REVIEW - FIVE PARSECS FROM HOME 3rd Edition

Here is another first draft of a review I've written for Tabletop Games UK, while I try to persuade the wargames press to pay me to write similar stuff for them. If you caught Friday's Livestream, this one should be unsurprising. If not, you'll hopefully enjoy.

If it sometimes seems like I’m doomed to review games similar to games I’ve written myself, don’t worry: I choose this!

Five Parsecs from Home has been around for a few years now, and is one of a selection of re-skins of the same set of rules from Nordic Weasel. Five Leagues from the Borderlands is the fantasy version, Five Klicks from the Zone is the post-apocalyptic version etc. But Five Parsecs has been by far the most popular of the family and has found its third edition incarnation in the hands of Modiphius Entertainment, where it fits well alongside their deluxe edition of Rangers of Shadowdeep, by Joseph McCullough.

Like Rangers, Five Parsecs is predominantly a solo game with a clear pulp sci-fi feel to its rules. The layout and formatting is closer to a cyberpunk look, but the sketchy, bold artwork ties the whole thing together. The book looks very good indeed, and Modiphius’s choice of a smaller and more compact, matt-finish perfect-bound hardback format certainly makes it stand out on the shelf. But the whole thing is let down by the absence of any miniatures photography at all - which seems like a terrible oversight, and Ivan tells me the book was originally supposed to have photography but it just kind of fell by the wayside in the development process. Also the failure to include an index in a book of 175 pages, the vast majority of which is rules, seems weirdly lazy when the rest of the book is anything but.

The rules themselves can be broadly divided into three main sections: building your team, playing the game, and creating a campaign, in that order, but I’ll briefly touch upon the playing of the game itself:

The core mechanics are extremely straightforward and will seem familiar to anyone with a broad exposure to miniatures wargames: you roll a dice, you add some modifiers and you compare it to a target. Beating the target results in success! The game uses d6s and d10s, but the majority of the actual crunch is built on the d6. The rules add plenty of detail to accommodate different kinds of movement, jumping, climbing etc, and the shooting rules cover all the things you would usually expect to see, plus a lot of extra detail in weapon properties.

In short, the game mechanics of themselves, whilst smart enough and well articulated, are nothing to write home about. Where Five Parsecs comes alive is in the other two sections.

Going Solo

As I may have mentioned, Five Parsecs is a solo game! That means you need rules to manage your opposition. And Ivan has done a really interesting job of this. The rules include a range of what amount to decision trees, with each tree being allocated to a different type of enemy, from “tactical” to “bestial” and with many variations within that. The idea is that the mission will dictate what sort of opponent you’re up against and then you follow the rules in the decision tree to determine what the enemy will do.

A lot of leeway is left for players to interpret the decision tree, by the way. This is fine for a solo game, of course, but it does mean that the rules do lack a lot in the way of detail so expect to be exercising your judgement a lot when deciding what the bad guys get up to.

Assembling Your Crew

Creating an army is one of those jobs that your typical miniatures wargamer loves to agonize over. We are forever pouring over weapons tables and catalogues of special rules to find the optimal combination of tricks that will give us victory. But Five Parsecs is, remember, a solo game. So assembling your team is less about min-maxing your way to an assured outcome than it is about working out how to tell the most interesting story. And Ivan offers several ways to go about it. You can create the characters you want to, within a framework of restrictions and choices; or you can randomly-generate your characters and deal with the consequences; or - my favourite - you can pull your preferred minis out of the cabinet and pick the rules that suit them best. And, of course, you can mix and match this stuff to your taste. Because it’s a solo game, no one is looking over your shoulder and telling you off for fudging the results. If you want a dead-eye robot gunslinger with a pair of deadly pistols… just make one!

In other words, assembling your crew has all of the crunch and detail of writing any army list, but without the pressure of having to “get it right”. The only “right” in a game like Five Parsecs is the one that gives you the most fun. And it’s worth saying that this applies equally to other solo games, like Core Space, Hardwired, Ranges of Shadowdeep and, of course, Horizon Wars: Zero Dark in its solo mode.

