Hostage Negotiator Card Game (Base Game)

Product Information

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. When any card is played, a threat roll must be made. The card will give you the results for a resounding success (two shield faces), a regular success (one shield) and a bare faced failure. For example, if the “Keep Cool” card is played it can result in a double improvement in terms of threat level reduction and increased conversation points. On a failure you will lose credibility with the adversary and lose a conversation point. 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.

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. 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.

Having chosen your opponent and set-up, the game ofHostage Negotiator begins and falls into three phases:

Final Girl is quite a puzzle, with theme for days, and great reference material for fans of classichorror franchises. With so many expansions already in the wild, you’ll never run out of reasons to look at the beautiful art by Vladyslava Ladkova, Tyler Johnson, Roland McDonald, Tumo Mere and many other credited artists. 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. 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.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 other “villains” included with this base game offer different challenges through discrete and cunning alterations of gameplay mechanics, along with character specific demand cards each hostage taker requires the player to adjust their strategy and tactics. These adjustments also encourage players to consider their attitude towards the abductors. One character for example has, under great emotional stress, taken hostages to pressure a hospital into giving his son a treatment he can’t afford. Playing the sniper card under these circumstances would be unthinkable, surely? 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!) 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

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. 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. 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. When a song, particularly a pop song, hits the radio, that’s the song, the one that a songwriter wrote, and a singer performed, and the public took in as its own. I don’t want the live version, I don’t want the “Radio Edit” version (the one that snipped 45 seconds so that it removed some of the fade in/fade out melodies to fit ad-supported radio stations), I don’t want the cover by some random jazz band, and I definitely don’t want the KIDZ BOP version. 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.

Graded Cards

Depending on how well the last conversation went you now have the opportunity to cash in your conversation points. 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. 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. 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.