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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:
https://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.

A very fair review of the most excellent Five Parsecs.

First time I opened the book my thought was "Oh man, we'll be soloing in no time....omg. Wait, I have to do this?", but I found it helpful to keep the Solo Game Master's Guide to hand which is also avalialble from Modipheus.

I think my issue with all of these small skirmish games (be they co-op or not) is that the amount of set up and terrain making needed for a game is enormous, and then you're gonna just plonk down 5-15 models to play on it. It just seems odd to me.

I suppose it works well enough in a dungeon crawler style where it's mostly just floorplans and a bit of furniture here and there, but making cool battlefields for small scale skirmish is a lot of work, and at that point, I start to want to play a "proper" game on it, with armies and so on!

I just use the tiles from BSF to quickly generate maps for both Five Parsecs and Stargrave. I've been thinking of getting Cursed City for the same reason, for use with Frostgrave and Five Leagues...

I should just get my arse in gear and make some sci fi floor tiles. Bit of cross stitch mesh and chipboard will have a big set done in no time, I've just been lazy about it. I made a bunch of very good resin dungeon tiles that magnetically lock together from any direction using spherical magnets, but I'm probably never going to do that again because it was an lot of work.

A lot of these games also use a smaller board space, like 4 foot by 4 foot or smaller.

Therefore, you don't need as much terrain.

 Da Boss wrote:
I should just get my arse in gear and make some sci fi floor tiles. Bit of cross stitch mesh and chipboard will have a big set done in no time, I've just been lazy about it. I made a bunch of very good resin dungeon tiles that magnetically lock together from any direction using spherical magnets, but I'm probably never going to do that again because it was an lot of work.

Being as it's solo you might as well go for more simple shapes and less detail. The recommend size for Five Parsecs is 2x2 to 3x3.

2x2 mats are extremely cheap from Battle Systems, I think they even make fantastic card terrain to put on them