Pros

Ok, so before we start utterly bashing Firefly: Shiny Dice, it does look pretty decent. The dice are a pleasure to roll with engravings on them, that you can roll on the rubber mousepads.

For the actual dice faces, they correspond to the show pretty well! Zoe can attack anything, Mal is pretty well rounded by especially good against Saffron (a Foe die face), and Jayne is very aggressive.

This game fortunately does play very well to time at 30 minutes, where players can’t excessively roll, due to diminishing quantity of dice for subsequent attempts to keep ’Keep Flyin’ in one round.

Overall, Firefly: Shiny Dice does have a decent gameplay meets theme of rolling dice to see what crew you’ll get, seeing if you’ll achieve those Missions, all in a fairly risky universe.

Cons

But that’s it! For the good stuff! Everything from here is going to be bashing this game. Like, the rulebook is practically all text, no diagrams/photos to be confusing, and so this game requires that you watch an online video, that you must search up yourself..

And remember those mousepads we mentioned? There’s only 2 of them… for a game for up to 4 players!?

Ok fine, now its time for gameplay concerns. At its core, the game is extremely weird on how you draw a Mission card AFTER you roll and re-roll your dice. AFTER. Plus, getting the Missions isn’t even worth that much! Their payouts are lower than killing the foes in your ship.

But wait, hold on, oh, drawing the Missions is complete randomness anyways, so if you buffed the Mission payouts, then the players who didn’t draw Missions they could blindly solve get wrecked.

We’re not even close to done though. The HUGE problem here is that for a push-your-luck game, this game just doesn’t really have that! Due to how in-between deciding to ‘Lay Low’ or ‘Keep Flyin’’, a LOT of dice are eaten up, players can practically NEVER push their luck more than once. And its fairly risky to push their luck at all in many cases!

This makes the gameplay decisions like: You pull out immediately which is lame. Or you’re FORCED to pull out after the second round if you survive, because to push any further would be utter suicide.

It gets worse, because some Missions FORCE you to ‘Lay Low’, or ‘Keep Flyin’… and these Missions are random! So there goes your decisionmaking out the window.

In fact, for all of the 15 dice, and 3 different colors of them, the dice management can easily get boiled down to: you re-roll the dice that doesn’t do a damage to enemies, and dice on average do 2 damage to foes. Sure, there’s some special abilities like a River that does 3 damage, or a Strawberry that can move dice around. But for the most part, the dice management can play itself once you figure it out, which feels all the more worse because there are heaps and heaps of symbols explained in the player aid.

Having all the dice continues to hurt the game by removing so much tension in dice rolling, where you have to sit there and re-organize the 15 dice before finding out what you really have. Then, you flip a Mission randomly to see what the heck happens.

These points tie into how this game is REALLY solitaire to play. There’s such minimal interaction with the rule of: 'If one person rolls 4 dice of the same face, then everyone else loses 100 points (that’s just 1 VP in this game). While players are sorting out their 15 dice, other players just have to sit there and do literally nothing. There is nothing to plan for while waiting, no alternate victory paths, no way to goad your friend on because push-your-luck doesn’t exist… sheeesh.