Hello Gun of Icarus Community,
I was playing the Firefly Boardgame:
http://www.amazon.com/Gale-Force-9-GF9-FIRE001-Firefly/dp/0992251656When I got to thinking if we could make a Guns of Icarus Themed Board Game using similar game dynamics. For those of you who are not familiar with the Firefly Board Game the play works as follows:
* Fly your ship to Contacts that give you jobs of varying difficulty and reward.
* Work the jobs by flying to a location, picking up cargo, delivering cargo, or “misbehaving.”
* Misbehaving involves drawing cards from the misbehave deck and performing some skill check against a difficulty set on the card
* With your reward money you can hire crew and buy upgrades/equipment that makes it easier to pass misbehave checks.
* Flying also has its challenges and rewards depending on the territory you fly through. Alliance space runs the risk of inspections and contraband seizures, Border space runs the risk of Reaver attacks killing your crew.
* The end game condition is either pulling off a spectacular heist involving skill checks that are impossible for a starting crew, or amassing enough money to retire.
The game captures the feel of being a mercenary spaceship captain in the firefly universe. You are constantly working odd jobs to get money, and using this money to build your crew into something that can handle the big score. I think this feel would be very applicable to the Guns of Icarus Universe (as I imagine it).
Here is how I imagine development going:
Step 1: Take the world map Muse has provided and divide it into faction space and disputed space. This becomes the game board.
Step 2: Come up with encounter cards for both faction and disrupted space
Step 3: Place Contact and Job hubs at key cities in the world.
Step 4: Make crew, items, and ship upgrades that add skill bonuses and special abilities to the player’s ship.
Step 4.5: Name crew after prominent community members and use their in game avatars on the card.
Step 5: Make ship cards and tokens based off the current GOI ship roster.
Step 6: Play test and revise this thing until it is considered “fun.”
Step 7: Publish a PDF of the game rules and all the cards so interested parties could print it out and play it.
Since this is a fan project using art assets and lore that Muse came up with it would be wrong to make any money off it, and the project would be under constant threat of a cease and desist order. It might also be a terrible idea since the GOI community is very sparse and getting together to play a board game would be difficult/impossible. However like many of my silly ideas I feel obligated to share it with people who might find it interesting or fun.
