Last week’s Monday Night Gaming covered the Firefly Board Game and most of the expansions. We finally had a chance to sit down and play the Blue Sun expansion.

If you thought this game took up precious real estate before, try adding in this latest expansion, which includes an addition to the board itself called Rim Space. The main board + add on now takes about 3 feet of space. Add in 18 or so card decks and their discard piles, plus your ship, crew, ship upgrades, gear, etc., and you need a very large table to play this game. In fact, it would be best played on The Sultan.

If you take a look at the image to the left, you’ll see that we took up an entire booth table at Cafe Mox and this was only a two player game. o_O (You can click here to see a better, larger pic of what the game looks like now.)

The new Meridian cards are a bit odd. With the prior planet decks, they had themes. You knew that going to the Osiris Shipworks could get you ship parts while going to Silverhold could get you hired help or weapons for cheap. Meridian didn’t have much of a theme beyond being “random stuff” from the Serenity film.

The new jobs are really challenging, especially the Mr. Universe add-ons which exist to create an added challenge to an already existing job. I will also add that the time estimations on the scenario cards are way, way off–at least they are in two player. Every time we’ve played two-player, what the game makers say will take 2-3 hours, usually takes us 4-5, so just a head’s up on the time frame.

The Blue Sun expansion really ups the difficulty of the game as a whole (as if the bounty hunting expansion didn’t already). If the added jobs weren’t hard enough, the Rim Space area adds 2 more Reaver Cutter ships and a much higher likelihood of running into them. Case in point–3 hours into the game, this was me:

I’m humped, Captain.

Yes, that’s my poor ship surrounded by all the Reavers in space (thanks to my husband and bad luck!). Fun times!

I wish I could tell you who won, but sadly, we had to wrap up the game early due to Seizure Kitty™. But I can tell you, I was probably, most definitely going to lose. Must play again soon to find out!

Happy Gaming!