Legendary Encounters: Firefly Review

“Huaugh! Argh!”

“What is it? What’s wrong!?”

“Oh god I just had the most terrible dream! I was on Firefly”

“… On Firefly?”

“YES! But everyone looked weird – bizarre! It was horrible!”

“Matt…”

“Yes?”

“ARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!”

 

 

Players: 1-5

Time: 45-90 mins

Ages: 14+

 

 

Tell me I’m pretty, Wash!

 

Ok! So, we’re going to have to start by talking about the elephant in the cargo bay… Zoe.

What

Have

You

Done!?

I’m sure many of you have heard bad things about the artwork and they are all true. I understand good art isn’t cheap and I understand that there are a lot of cards in this set. But FFS Upper Deck! You’re handling a beloved TV series here, we know what people look like! God, you’re selling this to people who spend weeks recreating costumes to dress up in! For more than £50, this isn’t good enough.

Zoe is the character that suffered most, many of the cards are fine, a few, like the artwork on the box and on the avatar cards, is genuinely superb…

But while the avatars might be out on the tabletop all game, it’ll be your hands of cards you spend most of your time looking at. And even the best of those are just passable. I would have been happier with just a single, good piece of art for each character, if that’s what it took.

Ok! Enough about art! What about gameplay!? Can it make up for that rather rough landing?

 

My days of not taking ya seriously are certainly coming to a middle

Legendary Encounters Firefly follows the same format as other Legendary Encounters games (Alien/Predator, of which I’ve played Alien). The players build decks and co-operatively use those decks to overcome the challenges faced within a scenario deck. Each round a card will drop out of that deck and slowly move through the row of spaces (“the ‘verse”) at the top of LE: Firefly’s lovely neoprene mat. If a card ever reaches the end it drops into the combat zone and, typically, does lots of damage or other nasty things. In LE: Alien, the scenario represented a whole film, in LE: Firefly, you play through 3 separate episodes of the TV series, which is entirely appropriate for our binge watching culture! You can’t just watch one episode of Firefly!

Thus, in total you have 5 full games worth of episodes to play through (the pilot is split into two parts) to make the entire series. Indeed, you can play it as a whole series too! There are rules for a linked campaign and some of your decisions, like keeping or returning the medicine after the Train Job, will affect future games. You can also play episodes in a random order; the Fox variant, as I like to call it. The only limit is you must have an A, a B and a C episode, as the difficulty increases through these different types to ensure an exciting arc to your game.

Each episode plays out the key events you’ll remember from the TV series: shooting up Constance’s gang, getting tortured by Nisca… Jaynestown! It’s all in here and very neatly put together. In fact, I’d recommend you don’t read through the cards before you play: discovering the mechanics being used and the challenges you need to overcome in each episode is a real treat. Seeing a reference to the objective but not knowing exactly how it was going to work was thoroughly enjoyable!

There’s a lovely mix of mechanics in there too, representing the events from the episode at hand. You’ve got your basic combats (no surprise), but the enemies will vary from episode to episode. Like snipers who can shoot from the ‘verse or ship lockdowns (as in Jaynestown) that are a special ship strike that sit on your ship and prevent you from escaping until you can afford to remove them.

Wait… your ship!? That’s right! As much a character in the show as any crew member, Serenity has her own part to play in the game. Ship enemies will attack Serenity, doing damage that you’ll have to spend resources fixing. If you take too much damage you’ll blow up and lose the game. Pro tip: don’t blow up! Serenity can also be upgraded during the special phases between episodes. Successfully completing your objectives will reward you with credits that you can spend to do things like heal wounds, draw more cards, repair damage… or buy upgrades. These upgrades offer the team a permanent bonus. Enhanced scanners give you a cheap scan once per turn. Or the Internal Engine Stabilizer lets you draw an extra card… not especially thematic, but never mind.

If someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill ‘em right back!

An element that is shared with the other Legendary Encounters game is scanning. Unlike Marvel Legendary that I’ve been writing about recently, the cards from the episode deck come out face down. You must spend some combat to scan those spaces to flip the card face up. This was an incredible mechanic in LE: Alien, perfectly capturing those terrifying moments with the motion sensors as the unseen enemy gets closer… and closer… and closer! Likewise, in Predator you’re fighting an invisible enemy. But what does it mean in Firefly? Sure it could be the range of your ships scanners. But that feeling of tension and terror I associate with the mechanism in LE: Alien is incongruous with the Firefly setting. That’s a shame!

