Bringing in the new year.

New year in Edinburgh was brought in in a cacophonous explosion of light and colour, outshining all prior Hogmanay celebratory firework displays of years previous.

Or so I assume. I was in a basement, negotiating the hand-over of smuggled contraband into the grubby paws of a man who liked to go by the name of 'Badger'. Actually getting the illicit goods here in the first place had proven remarkably straight-forward—a number of my competitors had run into trouble with their operations lately, but I had been able to make the delivery without any incident, and I was hoping that my employer would appreciate my hard graft. In fact, I was hoping that in the new year spirit, I could get a certain little extra -- and I was relying on my companion to work her charms on the man Badger. Provided that nothing went awry, I would soon have a rock-solid reputation among the less-than-salubrious community of fixers and fences as a reliable man, someone who could be trusted with more... extravagant capers.

To my left, my companion continued to charm and cajole Badger. Deferring to her line of expertise, I was keeping my mouth shut. I could hear the fireworks outside, muffled. Despite everything, I was starting to worry that I had perhaps overreached myself...

Okay, I admit it. I wasn't actually smuggling contraband into the city. At midnight, January 1st 2015, I was actually in the basement of the Edinburgh Games Hub playing the Firefly board game (with Blue Sun expansion!). Well, I'd seen fireworks before, and it's bad manners to leave the table for long in the middle of a game.

In the game you play the captain of a Firefly vessel (or a different type of ship if you're feeling difficult). The idea is to gather crew, equipment and upgrades, take on missions from various luminaries of the Firefly universe such as Patience, Nishka or, as I had, Badger, and generally thrive out in the black. You travel between worlds shopping, taking on jobs, getting into trouble while on jobs, and occasionally remembering to refuel your ship. A number of trading worlds provide their own marketplaces, represented by their own unique deck of cards (for Persephone, Osiris, Meridian, and so forth). Travelling through space forces you to draw cards from different decks depending on whether you were sailing through Alliance Space, the outskirts or the Outer Rim. You hope for plain sailing, but occasionally you detect traces of reavers or random bits of your ship fall off (as they do). Individual games are given shape and purpose by selecting a specific objective card at the start of the game—determining the win condition for the game overall. In the game I played, the players all had to get 'solid' with four of the mission-dealers (Patience, Nishka, Badger and Amnon Duul) by successfully performing missions for them and then lead the Alliance on a wild-goose chase for some purpose that I can't quite recall (in retrospect, I perhaps should have paid more attention at the briefing).

All the captains are represented by characters in the Firefly universe (including Mal Reynolds of course). I was the trade baron Murphy: skilled mechanic, medic and moral man according to the card I got. By the time that midnight had rolled along, I had gotten solid with all four required mission-dispensers except Badger (who I was working on), ahead of the other players (who were busy getting eaten by reavers mostly). All I had to do to win was press my advantage and fulfil the parameters of the objective (I wasn't sure why Murphy was trying to pull one over on the Alliance, but I'm sure it was for pragmatic and noble purposes... maybe).

This was the first time I'd played, so I couldn't speak for the longevity of the game or how the other objectives play out. but I had fun. Most random events happen when travelling space or 'misbehaving' on missions—the contents of the various world decks unveil themselves as the game unfolds, allowing you to plan your jobs and invest in your crew with a reasonable degree of foresight. There's a decent range of things to do (including bounty hunting), though I felt that there was little interaction between the players; we were racing to win, but otherwise we left each other alone. This isn't necessarily how every game will play out, as it's possible to jump the other players (for example because one of their crew have a bounty on them), but that seemed to be a distraction in this case from the objective at hand, which encouraged getting on with missions rather than putting the screws on one another. I guess I'll have to play again another time.

I lost by the way—despite my initial lead, I hadn't built a strong enough crew to handle the rest of the mission and my progress stalled, allowing one of the other players to steal the initiative and complete the caper.