Last weekend I completed my first encounter in Five Parsecs from Home! My crew suffered no causalities; even though my strategy was pretty weak haha.
Lucky roll of the dice meant the opposition was outnumbered. Which is great because I didn’t want to have to bail on my first encounter!
My crew encountered a rival Brat Gang. They all have body armor, which proved a bit tricky to overcome with my basic weapons. I did learn that, if you are patient and the only objective is to hold the field, you can let them come to you.
It was helpful that my crew is fairly colorful. I have numbers on the bottom of each but I differentiated them by the color of their jackets. Painting them to be quickly identifiable is probably a good idea.
I felt like the retro aesthetic for Stargrave miniatures only works if you go full-on hipster style. I used heads from Frostgrave and Oathmark for some nice facial hair. Also, facial hair is pretty easy to sculpt with greenstuff sculpting putty.
As described in the book, is better to not worry about what appears on the model. After a while, you quickly remember what dudes have what weapons.
In addition to the miniatures from Stargrave, I am using miniatures from Core Space. They are perfect for this game because the atheistic is already fairly colorful.
Five Parsecs adds a lot of flavor but purposely providing flexibility in what miniatures and terrain you need to play the game. My goal is to have three basic landscape themes, each with different variations. So far I have decided on desert/wasteland, forest/jungle and urban/starport.
I am coming from Warhammer 40k, so my miniature choices are limited for Five Parsecs. I am trying to expand the variety of what I have, even though I do not have a 3D printer yet.
All of my terrain is designed to sit on burnt sienna board; either mud or dirt.. All of my miniatures also use burnt sienna bases.
What I like most about Five Parsecs from Home, is that the battle part goes pretty quickly and is only one aspect of the game. The campaign, which uses a lot of random tables, is very entertaining.
The table I am using is a 3’x3′ piece of 3/4″ plywood. I glued paper onto it, coated it in water-based matt varnish and painted it with burnt sienna and other browns. I avoided sand and instead used baking soda and cheap kitchen herbs for texture. I applied oil paints last before sealing with matt varnish.
On to build more terrain!
I am an outdoorsy geek. Which is not rare at all. In fact, outdoorsy geeks are some of my favorite people 🙂