Hostage Negotiator Card Game (Base Game)

Product Information

The Final Girl Core Box includes your dice, player board, meeples, heart tokens and everything else you’ll need to play expansion content. You need the Core Box to do anything else; from there, you can add expansion content—known as Feature Film boxes—to your heart’s content. The higher cost cards come with higher rewards, but the wages of failure are commensurately more significant. The successful negotiator must also decide whether to go all in on a higher cost card which could swing the entire game or get a number of less critical opportunities. Either way, all points must be spent or lost in this phase. This adds yet another degree of pressure to the situation.

Depending on how well the last conversation went you now have the opportunity to cash in your conversation points. 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. The hostage area shows the number and status of the abductees. This is recorded by wooden figures in the hostage pool, the hostages rescued area and a field reserved for those unfortunates who are killed. 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.Hostage Negotiator: Crime Wave is not an ordinary expansion. In fact, besides the actual dimensions of the box it barely expands on the original at all. It is fundamentally a remix of the base game. A standalone director’s cut, rather than deleted scenes. However, rather than supersede the original, this expansion makes room for integration with it, figuratively and literally. 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. The conversation cards have several uses. Primarily, you play them to try and influence the game parameters, improve the mood of the hostage taker or gain leverage against them by conniving conversation points. And the variety within these different Locations is fantastic. My experience playing through the review content of Final Girl took place using 2 of the 5 Feature Film boxes for what is known as Season One: “Slaughter in the Groves”, featuring a cult leader who harnesses energy by collecting victims in certain locations on the Sacred Groves Location board, and “Carnage at the Carnival”, featuring Geppetto the Puppet Master and a carnival that doesn’t feel like the right place to bring the kids. (Not just my kids. ANY kids!)

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. In most cases the threat level begins in the mid range which affords the player two dice with which to determine the outcome of the cards they are playing. Lower the threat level, gain the adversary’s trust and you will be rewarded with another die. This significantly increases your chances of getting a good or negotiable threat roll. However, if you aggravate your adversary too far you will lose a die. This not only reduces your chance of success but absolutely negates any chance of a resounding success. Other circumstances can give or take dice from the player making the protection of favourable probabilities vital to winning the game. In cinemas many hostage negotiation scenes are a life or death battle of wits between two opponents. In Hostage Negotiator, Van Ryder Games have taken the counter-intuitive step of taking this action thriller trope as the inspiration for a solo player game. 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. The game, designed by A.J. Porfirio, comes in a robust and compact box for portability. Its art immediately impresses with a kinetically rendered split portrait which cleverly evokes the complimentary nature of the hostage taker/negotiator relationship.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. 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.

The box, so significantly larger than the base game as to be able to house it in its entirety, seems a little empty. Besides the component parts, which are craftily reworked from the original Hostage Negotiator, there is a lot of space. But this space speaks volumes.

Rarity

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. 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. Unique to the last conversation is the ability to spend conversation points on cards for immediate use. Strategic planning is cast aside in favour of a hell for leather tactical negotiation with fate. Final Thoughts on Hostage Negotiator The third use of the conversation cards is subtle but can be absolutely critical to success. Any conversation card can be exchanged for a conversation point. This may seem like small change but if it can give the player enough cachet to grab just the right card it may be worth the punt.