Firefly boardgame

[VJ]

There is a great boardgame after the TV series Firefly. The game celebrates its 10th anniversary, and while you need ample space to play the game, it is a nice space-adventure game (fly a ship, do missions, try to reach the goal first). For the anniversary, a 10th anniversary edition has been announced and it can only be ordered via a crowdfunding.
We have the game, and a few expansions, but have pledged for the anniversary edition: it comes with all expansions (in a single box), higher quality tokens and a very nice storage solution. Getting the expansions we lack would cost us the same. We'll probably keep the game we have (e.g. for a smaller game-session without expansions).

I'm guessing there may be some boardgamers here, so:

https://gamefound.com/projects/gf9/firefly-the-game

I'm a bit puzzled why they write 1-10 players, I thought the maximum was 4 or 5.... but it looks like the presented setup allows for more players (there are enough ships to make it work). The 120 minutes is quite an underestimate; more realistic is 45min-1 hour per player.

[Dr Mordrid]

Lost most of my board game partners when the kids grew up. There is hope, some young hussy (actually, a geologist in training) has her sights set on our grandson - presenting the possibility of new players

[Dilitante1]

WOW I scored this years ago in the hopes of getting my youngest playing it with me. But she fell in love and moved away so it sits in cellophane to this day. Box says 1 player minimum.

[VJ]

Just realized: some expansions add the possibility for additional players, so 10 might be the maximum with all expansions.

In the game you have some goals (amount of money to collect, person to have, ...), and there are many goal cards so the scenarios always change. To achieve the goals, you need to do some jobs (transfer cargo, transfer contraband, ...), each come with requirements, benefits and risks which you have balance. The jobs give you money or reputation (positive or negative: you can go towards more crime jobs that make you wanted by the police but are more profitable), things you may need towards achieving your goal. During gameplay, the game mechanics make it challenging and your choices affect this (e.g. if you play more illegal jobs, you become wanted and it is harder to move around without getting caught - especially as the police cruiser moves based on rules but also by other players; if you play more legal jobs you need to do more of them which increases your exposure to pirates). The interaction between players is limited in the base version, there can be some player interaction if people have similar goals or if you try to prevent another person of reaching their goal (you then would have to have some idea of what they need to achieve their goal). Some expansions increase that player interaction (e.g. by making people wanted, so you can gain money by taking another player's crewmember, or by adding mechanics to attack another ship and steal stuff).

There is some dice rolling (e.g. in battles), but you can increase your odds as the number on the die is added up to your own strength - which you can increase by buying weapons or adding people. So any dice roll can become a guaranteed win. It might just pay off however to gamble earlier.

There are single player scenarios, the game mechanics itself then makes it challenging to achieve the goals. I have not yet played it in single player though, but I can see that it can be fun.

[VJ]

With this anniversary edition on our minds we decided to play again on Sunday. We played two two player games (without expansions). Each took around two hours and were quite tense - we each won one game.
The second game was so close... I could have won it if I had not made a few poor choices (playing it too safe), and was too late in my run to reach the end goal: one more turn or one less of those poor choices and I could have won... It went very back-and-forth during the game, I was in the lead for a long time (had two out of the three goals, she had none), but then she started catching up.

We made one small mistake in the rules, but quickly corrected for that one. Other than that, we managed quite well with remembering the rules - this is often an issue with these complicated boardgames: you spend the first hour decoding the rulebook.