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!) 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. 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. But remember that stretch in 2019 when Lil’ Nas X released Old Town Road, then after it had a run on the Billboard Hot 100 for a few months, the country charts decided it just wasn’t quite country enough? Lil’ Nas X went out and got Billy Ray Cyrus to join him for a remix of Old Town Road…and the song went nuclear. Over the last 10 years I’m not sure there has been a signature remix that hammered it quite like Old Town Road, and when you listen to the different versions of the song, that remix really didn’t change much to the structure of the song beyond adding Cyrus to the vocals. (Oh, and that remix video is so good!)

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 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.

The player’s goal is to rescue more hostages than are killed and to eliminate the threat of the hostage taker. This drama is played out on a comprehensive but somewhat busy game board which has three main functions. Many of the cards utilize a cost that eats into the time you’ll spend running around the board. That’s important, because any leftover time you have is spent during the Planning phase on the “Action Tableau”, the card market where you will be able to buy better actions for future rounds while also scooping up any free action cards available from previous turns. 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.

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. 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. 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 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 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

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 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? 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.