Firefly Adventures: Brigands and Browncoats

[John D Salt]

The nice man from goods inwards just delivered a package to my office today: my pre-order of Gale Force Nine’s “Firefly Adventures: Brigands and Browncoats” has arrived. The enclosed note assured me that “as a pre-ordering customer you are the first in the world to receive a copy of the game”, but Mr. Picky feels even more special because he has already spotted four spelling errors in the rulebook.

The physical quality of the game components is very impressive, with lots of chunky gameboards, laser-cut counters, several folded card buildings (with open toops), which is an idea I haven’t seen before, and twenty nicely-cast miniatures, all different (Mal seems to be 35mm tall, so no scale I have ever heard of).

On the one hand, I love the whole Firefly megillah, so I hope I shall have the energy to take these along to the club on Wednesday, despite not being much of an SF gamer. On the other, the game seems (on the basis of one quick read of the rules) to include a number of eminently theftworthy ideas for minor tactical games in general. The sequence of play is based on a timeline which characters (and goons) move along as they take actions, and whoever is at the back of the track has the current turn — similar IIRC to the scheme used in Fantasy Flight’s “Red November”, which was also a collaborative game (or “multi-player solitaire”, as I like to call it). The two modes for the good guys, “heroic” or “causal” — each represented by a different miniature, and differeing in allowable actions and detectability by goons — and the series of “challenges” laid out in the job (scenario) beiefings seem to offer a method of modelling stealth and surprise, an old bugbear of mine. If you can keep goons off the timeline by not alerting them, it seems possible that some missions might succeed by stealth alone. I’m wondering if this might be a decent model of “getting inside the OODA loop” of your, in this case, clockwork mouse opponent.

Executive summary: Shiny!

All the best,

John.

[Mike]

Will you be in your bunk?

[John D Salt]

Mike wrote:

Will you be in your bunk?

Unfortunately the crew miniatures do not include one for Inara.

I will, however, note that on the table at my elbow, next to the game box, is the tea-cosy mum knitted me for Xmas. It has a bobble on top. It is green. I am now thinking that I should have asked for orange and yellow, so that I could wear it while playing.

All the best,

John.

[Darkest Star Games]

Don’t show him the picture of your hat, Mike, or he may try that sneaky stealthy rules bit on you to snake said cappo!

"I saw this in a cartoon once, but I'm pretty sure I can do it..."

[Angel Barracks]

Darkest Star Games wrote:

Don’t show him the picture of your hat, Mike, or he may try that sneaky stealthy rules bit on you to snake said cappo!

[James Manto]

You’re all set for some thrilling heroics I see.

[Noel]

Gonna keep my eye on this one.

 

[John D Salt]

I have now managed to get through five solitaire games, trying each of the four enclosed scenarions (“Jobs”) at least once. The first couple of games were full of mistakes in rules interpretation, but I think I have got a pretty good grip on them now. I have at any rate sent a list of ten rules questions to the publishers; we’ll see what happens.

The timeline and heroic/casual modes work very well, although it is important to keep on your toes and check for LOS from goons to heroic crew at the end of every turn. The actions for wach of the crew members — a different set according to whether they are heroic or casual — seem very well chosen to reflect the abilities of the characters in the TV series. As it seems they will be releasing Inara and Shepherd as one expansion, and the Tams as another, I seem unavoidably committed to further expense.

One cunning dice mechanic I think worthy of mention is a modification of the traditional “exploding dice” idea. The dice in the game have the 6 replaces by a Firefly symbol, and the 1 replaced by a teary face. The are “Thrillin’ Heroics” and “Disgruntled dice”, respectively. The Firefly symbol counts as 6 and entitles the thrower to a second roll, and so on without limit. So far so unremarkable. The clever bit is that the “disgruntled” roll counts as zero, and, regardless of the final score, the roll is a failure if the number of disgruntled dice rolled exceeds the number of Fireflies. As far as I can make out, this means that the average score on one die is 4, and the expected number of disgruntled or Firefly dice 0.2. It would seem that it is often sensible to roll one die instead of two if one has bags of favourable modifiers in play, as the chance of rolling disgruntled on one die is 1/6, whereas on two dice it is 9/36 or 1/4 (making no allowance for the 11 cases where the Firefly result expands the series, but this seems to make no diference).

