Choosing Your Next Sci-Fi Skirmish Game: Stargrave and Five Parsecs from Home

You spend years waiting for a great small-scale sci-fi skirmish game which lets you use whatever miniatures and terrain you like, then two come along at once...

Stargrave and Five Parsecs From Home (referred to as Five Parsecs from now on) are two excellent games. That's the short of it. The long is that they are in many ways quite similar, but approach the same essential goal of space opera gaming with a handful of miniatures and a minimum of table space in different ways that gives each their own distinct flavour and impression. More than that, each is also part of a broader family of games which have a fantasy-themed alternative if you prefer your sword and board to blaster and jetpack - hello Frostgrave and Five Leagues From the Borderlands! They really are two very distinct games, but I think there's enough echoes of them in one another that it's worth introducing them together to discuss the differences between them. Each is an excellent game in its own right, and if you've been having the itch for a bit of laser-fuelled adventuring, they're both worth considering.

FIVE PARSECS FROM HOME

Chances are good that if you've followed my work for any stretch of time you'll have probably heard me evangelize about Nordic Weasel Games, the one man band behind Five Parsecs. FiveCore is an entire family of games with different themes, each with tweaks and layers over a core (pun not intended) system of game mechanics so that each plays differently to the other in a way that fits the theme it's geared toward. The lead designer, Ivan Sorensen, works steadily on additional scenarios, character options, and other supporting material, and each of the FiveCore games have that feel of games that exist in worlds one could visit.

Five Parsecs is a game which follows a small crew trying to keep their ship in one piece, find a job and get paid. If it sounds familiar, there's probably a good reason for that - the author makes no secret of wearing his inspiration on his sleeve for all to see, and will gleefully allude to all manner of neat and quirky sci-fi settings in rules and supplemental material. You create a crew of up to six characters who are then subject to all the vagaries, dangers and good fortune that luck can throw their way. Five Parsecs is a game designed to be played solo (again, I swear there's no pun there). Players are guided through a series of steps during each campaign turn, following up rumours, chasing down story opportunities, grappling with rivals and resupplying before each chance to hit the table for a game played out with miniatures and a simple yet intuitive decision matrix for different enemy types. Five Parsecs is a game about the story of your crew, whether they make it off-world to escape a rival only to find their more deadly partner on the next planet, or if they're left blasted in the dust by invasion forces.

Each campaign turn is handled by a series of charts and tables which might sound quite dry, but have a wealth of storytelling opportunity baked in at every level. Players are encouraged to consider how the random results fit together to form a cohesive narrative and expand on the story of their crew - given a few minutes with some of the table results and a little imagination, I found it was actually a lot of fun picturing some of the wild tales that would come about just by following the results on the dice. But, as the author points out, you're free to ignore the dice if they don't make sense - it's a toolbox, and if you're not having fun with something, you can turn it sideways and shake it until all the gears and screws fall out. After all, the only person that needs to be entertained in a solo game is you!

SO WHAT'S NEW?

Five Parsecs has a physical release coming. If you're familiar with Nordic Weasel Games, that's a big deal! Ordinarily released purely as PDFs and digital content, you'll soon be able to get your hands on a gorgeous, full-colour hardback of Five Parsecs From Home as Ivan teamed up with the folks at Modiphius to create its third edition, and man oh man, is it ever glorious. I don't have my hands on the physical copy yet, but pre-ordering nets you a free PDF version of the new edition to download and the interior is just amazing. Years of little tweaks, expansions and content have been folded into the upcoming release, along with absolute tons of new options for crew creation, streamlining how campaign steps work, and more, and all of that with a wealth of examples of how each system works in play.

This is the reason that I bring up Five Parsecs once again, if you've already heard it mentioned. It's about to take a much-deserved place on shelves around the world, and it's far more than some trite cosmetic upgrades. The third edition really packs in more than ever, and after poring over the PDF download I'm rummaging through my bits box for miniatures to use to create a crew.

If you're keen, check it out here on Modiphius' pre-order page!

STARGRAVE

Joseph McCullough writes very good games. His titles available include Oathmark, Rangers of Shadow Deep and Frostgrave. So, to immediately address the elephant in the room: Is Stargrave just Frostgrave in space? Well... no, but also in some ways yes? One may as well ask if Warhammer Fantasy Battles and Warhammer 40,000 are the same game - sure, there are familiar systems underpinning each game and some of the concepts translate across each title, but they're very different beasts even after you peel away the fantasy and sci-fi skins and take a look at them purely mechanically. There, I think, is the easiest answer to the question of whether or not the two Grave titles are the same game. Structurally, they share a lot of familiar mechanics, but they're doing different things with them.

