. There is a pretty good variety of viable strategies available to each player no matter what the initial draw. It's fairly non confrontational with only a limited number of ways to directly sabotage an opponent. You can't attack directly but you can dime opponents to the authorities, set bandits on them and steal their crew members. Competitive play (as far as I can tell) will probably require one to complete missions in creative combinations. 

I look forward to playing it again with a better understanding of the rules. 

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