Been playing quite a bit of Firefly recently. It is one of our go to games when we want to have a group over and play a big game. Last Thursday we have a few people over. We played with the all of the expansions with the exception of leaving the PVP elements out (piracy and bounties).

For the set-up we used the Browncoat way to determine the starting ships and captains. It is my preferred method of distributing ships and captains. The way it works is that each player is given $12000. Then a player can select either a captain or a ship until it gets to the last player who can pick both a ship and a captain. Then it goes back the opposite direction and player pick what they didn’t get before. Players then pay for and outfit their ships. We have found that with the variety of ships that we have now that this is the only fair way to do things.

The scenario was an interesting one. I don’t remember the name of it but essentially the goal of it is to have each player draw three job cards from a contact deck of their choosing and the look at the destination. And place a goal marker at each destination. The goal of the scenario was to be the first to complete three jobs that had goal tokens on them first. Additionally you start with no jobs.

So mostly during the deployment we are all scrambling to get jobs. The double locations like Persephone where you have both (Badger and a buy market), Space Bazar and Beaumond were taken first. I was last, so I started at Highgate so I could hit up Dr. Giggles for some jobs but I was a short trip away from Meridian.

It seemed like all of our moves were plagued by Reavers and Alliance actions. Big Black cards seemed few and far between. This was one of the first games were I ran out of fuel and money and had to scrape and save to get by.

There person that that was going to win in his next turn got knocked out by another player but had to leave so we all decided to give him the win and the rest of us would play for second place. Another player and I made it to Silverhold where there we three goal tokens She had two, I had one. I had two jobs that would get me the tokens I needed and she had one she needed to win. I completed my first job on my turn that I arrived. Then it was her turn and she blew her dice roll and botched the attempt. It came back to me and I had to Misbehaves to complete. The Two by Two hands of blue card had not come out yet so I was sweating it because that deck was looking very small. I drew two easy misbehaves completed the job and won the game (2nd place really).

In conclusion I would do a couple of things to speed this up a bit.

1.       I would get rid of the operative’s ship and associated cards for games with more than 4 people.

2.       For 5+ player games I would additionally prime the pump and let players select 3 starting jobs.

3.       For 5+ player games maybe I would let players do a prestart buy action at one of the markets.

I think that doing these things would cut about 15-30 minutes off of the scenario time.