Final Girl is a masterpiece. I thought Under Falling Skies would be the best solo game I played in 2021, but Final Girl has taken the prize. Loads of items, weapons, events, and “Terror” cards are in each expansion. You’ll likely not see all of it from any single box for a half-dozen plays in the same game, although I have already seen some item duplicates in the first 2 boxes I opened up.

And then it hit me. Final Girl IS Hostage Negotiator, but this remix is one of the greatest board game remixes ever. Final Girl takes the best parts of the cardplay in Hostage Negotiator, maintains the tension of the original game, rethemes the entire enterprise into a core box system that lets players swap in various elements from other expansions in this new Final Girl universe, and blows the original game’s artwork out of the water with a pulpy, distinctive, bold style that makes the box really pop on your shelf. And for a horror movie junkie like me, Final Girl brings it all home by making players the female protagonist in the game, similar to classic horror-film franchises such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Poltergeist. This phase ends when the player wants it to. There is no requirement to use all of your hand and sometimes it will be more judicious to not engage in conversation at all should you want to jump straight into the spend phase. Having chosen your opponent and set-up, the game ofHostage Negotiator begins and falls into three phases: Final Girl is built on the systems featured in the 2015 solo game Hostage Negotiator from Van Ryder Games. I bought a copy of Hostage Negotiator at Gen Con years ago; that was my first dedicated solo game, and I loved it. Planning for each turn is a fun mini-puzzle that changes every game thanks to the variable setup and the random selection of items to find in a given game.Should you choose this drastic and expensive course of action however, you will uncover a sting in the tail. Each adversary has a second in command ready to take over, and these individuals are significantly more volatile than their colleagues. The real choices in Final Girl come with each expansion’s Location and Killer boards. Each Feature Film box comes with one of each Location and Killer, and across the Season One product line there are 5 Locations and 5 different Killers that can be mixed and matched. Then you add in a couple dozen different setups and 10 different playable characters, and you have something that might be enough to be your only solo gaming system for weeks, if not months.

This review focuses on the differences between Crime Wave and the original Hostage Negotiator. For a more focused description of the game’s basic mechanics please refer to the Hostage Negotiator review. The expansion also has its own terror and pivotal event cards. These, in the same satisfying way, add variety to a game already bristling with variables. So far, the game hits all of the same thematic and mechanical beats as the original. But where it breaks new ground is in the integration of both sets. The playable characters in Final Girl have different skins, with 2 Final Girl characters in each Feature Film box. The different characters are quite similar. All of them have a special power (either a one-time bonus or an ongoing effect) that triggers after you save their allotted number of Victims from the board, anywhere from 4-6 Victims. But character choice comes down to a choice of skins; do you prefer Nancy or Barbara or Adelaide or Meiko or someone else based on their appearance? Managing your hand in Final Girl, just like Hostage Negotiator, is such a blast. That’s because on your Horror Roll, 1s and 2s are misses. 5s and 6s are successes. But 3s and 4s are the toughest choice: an icon showing 2 cards. That means you can convert 3s and 4s to successes, but only if you burn 2 cards from your hand, and let’s just say your hand is never bustling with extra cards. Then there is the third face of the die, the near miss. As represented on the dice, two conversation cards can be spent to increase this roll to a success. This is a high enough cost to give the player a real head scratching moment as they decide whether the prize is worth the cost.

Puzzle Pieces

Following the compact, but intense, Hostage Negotiator, Van Ryder Games' A.J. Porfirio developed and released three new abductors into the world. Tensions are high in the little box; critical mass has been reached and the terror expands in an omnidirectional Crime Wave. Crime Wave Expansion