What must be two or three years ago now, I got the Kickstarter copy of Thunderbirds the co-operative board game that I had backed. It was all in, so I had all the planned expansions along with the base game.

Much to my shame, the game has never hit the table since it arrived. Despite it being a genre that I enjoy, a theme I grew up with and love, and by a game designer I like.

I’m going to paint an image now that you will never be able to get out of your head. Copious amounts of alcohol will not work.

Yesterday I was looking for something to read in the bath. I love having a relaxed soak and a read. As you know recently I’ve been reading a lot of stuff about RPG’s. Then I remembered one of the expansions that came with the board game was an RPG.

So there I was yesterday morning soaking in my bath, reading the A5 rule book for the Thunderbirds RPG.

The RPG expansion gets you the following for your money:

• 2 x custom Thunderbirds d6 dice

• 56 Page RPG Book

• 63 Card Mission Generator Deck

But as the extract from the rule book shows you can (well they say that you should) use bits of the board game itself to enhance the experience.

The actual system Modiphius have come up with is a very simple d6 system. Which would not actually take much to move over to the Genesys system. The Genesys system would be a great system to use for this.

Instead of the bonus tokens that the rules use for giving a bonus to a dice roll, a story point would work just as well. The limited skills used would easily cross over. The rules use default characters that naturally are from the show. I don’t see transferring these to Genesys characters being a problem.

The benefits of moving to Genesys would be the narrative dice, the improved combat (which is very very simple in the RPG rules) and social encounters. Plus it would be easier to do skill challenges. Which I think would be awesome in this game.

‘The random Thunderbirds Mission Generator deck will help you create exciting missions for your players or help inspire devious new schemes to test your players to the limit!” There are basically tables in the rulebook as well that cover some of the cards, that can be used for generating ideas also. But you are rolling a d6, looking on a table to decide on an emergency to deal with, then repeating for where the emergency is happening and so on. Which having not seen the Android chapter with their mix and match adventure creation, sounds similar in principle. Except instead you are rolling a die, and I don’t see why you couldn’t also do that with the Android stuff.

I don’t see this Thunderbirds RPG as a campaign thing, but more as a one shot you’d run every now and again as a break from a groups regular campaign, or as an intro to RPG’s for noobs.

You don’t really need to use the board game. It helps. But there are some fantastic Thunderbirds toys available (or used to be), especially of the iconic vehicles. I did check out the available figures for the 7TV miniatures skirmish game. Sadly no Thunderbird like ones. Although their Captain Scarlet ones sparked the idea of a spin off adventure. As did The Prisoner minis they had. Oh that would be soooo cool.

Having said all this, the Thunderbirds RPG or a Genesys version is something that interests me because I love Thunderbirds. I grew up watching them. And would love to visit that universe from time to time.

If you’d like a copy of the RPG expansion you can get it from the publisher for £4.99! Plus whatever they charge for postage.