Thursday, September 1, 2016

Tricking Out My Firefly Game

I love, love, love the Firefly board game. I'm a huge Firefly fan and the game by Gale Force Nine is amazingly immersive. I love to just fly around the 'verse doing jobs and it's almost disappointing when the story scenario ends (even though, yes, the games do tend to be at least two hours long). It's a massive game and we have just about every expansion (right now we are only missing the Esmerelda ship).

It's such a big game that set up can be intimidating. One thing that I've done to make that a little easier is that I got this card organizer.


This is one from Amazon that I saw recommended on Board Game Geek. I would love to have one big enough to have a separate holder for deck and discard but there are just far too many decks! I managed to get all the decks except the misbehave cards and the flying decks (border, rim, central). I also use the little holders on the side for parts, fuel, etc.

This has made a huge difference in our ability to actually play the game. Even though we still have to shuffle all the cards there is something about having them all sorted that makes pulling the game out feel more do-able (we leave this set up on a side table in our gaming room).

Another thing I did to make the game even more immersive was I painted the ships. They do sell some gorgeous kits for painting minis and I would love to get those but a bit too expensive for me so I did my best to paint the ones that came in the box.


(There's a Runebound figure in there too)

I have the play mat that puts the entire map with all current expansions on one. We had a break in one of the boards plus putting boards next to each other means shifting around and it's just not ideal. The mat is really nice to have.

I really want to get these ship caddies someone designed on Thingiverse, but they are not available for order. Probably because, as I discovered with my Runebound caddies, they would be too expensive to produce. I think I will try to do something like this with layers of cardboard. My husband is not sold on this idea, though, as I would be cutting into the ship caddies that the game comes with.

What I can get from Thingiverse are these little crates. My brother is printing these out for me and I'm going to paint them and then glue them to the cargo and contraband cards. I'd like to do something similar with passenger/fugitive figurines.

So that's all the ways I've thought of so far to totally trick out my Firefly game!