The cover for the original core rule book for Five Parsecs From Home Third Edition published by Modiphius Entertainment in 2021 included the subtitle, “Solo Adventure Wargaming.” This set of miniatures rules, which combines a tabletop skirmish wargame in a far future setting with lite roleplaying game (RPG) elements, was subsequently expanded on in three releases – Trailblazer’s Toolkit (2021), Freelancer’s Handbook (2023), and Fixer’s Guidebook (2023). Each product added additional rules and campaigns that were all compatible though a bit hard to use given rules spread out over four books. For myself, I added another layer of complexity by owning the core rule book in a dead tree version while the three expansions were held as digital copies. All of which made cross-referencing and using the rules in play a bit of a challenge.
Enter the Five Parsecs From Home Compendium. The Compendium brings all the rules from the three expansions together into a single product organized to, “group Character Options, Game Options, and Scenario & Setting material together, and includes a combined Index for both the core rules and this compendium” (Compendium, p. 6). The end result is that I have gone from four books back to two…
…for just a moment. As if that compilation of all the rules for Five Parsecs From Home was not enough, the Compendium also includes a standalone game and military-themed version of play called Bug Hunt. While called “standalone” in the introduction, rules exist which enables players to take a character from Bug Hunt and use them in the “standard” Five Parsecs From Home game setting. So now I am back to three products.
If the title and cover illustration are not enough of a hint, Bug Hunt very clearly draws inspiration from the ALIEN family of movies and the Verhoeven-movie version of Starship Troopers. There are many references to the step-parent settings like the section, “In space, nobody can hear your attack dice,” a very obvious riff off the ALIEN tagline, “In space no one can hear you scream.”
In the introduction to Bug Hunt, the designers give inspirational credit first to the board game Space Crusade (Milton Bradley, 1990). As the BoardGameGeek page for the game notes, “Space Crusade is a cooperative effort between Milton Bradley UK and Games Workshop. It takes the role-playing elements from Milton Bradley’s Heroquest and merges them with Game Workshop’s dark vision of the future.” While that may be true, I personally have no connection to Space Crusade so I will have to take the designer’s word for it.
For those who want to use the Five Parsecs From Home setting as more of a RPG campaign setting, there is an eight-page “Galactic Timeline” provided (Compendium, pp. 215-222). For myself, the timeline is interesting but a bit unneeded. Part of the charm of Five Parsecs From Home for me is that it is a decent skirmish-scale wargame with just enough RPG elements to make for interesting characters…on the battlefield. If I want a deeper character experience, I’m going to open up one of my roleplaying games like Classic Traveller or Cepheus Engine or ALIEN: The Roleplaying Game (Free League Publishing, 2021).
The fact that Five Parsecs From Home is designed for solo play is a great attraction. My personal preference is to play a campaign; a series of perhaps five or ten linked games, sometimes played one-per-evening as a (somewhat) quick diversion to pass time. That level of attention does not demand deep immersion, but only sufficient. Five Parsecs From Home and Bug Hunt deliver more than sufficient diversion in my evenings, and even occasionally—and deservedly—can make an appearance a weekend family game night.
Feature image courtesy WP AI with prompt “future soldier fighting bug.”
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