I am Nik Butler

Five Parsecs From Home is a Solo Wargaming experience by Ivan Sorenson and published by Modiphius. It provides a rule system for the creation of a "Crew" allowing for the usual mix of species and machines a Space Ship for the Crew to move between planets and a Series of well constructured tables and explanations to build out a reason to put your Minis on the table and start rolling dice and claiming creds and experience. The battle system is fast and simple quickly resolving outcomes and allowing for thoughtful use of terrain and campaign.

Overall the time between zero rules knowledge and a complete crew, ship and first encounter took a little over 3 hours much of this bcecause I was writing in my notebook before transfering to a charactersheet. With no real knowledge as to what to expect I allowed for the usual 6 crew 3 humans, 2 K'erin and a Bot. A Crew gathered under the common goals of protecting each other in a cruel universe. Their Starship was named "Cant Park Here" because I have a love of Ian M Bank Culture novels and the crew called themselves "The Estranged" a mercenary group for hire running errands and keeping out of the way of the law. With only 2 rivals to their name they have a very low key but wealthy begining.

With the Crew planned out the first encounter was rolled up and thankfully nothing too complicated in terms of Conditions for the game. A delivery run to the centre of the map whilst dealing with a Criminal Element of Gunslingers.

Of course this had all the hallmarks of a good cold open, running an erand, dealing with what might seem like the usual thugs later to discover your data transfer mission to get the commms packet offline was something a few plante side parties were paying to see not happen.

My mini collection for this consists of minis from the Battle System Core Space , which is another great Solo tabletop skirmish system, minis from StarGave Crew by Northstar Military Figures and a spare bot which I picked up from Etsy a while back.

The terrain is a scattering of old warhammer 40K battle map, some converted "the works" storage boxes and scatter terrain from various game systems. The central comms pillar a repainted pill bottle, more on that later.

4 hours into the build and planning and the game was on the table and more on that later.

As ever #SoloSept runs with the idea that I wanted to make time to play more games I have bought into yet never put on the table. This month I am giving at least 6 games 5 hours each for me to take time to play, discover, and share. Im hoping to see more #SoloSept entries from other content creators as the month continues; certainly the tag is seeing others on the BSKY community share their passions too.