2022 Top 10 Solo Skirmish Games #8!

#8 FIREFLY ADVENTURES: BRIGANDS AND BROWNCOATS

I’ve played this game more co-op this year than solo, but the game is still fun. However, after my recent experience, I’m not sure if it works well co-op (in my gaming group anyways) compared to solo.

You also get a game with Casual And Action modes, represented by different crew minis. In Casual mode you can walk around the map under the eyes of the bad guys and they won’t lift a finger to stop you. But start doing heroic things (picking the lock on a locked door, punching somebody) and you switch over to Heroic mode and the baddies come after you. You can punch someone senseless and then drag the body out of line of sight and spend some time to walk around the corner in Casual mode, whistling as if nothing untoward had happened.

Aside from combat, there’s mission objectives to accomplish and you deal with them by drawing cards to see what the challenge is. You can accomplish the missions by hacking, violence, or sweet talking/bribery. So you could have one of the girls (like Inara in the photo below) sweet talk a bad guy to follow her round the corner where Jayne is waiting to punch him senseless. What other game lets you do that?!!

The great thing about the game is that out of the box, it comes with 3D buildings already so it looks great on the table. The game also has a unique time-based activation method : some actions take more time than others, and like Tokaido (the board game) the last one on the time track activates first, moving the PC token along the time track according to how many “ticks” of time that action takes. Once you reach the end of the time track, the mission ends and you check to see how you did.

There’s no clear “win-lose” conditions but rather, “how did your crew do”? What you want is make a big score, and how well you do depends on how much money you make. It could range from “barely paying the bills” to “not bad, could be better but… not bad” to “BIG SCORE”.

If you’re a fan of Firefly, run, don’t walk, to get this game. It’s got enough there (with the limited number of expansions) to give you some great gaming sessions. Plus points if you can role play the crew members on the missions and you can hear their voices in your head. 

HONOURABLE MENTION

Shoot People in Space

Full disclosure: I play tested this game, but didn’t receive anything for it, not even the final rules.

This game apparently harks back to the good old days where crazy things can happen on the tabletop. Gonzo things like a dinosaur wandering onto the table. It has rules for bikes, and they are fun (but difficult) to use. Especially on a crowded urban table.

You can bring heroic solos, or squads of 3 troopers or a combo of both as both have pros and cons and it’s not like one is better than the other.

Combat is straightforward and there are some missions you can play.

The game does come into its own if you also play 5 Parsecs From Home (it’s by the same designer) as you can flesh out your 5 Parsecs battles into bigger ones using squads and such since the weapons and background fluff is in a shared universe.