Stargrave is a game which follows a small crew trying to keep their ship in one piece, find a job and get paid-... wait a second. I don't include this comparison deliberately to poke fun at Stargrave, because it's such a good premise for a small, skirmish-sized game centered around a crew of rebels, pirates, troublemakers or desperate independent traders just trying to stay ahead of danger. The key difference between Five Parsecs and Stargrave is that, at its core, Stargrave is a game about competition with other human players. Your crews may face off against wandering dangers such as monsters and pirate intruders, but for the most part it's about dashing in to seize opportunity and profit before a rival crew can get their hands on it. The game is still one in which the story of your cast of characters underpins the entire experience, though it relies on a second player at present. Frostgrave, after all, has a wealth of expansions available, one of which is a module allowing you to play solo scenarios against AI-driven enemies. I would be surprised if something similar weren't already in the works for Stargrave, then, especially with solo gaming experiencing such a resurgence given the current global situation.

In Stargrave, you create a Captain and a First Mate, choosing Backgrounds which function essentially like character classes, allowing them access to certain abilities and skills as well as a couple of stat buffs before the start of a campaign. Your crew by comparison are relatively faceless - their classes define them almost entirely by their statistics and equipment load-outs, though they can in play discover upgraded versions of those which give them an edge. This might sound like a downside, but Stargrave has you playing with a larger crew of ten, so keeping things relatively simple for the grunts that make up your crew is a nice touch which means you can refer back to a single page when you need to double-check their rules. The real customization comes in how your two 'main' characters interact with one another and the crew, as you can create stalwart leaders that enhance the fighting ability of those around them, damage-dealing monsters that will go through an opposing crew like a blender, or a more subtle rogue who specializes in battlefield control and manipulating the weak-willed of the enemy's crew.

In the same way as Five Parsecs, Stargrave allows you to use whatever miniatures you like to represent your crew, although there is a range of plastic boxes coming from North Star Figures which ought to be brilliant if previous Frostgrave releases are anything to judge by! Keep an eye out for those, or take a look at the complete section on creating a crew they've released ahead of the book so you can get started painting miniatures straight away.

Stargrave is available for pre-order directly through Osprey Games although they are unable to ship directly to EU member nations at the moment. All of the usual online retailers I use here in Germany have Stargrave pre-orders available, however, so if you're unable to get a copy direct from the source you won't miss out.

SO: WHICH TO BUY?

If you're anything like me, just get both! In the interests of disclosure, the team at Osprey Publishing very kindly sent me a review copy ahead of schedule so that I could take a look and discuss miniature choices for Stargrave, but I was so impressed by the book and its system that I immediately went and purchased Frostgrave myself, so... that's probably a good sign if you're wondering whether or not it looks like fun. If you're looking for something light, easy to keep track of between games and have an opponent or two that's able to visit to throw some dice around a table, Stargrave is an excellent purchase. Even if you haven't an opponent local to you, I'm of the opinion it wouldn't be difficult to create a second (or third, or fourth) enemy crew and control them with the same AI choices the game uses for its wandering monsters, but it's worth knowing ahead of time that Stargrave isn't designed with that specifically in mind.

Five Parsecs, meanwhile, is a game built from the ground up to be played solo. It does demand more book-keeping by nature of the campaign system, but I think you'll find if you have the inclination to roll some dice, abide by the weird results and see what kind of a story you can create with your miniatures collection, you're going to have a good time. That book-keeping becomes in itself a part of the tale you're writing with your heroes, and there are a few suggested victory conditions in the book as well as difficulty tweaks, space opera 'second chance' options for those characters you don't want to lose, and more besides. I've long really enjoyed Nordic Weasel's line of games, and the author is a top bloke besides, active on Twitter and always easygoing if you've got questions about how a rule is meant to be interpreted or if you're just looking for suggestions on miniatures... or music, or beer, or movies!

So, finally, if you're looking at all this and still want to get your hands on a fantasy-themed variation on these games, hit up Google for where you can get a copy of Frostgrave near you, or check out Five Leagues From the Borderlands over on WargameVault!

Hopefully this introduces you to something you might enjoy for many an exciting gaming session!