January a year ago I promised my wife I’d have a dry January. As the joke goes, “I went on a diet for a month and all I lost were 30 days.” But, I was looking for things to do besides sitting in front of the TV at night and having a few bourbons. So I started looking into the one person game space and Final Girl piqued my interest.
The concept is simple, you’re playing the Final Girl in a horror movie and trying to make it out alive.
Now, the format puts some people off. In order to play Final Girl you need to actually buy two boxes: the Core Box and a “Film” box. It’s kind of brilliant because the Core Box has everything that’s shared between films. Whereas each “film” features a setting and a villain. It would probably soothe a lot of feathers if they figured offered a starter package, where it was the Core Box and a film bundled together. But that’s not how it’s done. Two boxes it is.
That said, the genius behind the system is that each film box adds to the game’s gameplay possibilities exponentially. Villains and locations can be mixed and matched so, while a a villain and location are optimized for each other, you can bring a villain into a new location for a little crossover fun.
So how’s the gameplay? Well… I’ll be honest, this is a tough and unforgiving game. A few mistakes early on and you’re boned for the rest of the game. And the rest of the game could only be one or two more turns.
Every action card has roughly three states: a success, a partial success, and a failure. You have to roll dice, usually two but maybe three and only one if you’ve been unlucky and, based on the result, it determines which state of the action you can perform. Sometimes you can sacrifice other actions to get a success but that eats up action cards pretty quickly and can begin a failure cycle.
And then there are random events and the actions of the villain. All of this adds up to a pretty brutal game on the player. I don’t say this is necessarily a bad thing. But if you don’t know it going in, it might end up pretty frustrating.
One of the nice things about this game is that its Kickstarters have been really well supported so there’s a whole ecosystem of extra items around it. For instance, every “season” has miniatures. I bought the first season’s and tried out the “slap chop” painting technique to pretty good success! There’s also a book that lays out a way to play cross-over games in an almost movie franchise style. And, my favorite, is the gaming mat that replaces the board in the core box and provides a good surface for cards and dice.
All in all, it’s a pretty complete game with a great ecosystem of extras. Whether it’s too difficult…? That’s up to the individual player.
