2020 Top 10 Countdown of solo skirmish games #9

#9 FIREFLY ADVENTURES: BRIGANDS AND BROWNCOATS

This is a tough one to rank. I love/adore Firefly. Being able to play Mal and gang is so fun. I've got all the expansions. I've played a game. I've enjoyed it. So why does it not get played more? My notes on this game: "Played the 'Questionable Objectives' mission with the 5 original crew. Dice rolling was awesome! Zoë and Kaylee went down (cowardly thugs and cowboys went after the girls) but they got back on their feet again."

I don't even have a photo of that session! So you just have to make do with a stock photo:

The game system is loads of fun. You activate your minis and take actions, and each action takes some time, which is reflected on a track. The track is what determines activations both for your heroes and the AI bad guys. So the more heroic stuff you do, the longer it is before you can activate again.

The other fun part is your heroes can be in one of two modes: casual or heroic. In casual mode (basically walking around and hanging out) the baddies won't activate even if you are in sight. But do anything heroic, and they will. This is reflected in having 2 different minis per hero to track this.

The game comes with terrain and buildings already. And even though it uses a gridded map for measurement, there's nothing to stop you from using normal tabletop terrain and a tape measure (if that floats your boat) for the true tabletop minis experience.

Coming back to my question: since I enjoyed the game, why don't I play it more? Writing about this game has me hankering to play it again. The first world answer is: because I have TOO MANY games. Sad but true. If I were to add on other non-solo skirmish games, I'd have Dropzone Commander, Infinity, Twisted Steampunk, Gates of Antares, Wrath of Kings and a few others to the list.

Hopefully this game will hit the table more often and have a different rank come December 2021.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

Next up on the list:

5150 Star Army 2nd Tour. This one is part of the 2 Hour Wargames (2HWG) series. I've always been a fan of the reaction system where you make some tests to see how your troops (and the enemy) will react given a particular situation. This has the advantage of not being so deterministic (i.e. I Go, You Go, or like Infinity I go, you ARO me for sure). The downside to this is: it's pretty tough to wade through the rulebook. Mainly because when you have to make a test, you have to look up several tables that are scattered in various pages of the rules. Sigh. However, I recently discovered a set of new videos that were made by 2HWG to explain the reaction system and how the system works in general. So probably post-Christmas I will sit down, go through it and attempt to make coherent sense of the rules as a whole. (Each section of the rules is coherent. It's putting them together that defeats me).