Players: Corinne (Landowner), David (Revolutionary), Kevin (Landowner), Nick (Revolutionary), Taylor (Baentraesh)

I love the structure to Firebrands - the mini-games that poetically echo each other, the juxtaposition of implied and explicit intimacy, the approach towards consent, the "yes, and..." built directly into the prompts, and the focus on the inter-personal drama over the larger arching story - and we saw the budding of some really fantastic moments that left everyone (at least it seemed that way to me) satisfied at the end of the night:

• Nick's flirtatious and naive revolutionary caught up in the romantic idea of war and not yet intimate with the realities.
  
• The simmering intrigue between the two landowners who must insist on "being professional"
  
• David's revolutionary carefully trying to play multiple sides
  
• and Taylor's foppish Bantraesh who was able to quickly gain allegiance and support from the Revolutionaries.
  

...and yet...it could have been so much better, because just as it started getting good, we all had to go.

This wasn't a surprise. It's pretty consistent with my prior experience and from what I've heard from other folks; when I played a 6-hr 3-player game, it wasn't until the 4-hr mark that we started really seeing the payoff that left us all exstatically saying, "So, good!" The problem seems (IMO) to lie in the fact that since Firebrands is all about that interpersonal drama, you need to spend time building up trust and intersecting motivations before your actions carry any real emotional weight. It really needs that slow burn at the start.

I also noticed the prompts have a habit of tripping folks up. Rather than using the prompts as beats that occur within a scene, it's easy to mistake the prompts as all the interaction you're allowed. The games are also just different enough that you need to re-learn what you're doing a bit each time you play a new one. None of this is a big deal for a longer game, but when you've got 3 hours for 5 people...well we only got 1 1/2 times around the table.

tl;dr: Chances are, I'll pitch Firebrands again sometime soon, but I'll try to keep it at only 3-4 Players

Kevin, I really appreciate these very honest assessments of games. It's easy to just say "yeah, everything was great!" but these kind of insights are much more helpful to other people who want to play the game. Kudos!

I'm glad I'm being helpful, and I appreciate the Kudos. I just hope I'm not coming off too glum or negative. I really like Firebrands, I just like it more when I have more time to really explore the intrigue and relationships. I feel similarly about Fall of Magic; as much as I like the game, every time I play it at Story Games I'm left thinking, "I really wish I could see this story to the end."