Lady Dynamo

You know how sometimes you get really excited about something and it totally lets you down? Or when you buy something because it’s branded with your fandom but you discover the spirit of said fandom is nowhere to be found and it’s purely a case of commercializing what you love to sell merchandise? This is not one of those times.

This game nails it. The spirit of the ‘Verse is in every piece of this game. The art on the backs of the cards is stellar. The money is beautiful. Even the tokens have a meaning and give a nod back to the show and movie. Every crew or piece of gear is a reference to the show and the pictures are all screencaps.

If you’ve never seen the show, you can certainly play this game but it probably won’t hold the same joy it does for us Browncoats. There are a lot of little jokes you won’t get, but game play does not require knowledge of the Firefly ‘Verse.

The rule book is lengthy and the pieces are many, which may seem overwhelming the first time you sit down to play. Once you get past all that, the game play is actually fairly simple. In a nutshell, your goal is to build your crew and improve your ship so you can take jobs and earn money. In addition, there are story cards to give you different goals and win conditions.

One of the biggest criticisms I’ve heard of this game is that it takes much longer than the rules and story cards say. This is definitely true when you first play it as there are a lot of elements to get used to. The more you play, the easier and faster game play becomes. If you’re performing a Buy or Deal action at the end of your turn, play can pass to the next player while you make your decisions to keep the game moving. This is actually suggested in the official rulebook, but it can lead to a less interactive game because you may miss what other players are doing while you make your choices.

I adopted a couple of “house rules” to help move things along, especially if you’re playing with new players:

Instead of taking only 2 unique actions each turn, take 3 actions per turn; you are allowed to take 2 fly actions a turn but all other actions are still only allowed once per turn. In addition to helping you complete jobs more quickly, this helps ensure that you don’t get stranded out in the big black.

Start the game with a basic crew to help you complete more jobs from the start. To accomplish this, I pulled all crew cards from their respective Supply Decks, shuffled each location’s crew separately and then dealt one from each location to each player. Players can then choose to “hire” as many or as few as they’d like following the normal rules for hiring crew members. The crew cards are then shuffled back into their respective Supply decks and setup continues normally.

Review originally posted on my website here: http://theladynerds.com/firefly-the-game-tips-reviews/