All the best,

John.

[Noel]

The iconography looks to be consistent with Firefly: the Game and each scenario in this one is supposed to be like working a job in the other.

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Angel Barracks wrote:

Darkest Star Games wrote:

Don’t show him the picture of your hat, Mike, or he may try that sneaky stealthy rules bit on you to snake said cappo!

 

Cunning.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[John D Salt]

Finally got round to taking the game along to the club last night, and by great good luck five other people turned up, so we had a full five-player game with me gamesmatering. The job was “The Rescue”, where the crew have to work out in which of 10 buildings an old wartime pal of theirs is being held hostage, then get him and the team to the landing pad before time runs out.

Equipment selection is done by dealing five cards from the equipment deck, any of which can be purchased for the printed cost. When an item is bought, a fresh card is dealt, so that there are always five items of equipment to choose from. For a one-off game, the players’ budget is $3000 (‘$’ being apparently the symbol for credits). As the Cunning Hat had already been discussed before the game, and the player in the role of Jayne pointed out that it was free in “Firefly: The Game”, I let them have it for free instead of the normal $200.

In this scenario, on of the ways the crew can narrow down the location of the hostage is to extract intelligence information (represented by Intel Tokens) from a cortex terminal in a building in the middle of the map. The achievement of a successful technical challenge permits the player to acquire an Intel token; this can be expended to choose one of the randomizer chits numbered 1..10, and eliminate the building with the corresponding number from consideration. Surplus intel tokens can be flogged off at the end of the job for $500 apiece.

An alternative method of finding out what’s going on is chatting to the local cowboys — successful achievement of a negotiation challenge with one of the local cowboys will also yield an intel token. Failure of the challenge means that Cowboy won’t talk to you any more.

The other method of locating the hostage is to simply look into the door of a building. Almost all the doors that don’t have a cowboy standing by them in this job are locked, and turning over the lock counter shows what is needed to open it (it might be a technical challenge, it might be brute force, the thing might be open anyway). Once access has been achieved to a buillding, a randomizer chit is drawn; if it is one away from the number of the building you’ve found a cargo crate guarded by a thug, but if it matches exactly, you’ve found the hostage (represented by a body counter normally, but by a bonus miniature for privileged Kickstarter owners like me). When found, the hostage is in the company of three thugs, who do not seem to be being very nice to him, which is why he suffers a wound every ten moments (time increments) after the first ten of the game.

The players decided on what one might call an omnibus plan — all three methods at once. Kaylee was to hack the cortex terminal, Wash was to chat with the local cowboys, and Mal, Jayne and Zoe were to poke around. In the first few moments of the game, Wash strolled up to a cowboy and was pointedly ignored (failed his negotiation challenge), Jayne persuaded a cowboy to move away from the open door at the front of building 9, and Mal stuck his head through the door. The player playing Mal picked a chit at random. It was number 9. I think this confirms my general principle of how to succeed in wargaming: “Try to be incredibly lucky”. They had found the hostage first go, before Kaylee has even got herself into the Cortex.

At that point it all kicked off, as Mal was obliged to go heroic, and this naturally attracted the attention of the cowboys who could see him. Wash might have been disappointed at his lack of persuasive skill talking to one of them, but was slightly surprised a couple of moments later when the chap he had been talking to was blatted by a long shot from Mal. Jayne then rushed in past Mal and started knifing the thugs in the hostage room. Zoe and Mal remained casual for a while, Zoe succeeding in slotting an unalerted cowboy with her Holdout Pistol (whch confers the special ability of shooting while casual), and Kaylee — very sensibly, being unarmed and having no combat skill, but tooled up with some useful technical aids — stayed cool, stayed casual, and slipped into the building with the Cortex terminal anyway, because even if any intel tokens she could harvest would now be irrelevant to the search for the hostage, $500 a pop is not to be sneezed at.

