Firefly Adventures : The Rescue

One of Mal's old war buddies has been taken hostage owing to some previously perceived slight against the local bosses' delicate perception of themselves. Mal and crew have to rescue him and get everyone out to the Landing Pad where Wash will pick them up.

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The crew start by acting all casual-like as they wander down the street...

Tucked out of sight of everyone, Kaylee casually checks the locks on the two doors in front of her. She doesn't even attempt to open one door as it’s padlocked, needing sheer brute strength to bust open. The other door is unlocked. She peeks inside. No hostage here. 

She moseys on down towards the building with the terminal, hoping to do a search instead.

Inara sashays up to the grizzled cowboy and sweet talks him. She finds out the hostage isn’t in the far building either. 

Mal casually walks into the building with the computer terminal … and right in front of him is the hostage together with 3 Thugs! They must have been moving him from one building to another and ducked inside when seeing so many strangers around!

Mal brawls with one, causing one wound. The guy fights back and Mal puts him down! The other 2 Thugs deal 4 wounds to the hostage. One more wound and the job is a failure!

Hearing the ruckus, Zoe sighs and shoots down the duelist gunman. The other gunman, Roper, fires  her causing 2 wounds. Jayne shoots Roper down...

 ...then runs over to the terminal building and heroically yanks the hostage out!

He’s caught the attention of the tracker gunman though. The gunman runs towards Jayne. 

Zoe reaches the hostage and patches 2 wounds up.

Kaylee quickly moves up along the side of the buildings. 

Mal takes the opportunity to dash out of the building but is fired on by the grizzled gunman. Mal ducks around the corner and both shots miss! Inara managed to distract the gunman by screaming like a frightened lady. 

Inara then sweet talks the grizzled gunman into not pursuing Mal then walks over to the Sharpshooter gunman. 

Mal moves out of sight of the bad guys and patches up 2 wounds. 

Jayne shoots down the tracker gunman... which alerts the punk thug in the building behind him. The thug rushes out and ends up in front of Jayne's gun. The butcher thug exits the terminal building and attacks Jayne. Jayne smashes him with his gun instead. The bruiser thug runs out the other door … smack into Mal! (Made major mistake. The body out in the open after Jayne shot the tracker gunman should’ve alerted the Sharpshooter). 

Zoe heals herself and the hostage for 2 wounds each. 

Inara shashays in front of the sharpshooter, catching his eye. (As mentioned before, she should then sweet talk him into being unalert again).

Kaylee walks closer to Mal. 

Mal gets into a fight with the bruiser. But recovering from his earlier beating, he takes 2 wounds and the bruiser only takes 1. 

Zoe drags the hostage out of sight into a building. 

The butcher thug fights Jayne. He manages to wound Jayne for 2 but he’s already wounded and Jayne finishes him off!

Kaylee casually walks up to the bruiser thug … then acts all heroic and swings her wrench at him! He doesn’t know what hit him and falls flat on his face. 

But the grizzled gunman saw that! He runs towards Kaylee and shoots her. Kaylee whimpers in pain as she's hit. 

Inara lures the sharpshooter further away from the fracas. 

The punk thug attacks Jayne. Jayne finishes off the Punk, taking a wound in the process. 

Mal shoots twice at the grizzled gunman but flubs the 2nd shot. What?!

Inara moves into cover then throws her knives at the sharpshooter. He fires back. He hits her once but flubs the 2nd shot... probably flustered by Inara screaming all lady-like an' all.

Zoe rushes to Mal's and Kaylee's aid, dragging the hostage along. 

But Jayne peeks out the alley and shoots down the grizzled gunman. 

All the noise has woken up a martial artist thug. He runs out of the building. Zoe moves out of cover and fires at him dealing 1 wound. 

Inara moves into brawl range of the sharpshooter intending to finish him off but takes a wound instead. 

Wounded as they are, Mal and Kaylee rush to help Inara. 

Zoe finishes off the martial artist thug then drags the hostage along with her to the landing pad. 

But Inara doesn’t need any help. She finally finishes off the sharpshooter gunman. 

Grateful for the rescue, Mal's war buddy is happy to share some of the spoils of the endeavour which landed him in hot soup in the first place.

The crew make a Big Score!

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At last, I managed to get this to the table again. Since I'd only ever played it once before, I had to learn the game all over again. 

This is another game where you can potentially sneak your way around the table as you start of in casual mode (think of Mal and Zoe posing as husband and wife in "The Train Job") and then suddenly things go all haywire and you gotta act heroic-like.

This job went south pretty fast as I never expected Mal to find the hostage in the first building he entered! And it was so cramped too. After that, there was no choice but to shoot it out.

The Good:

• The Time Track. What an organic way to track activations for both friend and foe (although the way you do it when multiple tokens end up in te same slot feels a bit... odd). And you have some choice about how you activate, too, so you can potentially position yourself in a better time slot to maybe take out a Goon before he can activate. I've not yet pulled this off though because once the bullets start flying, there's not much time for anything else as things get fast and furious.
• Of course, the "stealth" mode where the crew act like innocent bystanders... all the way until the bullets start flying. Zoe even has an action where she can shoot someone in casual mode with alerting the bad guys... and Jayne can brawl with someone without needing to switch to heroic mode.
• How the crew members act in character. It was pretty hilarious to use Inara to sweet talk the alerted gunman back into a state of unalertness... then lure another gunman away from the action into a secluded corner where she could beat up on him. And how Kaylee was able to innocently walk up to another gunman then all of a sudden whup him on the side of the head with her wrench. Jayne and Mal act as you'd expect... with Zoe being the baddest ass of all. She was just a bit quiet in this job as she had to baby sit the hostage.
• Everything else... locked doors where you have to figure out how to open it... taking a tech challenge to hack terminals... negotiating (talking to) the bad guys to gain some important info before the action starts and the bird poop hits the fan... the terrain! No need to hunt for terrain, it's all here.

The Meh:

• The minis were... servicable. The thing about using non-grey plastic is no matter how good your mould is, the details don't come out as sharp.

The Bad:

• The rule book is a chore to wade through. Thankfully after 1+ years of not being able to play the game, the community stepped up with a better version. Imagine that. 
• The game felt... undercooked. As if it needed one more run to polish things up to a shine and raise the game up to where it deserves to be. The scenario in question had a lot of unanswered questions requiring you, the player, to make a lot of assumptions and just "wing it". So the hostage (when discovered) has as many HPs as there are wound tokens on the time track... and there are 3 thugs next to him. After the hero who dicovered him acts... it's only natural for them to beat up on the hostage (per the scenario rules), and unless the thugs roll a 1 (Disgruntled) there's nothing the hostage can do as he can't even defend himself. So that's 4-6 wounds there, with the potential to instantly kill off the hostage. I suppose that's realistic, but...

All in all though, since I'm used to skirmish games and can make decisions on the fly, I had a blast. It was pretty fun to see the crew acting all heroic and you can imagine this as an unaired episode in Firefly Season 2. It's that good! If you're a fan of Firefly... you owe it to yourself to check it out.

If you're not, but you're looking for a solo skirmish game that can dish out a lot of cinematic/heroic moments... check it out as well.