As Legendary Encounters connoisseurs will recall, the central co-operative element of the game comes from the excellent “co-ordinate” ability printed on certain cards. These can be played on other players turns to help them in some way, giving them extra attack or resources or maybe some other benefit. These are a great way of fostering co-operation in a deck builder, and really make you feel like you’re working together!

But let’s get back to what is new and shiny! Especially for Legendary Encounter lovers. First up are the Inevitable Cards, and I don’t just mean that there are cards. You see that capitalisation! These are special threats that sit on the bottom of the episode deck and inevitably drive each episode to its inevitable conclusion. They will relentlessly move through the ‘verse pushing everything towards the combat zone and make each episode end with a tense race to meet the objectives. They’re great! And utterly terrifying for if they reach the combat zone, you’re in for a world of hurt and you probably won’t have earned the credits for completing the objective.

The other great things in the episode deck are Side Quests, like juggling chicks or winning pub brawls. They represent those extra little stories that crop in the TV series. Gameplay-wise they are secondary objectives that are good to complete (and bad to fail) that are randomly mixed in each time you play. They take on the role of the random bonus aliens in LE: Alien that scale the deck to player numbers and work so much better. They’re both thematically and mechanically more interesting to see.

The coolest new mechanism though has to go to those lovely looking Avatar cards I highlighted earlier. They represent who you are supposed to be playing as this game and they come with their own personal talents and flaws. Certain effects let you add talent cards to your deck that when you choose to spend them trigger your avatar’s talent, like threatening people if you’re Jayne, or fixing the ship if you’re Kaylee. On the other hand, various cards might cause you to gain Flaw cards in your deck. These not only clog up your deck, they trigger your character’s unfortunate and irresistible urges! Like Kaylee’s naivety or Jayne’s obsession with betraying everyone. The talents and flaws are a lovely, simple way to make you feel like you are playing as the character whose avatar card you have sat in front of you!

Unfortunately, as is always the way with Legendary games, you’ll be purchasing cards named for multiple characters leaving you at a bit of a loss as to what playing those cards represents. In Firefly the character deck is specifically made up of characters whose avatar cards aren’t out. It means all 9 characters from the show are present in every game, but nearly all the actual in game actions are being performed by the 4 characters no one is playing as! Seems like you’re just ordering everyone else around!

There is one new mechanism that feels a bit odd though. Certain cards trigger according to specific characters. So if Jayne is a main player, and his avatar card is on the table, something good (or bad) might happen. Thus certain combinations of characters are just better at completing the episodes and that’s… rubbish!? They tend to only be fairly minor effects and are a thematic touch, but they leave you feeling like you should have certain characters when playing certain scenarios… and that’s not how it should be.

You can’t take the sky from me

For all the minor thematic quibbles I can poke fun at, there’s one more serious point I want to make, and that is how LE: Firefly falls short on capturing the spirit of Firefly in my eyes. Firefly isn’t really the best setting for the Legendary Encounters system. Not truly. You see, Legendary Encounters is focussed on the encounters (duh!), which is perfect for Alien and Predator where the stories of those films are entirely driven by the battles between the characters and some terrible foe. But in Firefly the “encounter” in each episode, as exciting as some of those might be, are never the focus of the story; not really. It always served as the backdrop for the characters and their relationships. But that isn’t what this system allows you to explore. In singing Firefly’s song it’s hitting all the right beats, but it’s not quite singing in tune.

But hey, it’s fun to hit those beats! You’re definitely missing some of what makes Firefly Firefly, but it doesn’t make it any less fun going along for the ride! If you want to re-live the adventures from the TV series this is great. The gameplay itself is fantastic, and there’s plenty of new stuff here for fans of the Legendary Encounters series! It’s certainly not perfect, but it is a whole lotta fun!

And while I could mention the art yet again, I won’t. After all, mercy is the mark of a great man!

The art is rubbish.

Guess I’m just a good man.

The art is rubbish!

Well, I’m alright.

 

Rating: Shiny

 

Our copy of Legendary Encounters Firefly was provided for review by Esdevium Games. You can get hold of it from your local hobby store for £54.99 RRP.