Saturday 24 May 2014

32. 'Firefly: Pirates and Bounty Hunters,' unboxing. The Cardboard Catographer issue 7.


Welcome to issue seven of 'The Cardboard Cartographer,' here on 'The science of selling yourself short.'

In this issue we are going to be doing something a little different.
Yet another new feature.

Some foreshadowing;

Here at The Cardboard Cartographer we accept that any review needs to be based on real life experience of playing the game being reviewed.
Due to life happening most of the reviews posted here will feature games that are good few months old at least. Not only does this allow for games to be played alongside real life issues, but it also allows for more research to be done on the games and their accompanying material.

This issue throws those rules out of the window.

This issue features a product that is a couple of weeks old at best (at time of posting). It is new enough for a fair amount of people to have not even noticed it was out at all.
This is not a review.

This is the un-boxing of 'Firefly: Pirates and Bounty Hunters;' an expansion for the Firefly board game.



To have something this up to date is a fairly exciting prospect here for 'The Cardboard Cartographer,' and is certainly something we'll try to do more of in the future.

I digress!

Google Fu.


For those of you who have yet to encounter 'Firefly: the board game,' or indeed the television show it is based upon, I suggest you Google it.
Failing that you can read issue one of 'The Cardboard Cartographer.' It was our very first review!
Check it out - Firefly Review

Caught up? Good.
On to the contents.




This picture contains everything in the new expansion.
as you can see there are new ships, cards, tokens and missions.

Before we continue I would like to point out that there are some new rules. These will not be covered in this issue, but will be explained in a future issue where we review the expansion. So stay tuned!

In the mean time we'll get acquainted with the new stuff; starting with the new ships.



This ship is the SS Walden. The ship is the salvage vessel from the episode 'Out of gas.'
as you can see it has a huge amount of storage space, something which *spoiler* will be invaluable in some of the new missions!

The other new ship is the Interceptor.





This is the bounty hunter; Jubal Early's ship from the episode 'Objects in Space.'
This ship has minimal storage space, crew compartments and upgrade space.
The plus side? It re-roll failed boarding tests.
In addition it is super fast!
Almost the exact opposite of the SS Walden.

While we're on the subject of speed, it should be noted that both the new ships have unique drive cores.



The SS Walden has a small range, but does not suffer heavy load penalties (another new feature), while the interceptor is outrageously fast, and requires no fuel.

New ships mean new captains.
Meet Jubal Early and Sash.


Again, their card text features modifiers based on the new rules.
We'll have to wait and see how effective they prove to be

Speaking of new rules, pretty much everything from here on in concentrates heavily on them.

The new missions for example;


'Jailbreak,' 'The choices we make' and 'Another man's treasure,' are missions specifically for the expansion. 'Choices,' and 'Treasure' are PvP based. Nice.

There is extra loot to be had. Five new cards for each trading post



The biggest addition to these cards is the new class of crew; The Lawman.
A Lawman is an alliance operative. They work for free but will not participate in illegal activity.

Each contact also has five new cards.


These are mad up entirely of jobs that involve piracy and bounties.
Oh wait, what?


Yes, an entirely new card type called 'Bounty.'

While the specifics of this new card will not be known until we've played the game, it is safe to assume that you can obtain or abduct certain people and trade them in for cash.

I picked out a few that caught my eye.


I almost lost it at Two Fry's 'unlicensed haberdashery.'

Finally we come to the new tokens.





As well as some extra tokens for already existing items such as parts, fuel, warrants and so on, there are some new ones.
Seven to be exact.

These seven have numbers printed on one side; these are destinations, whilst the other side are Havens.


So there you have it!

First impression.This is the first 'first impression,' written at the time of my first impression.
I pretty much summed everything up in issue one. Pieces wise nothing has changed.

The tweaked game mechanics are where this will get really interesting. I love the concept of player verse player and I also live the new ships.
I am also curious to see how piracy, boarding, stand off's and bounty's work

I don't know about you guys, but I am looking forward to playing this expansion.
In issue one I stated that I thought the game could do with some player verses player interaction to lend some urgency to play, and here it might well be.



That is all for this issue.

If you have any questions about 'The Cardboard Cartographer', this or past issues, and/or anything else, feel free to drop me a line.
Also, if you fancy leaving some feedback you can do that too.

Comment bellow, or hit me up on Twitter @DarKHaZZl3 - Use the hash tag #TCC.
I'd love to hear from you, especially if you've managed to play Pirates and Bounty Hunters yet!

Thanks for reading

-DH-


No comments:

Post a Comment