Farthest Star - Playtest

 

Farthest Star - Playtest

A while back I participated in the playtesting of a new ruleset called Farthest Star.  It's sort of the Super Mission Force rule engine combined with the Five Parsecs From Home crew/campaign sections.

Since I was just testing it, I wasn't going to invest myself in the characters and story, after all I was planning to bounce around from scenario to scenario, setting to setting, etc in an effort test them out.

So I had a bit of fun building my crew, giving no thought whatsoever to the nature or compatibility of them at all.  I just used figures I had around (or wanted to paint and hadn't).  

So I ended up with the crew seen above.  A Human with luck and shooting skills, a huge Warbot, a Telepathic Brain-in-a-Jar, and a tiny Amorphous blob with a gun.  They're a really odd crew, but honestly, I really came to love them.

He really is small, that's a penny he's based on.

The first game was a fight over an ancient artifact of power.  I used a clear ship/egg thing and stuffed some blue EL wire into it.  

I was playing the first edition of the playtest rules, so the artifact wasn't more than a terrain piece (that's changed now).  That made it little more than a straight fight between my crew and a crew of aliens across the board.  There was a rouge Senator trying to escape (he's behind the temple).  That did add some difference since it tied up my warbot for a while trying to capture him.  

The game played really nicely as I figured it would, i love both the base-concept games used here, so it made sense to combine them.

Epic moment, the blob squished through the cracks in the temple and launched into the alien Brute! Physics won out, and the tiny blob did little to the beast.  But just before the blob got squished for good, the Brain-in-a-Jar yanked him to safety telekinetically. 

The second game was a defense game.  My crew was inside a science outpost in an alien jungle, and had to defend the scientists inside.  

Again, the game played well, and was fun, but really my crew just sort of rolled right over the attackers.  They couldn't get to the wall entries fast enough, and were largely mowed down as they tried.  

My crew set-up inside the outpost.

The Attackers, lead by Mr.T! The black alien thing is a psychic.

And a gaggle of Transdoshians were storming the place from the other side.

I'm not going into rules and such here, but I'll say it played well.  I used the first edition for these games, and it was up to v1.7 last I saw, so things have undoubtedly been changed and streamlined.

I haven't gotten back to playing it, but I'm fully intending to.  I like this crew quite a bit.  They're something of a mercenary group, violent and unrepentant. A contrast to my Five Parsecs Crew I already have, which is more of a standard Firefly/roaming kind of crew.

I intend to use both crews, just for different games, but in the same universe.  

I just need to convert my FP crew over to the Farthest Star rules.  

Bottom Line: It's a fast, fun, starship crew game that allows for all sorts of scenarios and situations.  I like it.