Shiney! I finally got Firefly the Game back on the table recently and got to mosey in the ‘verse again with a few stalwart fans. I brought all the expansions like usual, and we ended up playing the base game like usual. It’s a lot of card piles to take in and I’m always reluctant to add more for newbies just trying to avoid the Alliance Cruiser.
I ended up winning of course, but really it’s the players vs the game. The struggle to keep flying is real. As the only person who’d played before I felt it was up to me to wrap things up in a timely 4 hours.
Our new big damn heroes weren’t helped by the setup card, which made us all outlaws and unable to deal with Harkin for simple legal jobs. So the new captains loaded a crew or two and sauntered off to misbehave. Big mistake. A healthy respect for the misbehave deck is the difference between a 4 hour and 6 hour game. Especially when the goal is just to amass $15,000.
Certain players were in the old conundrum of how to scrape together fuel money to make it to their next port after several failures in a row. You’ve gotta deliver to get paid and misbehaving is central to those illegal jobs a lot of the time. So after quite a few misbahave jobs went south (people died, like a lot of people. I ended up making a little graveyard instead of just tossing them back in the box) we had a discussion about the types of jobs someone might be able to complete with very little crew.
By that time of course I was plugging ahead against my own misbehave cards with a much more robust crew, loaded to the teeth with guns and tools. Having some idea the kinds of skills that might pop up on those cards is a real advantage; who knew?
But a good time was had by all, and a rematch was even discussed. Who knows, maybe we’ll even throw in an expansion or two.