From now on the game was pretty much straight combat, and getting the hostage to the landing pad (he can’t move under hs own steam, and has to be carried as a heavy object) and apart from a couple of reiterations and re-reiterations of a rule or two to a retired Gunner Colonel who hadn’t seen Firefly, and I suspect must have slept through ‘O’ groups, the game pretty much ran itself. As one would expect, the thugs and cowboys came off worse, although Jayne had a pretty rough time in the thug-filled building; at one point he was within one wound of being downed, and it was in fact only the Cunning Hat that saved him (by entitling him to a re-roll). The player playing Zoe seemed to have an astonishing ability to roll disgruntled dice, which, combined with the fact that the additional thugs arriving in response to random events all seemed to come on near her, meant she was also wounded, although not as badly as Jayne, and she could fix herself up. Kaylee remained at the terminal throughout, methodically extracting valuable information, unseen by any of the bad guys, until a random-event thug appeared in the doorway. This might have been bad news had Zoe not immediately slotted the thug with the trusty Holdout pistol. Kaylee then bugged out and joined the general rush to the pad, Zoe — furthest away — being encouraged by Wash (one of Wash’a abilities is to give Zoe two squares of movement as one of his actions). As Jayne hefted the hostage on to the landing pad, the last cowboy standing —the Sharpshooter — was activated by his coming into line of sight. Jayne had been partly patched up by Wash, but took another hit from the Sharpshooter, so the finale of the action was an enraged Jayne, bleeding profusely, rushing across the landing pad to knife the Sharpshooter, and end the game. There were ten bodies in various parts of the map.

Reckoning up the score — including rescuing the hostage effectively uninjured, plus a time bonus for finishing within 30 moments of the 50 allowed, and the sale of the six intel tokens Kaylee had harvested — the total reward for the job came to $6500. This is was a smashing success, well north of the $4500 listed in the job instructions as “BIG SCORE!”, and almost half of it thanks to Kaylee’s cool hackery while everyone else was running around shooting and stabbing people in the thrillin’ heroics going on outside.

The game went down very well with the players, two of whom had not seen “Firefly”, and they picked up the rules quickly. This scenario also made use of a very large proportion of the rules, as we had plenty of tech challenges and some negotiation challenges, a couple of locks tried, a heavy object (the hostage) being moved, and a lot of moving, shooting, and brawling. The action fairly cracked along, and we managed to bring the game to its triumphant conclusion before ten o’clock, having started I suppose a little before eight. Nobody had to sit around waiting for their turn very long, everyone had important decisions to make, and if the team had enormous good luck in finding the hostage in the first place they looked, they certainly didn’t seem to have great luck in their dice rolling, with disgruntled dice for them or Fireflies for the goons causing a bit of an upset more than once. The ingenuity of making the buildings do double duty as game terrain and storage containers was commented on favourably. The casual/heroic mechanic and the use of the time sequence seemed to present no difficulties, and worked well. I think the actions available for each of the crew are also an excellent reflection of their characters, and certainly in this game everyone seemed to behave in ways I could quite believe from the TV series, even if the player hadn’t seen it themself. I’m wondering what abilities we shall see for Inara and River when they turn up.

Executive summary — yes, it’s as good as it looks.

Shiny, shiny game.

All the best,

John.

[Mike]

Good Misbehavin’!
Any pics?

[John D Salt]

Mike wrote:

Good Misbehavin’!
Any pics?

I’m afraid I am old and curmudgeonly and Zen enough to live in the moment, rather than trying to take photographs of it.

My only real use for a digital camera is document copying.

All the best,

John.

[Author]

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