Title

Title
Tally Ho!

Tuesday, 27 May 2025

In a galaxy not very far away

After a few months painting I've assembled enough terrain and figures to try out some scifi solo gaming using 5 Parsecs From Home by Modiphius Publishing. The premise is you recruit a crew and play a through a series of procedurally generated scenarios in whatever scifi setting you like - the default being a fairly generic one. The combat system is fairly simple, with battles taking about an hour with 4 - 6 figs a side. The depth comes from the campaigns which are narrative and usually fairly long running, with 20-30 turns seeming typical. 

My crew consists of Captain Strake, First Mate Creed, Would-be sniper Veyt, a combat oriented alien called Ivarr, engineer Skor, and trusty bot PDP-11.   



I began my campaign with two intro scenarios to get things underway. In the first my crew was hired to clear out some troublesome security drones from a chemical storage yard. Fairly simple - destroy them all to win.

The chemical yard

The haywire security bots

PDP and Ivarr make a flanking move

The captain and first mate keep the bots pinned down

Ivarr gets ready to attack

The sniper takes up position 

Things went pretty well with the bots all being dispatched. Ivarr was a casualty following a melee but suffered no serious injury's and was back on duty for game 2  



In the second game the crew were hired to intercept some Isolationist set on blowing-up some transport infrastructure. The aim was to patrol through the table hitting 3 points, 2 of which turned out to be on my left flank. 

Transport systems in the distance


The isolationists

Isolationist leader

My flank attack is countered 

This mission was tougher as the Isolationists had longer range weapons than the security bots and I needed to move right into their position. Their leader took-out Ivarr and the captain but all the Isolationist were eliminated. Ivarr was once again fine but the captain will be out for 3 campaign turns.   

Skor takes up a shooting position. 

Creed nails the Isolationist leader


















     

     

2 comments:

  1. I presume there is a fairly robust system in place for the NPC reactions?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The enemy has an "AI type" which decides how they deploy and behave. This is further refined in the expansion to give you less control over individual figures. In the end though you need to still make sensible decisions for them

      Delete