RogerBW's Blog

My copy of the Crime and Punishment expansion for Firefly arrived on Thursday.

It's been hard to find anyone in the UK with actual stock; I ended up buying from GamesLore, who delivered two days later.

The box is pretty, but not useful; ditto the card spacer to stop things rattling around.

Alliance Alert cards work a bit like the Dungeons introduced in Munchkin 6: they provide an ongoing special rule until they're replaced by a new one, something like "when you Botch a Job, Disgruntle your entire Crew", "you may not sell Cargo to Contacts", or "each time a player Hires a Wanted Crew, place this card on that Supply Deck. Players may not take a Buy Action at this location until this card moves". There are ten in this box; an alert is replaced with a new one when the Alliance Cruiser card is drawn.

The thing some of us have been waiting for for a while is: extra Misbehave cards, increasing the size of the only deck that's been left untouched since the base game came out. Some of these are straightforward; some require multiple skill tests; a few require you to split your crew into two teams, each of which must pass its own Misbehave card. Some of these cards also cause the Alliance Alert to be replaced.

There are two new Setup and two new Story cards. Clearer Skies, Better Days makes life a bit easier by letting you roll a die before a Full Burn, and being able to go that far before you start drawing Nav Cards. It also bans Reaver and Alliance alert tokens from the game.

Alliance High Alert goes the other way: Harken is unavailable as a Contact, Starting Jobs are restricted, and there's an Alliance Alert card in play.

Smugglers Blues scatters Contraband across Alliance Space and gives a cash bonus to the first player to sell at least three Contraband at once to each of the four core game criminal contacts. When the last bonus is claimed, each other player gets one more turn, and the one with most credits wins.

Wanted Men gives players a Warrant to start with, rewards illegal jobs (+$1,000 per Warrant you have), penalises legal jobs, and removes the highest-priced crew member each time a Firefly meets the Cruiser. First to $20,000 wins. (And as with several other cards one could easily run this with a timer, and score most money at that point.)

There are also two counter sheets, each with three Warrant/Goal tokens and twelve Wanted tokens; when things go wrong, the latter will be applied to previously-legitimate crew members to make them Wanted. These can be removed only by dismissing the crew member.

The standard of proofreading is abysmal, but the new rules look interesting. It's certainly going to be much harder work to get the Crime-based victories that the base game allowed; legal work has always been a bit of a second-best, but now the value of a wanted crewmember has dropped and crime has become distinctly riskier. I look forward to getting this to the table.