A new feature of the third edition, by the way, is the introduction of rules to create your crew’s ship. Fans of the Traveller RPG will particularly enjoy this feature, but it’s fun for everyone. Whether it’s Serenity or the Razorcrest, a good ship can become a beloved character in its own right in these schlock sci-fi western-style adventures. And this is equally true of Five Parsecs. The ship is a crew’s home, their escape plan, their defensive position and their ultimate objective. Keeping it in tip-top shape, with the best equipment they can afford, is likely to be a high priority - but also an impossible goal, because there will never be enough credits, time or opportunities.

Note that you don’t need a model to represent your ship, but… You know you’re going to want one anyway, right?

Going on Campaign

You can, of course, play Five Parsecs as a “pick-up” game where you just make up a team, make up a mission and get playing. But why would you (unless you’re a reviewer just trying to get to grips with the rules so he can write a battle report)? The joy of a solo game is that you can play campaigns with none of the usual hassle of having everyone turn up, or making sure that no participant is running away with all the XP.

Important point: Five Parsecs doesn’t include a pre-written campaign. Or rather, it does, but if you blink, you’ll miss it. But there’s a good reason for this.

The idea with campaigns in Five Parsecs is that, rather than them being a pre-designed module you work your way through - like in a D&D campaign, or in Core Space, Infinity: Defiance or something like Zero Dark: Operation Nemesis - you create each new “chapter” in your campaign yourself. Whilst this sounds like a lot of work, Ivan does a great job of creating a host of tools to inspire and guide players in creating their own missions. The result is that missions in Five Parsecs are supposed to organically emerge from each other.

That said, Ivan does also provide the idea of a “story”. This is where the player writes a series of “event” missions, with each event being sparked by particular outcomes of other missions. The spark could be as simple as the player deciding that it’s time for a particular event to happen, or could be that a certain event happens when the player acquires X credits, or when a particular thing happens, such as a crew member being captured or the crew’s ship being damaged.

A sample story is included in the book as an example, but it’s easy to miss (it’s on page 154). Ivan suggests that players should get to grips with a freeform campaign before diving into a story campaign. But my impression is that stories for Five Parsecs are a field that would be ripe for blogging, creating articles for the independent press or just for Modiphius to get a bunch of imaginative contributors to write as supplements for the game. Having a story to play through where you don’t know what each new chapter will entail until you get there could be fantastic.

Appendicitis

For a game with no index, Five Parsecs sure has a lot of appendices. I won’t dwell on them all. There are two important ones:

First, there is a page of rules to allow you to convert Five Parsecs to a grid system. This is a great idea for folks who already own gridded maps, lots of Battle Systems stuff or just a heap of Imperial Assault tiles or similar. I haven’t tried these rules, so I don’t know whether a page covers everything you need, but it’s definitely a solid start.

Second, most importantly, is the appendix on using a Game Master.

Five Parsecs is a great solo experience, but my considered opinion is that it would be at its acme as a pseudo-RPG in which two or three friends control the crew between them and someone else runs the bad guys as the GM, writing the story events and designing the missions. Yes, it will be harder to organize. But because the crew is flexible in its consistency, you could keep running the campaign even if one or two players were absent every session. As long as you have the GM and at least one other player, the campaign could keep moving and returnees just have to catch up with the plot so far.

Some of the other appendices feel like filler - which is a shame in a book absent of miniatures photography that could have made it look a lot nicer.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Solo and co-operative miniature wargames are becoming increasingly popular and it’s interesting to ask why. The COVID pandemic is an obvious candidate, but it can’t take all of the credit. I think it’s also related to the growth in board and roleplay games, with some players wanting games that spend more time focused on the action scenes of combat and under-pressure puzzle solving. I think, to some extent, it’s also a result of board gamers being underwhelmed by Kickstarter board game projects with amazing miniatures and lacklustre play experiences looking for something else to do with their awesome minis.

I would like to think it’s also about the changing demographic of the miniatures wargaming scene that is de-emphasizing the win-at-all-costs culture and focusing back on the narrative experience that veterans have seen eroded over the last few decades.

Whatever the underlying cause, though, more wargamers are looking for engaging solo play experiences, and Five Parsecs From Home is definitely one of those. That said, it’s not a low-effort investment. I think if you were to just play in the freeform mode described by the rules, you might well find your enthusiasm coming off the boil after a handful of games. If you have the desire to write yourself a story through which to play, you could well sustain it through a narrative or two. But if Modiphius or someone were to start releasing their own CYA-style series of adventure books for Five Parsecs, well… that could set this game on fire.