Post by Eric Farrington on Jun 13, 2024 14:19:05 GMT
I know, I know I am very late to the party on this one. The year 2020, during the Pandemic; the history we are all trying to forget and move on from; saw a huge boom in the solo-wargaming realm. I think the reasons were pretty obvious.
One of the "stand-outs' from this period was Ivan Sorenson's Five Parsecs from Home. This is explicitly designed to be a solo-wargaming experience. It is a sci-fi, skirmish game where you create a "crew" of folks and go have adventures! This game (and others similar to it) from Mr. Sorenson pre-dates the Pandemic and definitely pre-dates Modiphius picking it up to publish. Ivan Sorenson had been very active in the Indie Wargaming world as Nordic Weasel Games for a long time now, and helped blaze the way for Indie Wargame designers and self-publishing games.
I will gladly admit that I have been slow to get on this bandwagon. However, I figured it was about time for me to check it out for myself. Grab your jump bag, gear up, and get ready to dust-off on my mark. 3....2......1....
You can read the full review on the Blood and Spectacles blog if you are so inclined:
bloodandspectacles.blogspot.com/2024/06/review-five-parsecs-from-home-3rd.html
However, my general thoughts are if you want a solo-campaign that fits in with the Firefly ethos of "Keep on Flying". This game matches that better than any other game I have seen out there, with the caveat that it is ONLY for solo-play. The closest comparison is Stargrave, but that was intended for Versus play. The game leans pretty hard on the Strategic element and RPG-lite. There is a ton of opportunity for replayability and making the enemy actions unknown. This is probably the gold standard of solo-play I have seen in a game BUT the player has to push-a-lot of buttons to make this game work. That means, the player is operating the game more than they are actually "playing" the game. However, in a solo-game that is somewhat expected and this one provides a lot of off-table decision making.