I fixed myself up with my first wargame acquisition of 20231 by purchasing the Fixer’s Guidebook for Five Parsecs from Home (Nordic Weasel Games / Modiphius Entertainment, 2023). Well, sorta but not really but yes. Back to that thought in a moment…
Five Parsecs from Home is something of a guilty pleasure for me. The front cover of the core game book prominently announces the game is for “Solo Adventure Wargaming.” Previously, I wrote about Adventure Wargames that for me lie at the intersection of wargames and roleplaying games. I am not normally a miniatures skirmish wargamer (which essentially is what Five Parsecs from Home is) but the skirmish combat rules combined with lite elements of roleplaying game character generation and a campaign framework for adventure—all playable solo—excites me.
Since purchasing the core rule book in 2022 I also acquired two expansion books, the Freelancer’s Handbook and Trailblazer’s Toolkit. Each expansion adds new rules or campaign arcs to the base game some of which, admittedly, are more useful than others. The new Fixer’s Guidebook is no exception.
Order of business
The first new section in the Fixer’s Guidebook is an updated and expanded set-up sequence. With so many options to choose from the comprehensive set-up sequence is essentially a choose-your-own adventure guide. Looking over the two-page sequence makes it obvious just how extensive your adventure choices are in the Five Parsecs from Home game system.
Random terrain
If you can’t find it in your imagination to place the terrain for your gaming table the second section of the Fixer’s Guidebook provides a process for a randomly generated table setup. I like one of the last steps: “Make any tweaks and changes at this point to get a really fun table.” An important reminder that while you may be a serious gamer you are still gaming for fun!
Don’t tell Ma I’m dead
Face it, it is easy to die (eliminated/removed/”Game over, Man”) in a Five Parsecs from Home skirmish. The next section of the Fixer’s Guidebook offers a process that “shakes things up” by using casualty tables that “tend to keep combatants in the fight longer than normal.” While this section sounds very wargame-y, in implementation it actually is more RPG-adjacent, as explained in the subsection on Narrative Styles:
While the default is that the tables are applied to both friendly and enemy figures, you don’t have to do it that way. For a more heroic game, apply the rules to your crew but not the enemy. This can also work well if you like to play with a smaller crew than normal or if you like to add a few extra bad guys for an epic firefight. If you find this approach to casualties make things a little on the easy side, apply a few options to tweak things.
Fixer’s Guidebook, 13
Square moves
The introduction to the Fixer’s Guidebook calls the next section of options a new movement mechanism called “Sector-based movement.” The related chapter, however, is titled “Grid-Based Movement.” Essentially this is a method of moving that avoids measuring moves for each figure. Honestly, this is how I usually run my games, rule or not…
Faction facts
The previous sections of the Fixer’s Guidebook concerned playing the game on the table; the next sections focus on the setting. Whereas the core game and earlier expansions explained opponents, in the Expanded Factions section of the Fixer’s Guidebook you get details on organized groups. The detail provided is not extensive; the rules provide more of a narrative of what the faction stands for.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it…
The final few sections of the Fixer’s Guidebook provide clarifications on existing rules for Conventional battle missions from the core book and Salvage missions from the Freelancer’s Handbook. The Fixer’s Guidebook introduces two new missions: Stealth and Street Fight. To be honest, these are not so much “new” missions as much as they are detailed alternative settings for a Conventional battle, but, heck, if it helps sell a game…
Fat cat gaming
By itself the Fixer’s Guidebook offers plenty of new content—almost too much. This expansion bloat (my term) is addressed by Modiphius in a section called “Official Status” in the Introduction:
As a solo game, the final arbiter on whether to include any given rule is you. However, as players may enjoy knowing what is “official”, here is my explanation:
All material in expansions published by Modiphius are official in the sense that they are meant to work with and integrate into the core rules. Effort has been made to ensure the material integrates across expansions so that options from one expansion can be used in another without too much difficulty.
Of course, this does not mean that every option is meant to be used simultaneously: Firstly, some may not suit your current campaign, and second such a game would become unwieldy very quickly.
As a player, you can pick and choose what to use and wne to use it. The material on offer allows you to do so at almost any time, so that you may use one option in your campaign for a while, before swapping it for another.
Fixer’s Guidebook, 5
Bugs, bugs, bugs
With three expansions published one might think that there is little more Modiphius can offer. Well, remember above where I mentioned I “sorta but not really” purchased the Fixer’s Guidebook? The “sorta not really” part is because I actually pre-ordered Five Parsecs From Home Compendium – Bug Hunt.
This forthcoming product for Five Parsecs from Home is technically not another expansion but a compendium with all three expansions under one cover PLUS a standalone game centered around a hunt squad of troopers called Bug Hunt. This game very much looks like the Five Parsecs from Home version of ALIENS with, “features like alien spawn points, alien sub types like the spitter and screamer and alien leaders like the driver or lancer.”
While I have the digital version of Bug Hunt in hand (tableted?) the deadtree version is promised to deliver in March 2024. I certainly will be reading the rules and experimenting with Bug Hunt before the deadtree delivery but likely will not do a deep dive until I hold the product in my hand. Only then will you I do my part and post my thoughts.
- Not that it really matters but I count an acquisition year as December 25 thru December 24. ↩︎
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