Review: Final Girl - A board game with a Killer theme

I'm sure we're all familiar enough with horror films to recognise the "final girl" trope. This is the character (due to convention it tends to be a female character) who is left standing at the end of a horror film surrounded by the remains of her fallen companions, usually victorious in defeating or evading the horror that has pursued them for the last 90 minutes. She often portrays some characteristic that the film-makers, or society, feels embodies the one "worthy" of survival. Perhaps she has been the voice of reason, compassion, or she's simply a virgin and therefore not deserving of a gruesome death. 

This character has managed to stick it out to the end, either through kick-ass bravery, or just screaming and stumbling far enough through the woods that they get picked up at the highway. Their journey has been transformative, terrifying, and usually good for 3-4 sequels.

Final Girl, the board game now on "Season 2" releases (I'll get into how that works more below), places you in the shoes of one of many possible, and legally distinct, Final Girls. You are constantly caught on the back foot, fighting for time, and a helpless witness to the growing horror of the situation, while given just enough hope to see a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Final Girl has condensed this age-old scenario into a loving homage to the many, many hours of screen time given over to our favourite horror cliché.

How do we kill something that's... already dead?!

That's it for the flowery introduction. What exactly is Final Girl?

Final Girl is the rarest of table top games, one that has been designed to be played solo from the ground up. A smart choice considering the aim of the game is to make you feel alone, but that isn't the first thing that makes the game intriguing.

I mentioned above that Final Girl feels like a love-letter to the golden age of horror, and this goes well beyond the theme and mechanics, to the make-up of the game itself. The foundation of the game is the Core Box, which all players will need to purchase in order to play the game, but does not allow you to play the game by itself. Much like the artwork of the boxes, this game harks back to the time of the VHS. Simply buying a VHS player was not enough, you had to actually buy a film to put in it. Think of the Core Box as the VHS player and the various expansions as the videos ready to be loaded in.

The Core Box comes with some universal components that will be used across all games: health tokens, action cards, meeples, etc. and each individual "Feature Film", as the expansions call themselves, comes with a location, a foe, a choice of Final Girl, and specific components to match. 

For example, the first Feature Film I purchased was "Frightmare on Maple Lane" featuring Not-Freddy-Krueger, Dr. Fright, who hunts his victims in their dreams. The ingeniously designed boxes come with location and enemy specific rules, tokens, cards, everything you need to play. So you load these components into your game, grab your popcorn, and enjoy the show!

These boxes tend to be released in waves that the designers are calling Seasons. While I understand the terminology has its uses, I do worry when board games use this term as it might put off potential players who "haven't played season 1 yet", even though that really makes no difference.

The Feature Film boxes themselves are not overly pricey, averaging around £16 if purchased from your friendly neighbourhood board game shop, so after an initial splurge to get set up, adding further experiences isn't prohibitively expensive and they offer considerable replay-ability.

Furthermore, there is the added bonus of being able to easily mix and match all Final Girls, enemies, and locations to create completely unique experiences. Feel like Creech Manor is too claustrophobic for your battle with the Poltergeist? Why not take them to Camp Happy Trails? Or maybe see how Dr. Fright handles himself in the Storybook Woods from Once Upon a Full Moon?

He was never really dead...

The game operates in phases with players spending action cards, purchasing cards for future turns, fulfilling the killer's moves, then planning for the next turn. Each killer and location is unique enough to make it difficult to describe the game in full detail but your standard win/lose-condition is kill or be killed. The Final Girl has already had her character development so now it's the showdown.

The killer will perpetually hunt you and the various other "victims" that spawn around the game map. With each kill, their blood lust increases along with their movement distance and strength, even unlocking their dark powers, which invariably make the game considerably harder. This unavoidable levelling up of the enemy is what helps keep the player feel they are working against the odds and makes the ultimate success or death even more exhilarating.

Actions such as sprinting , searching, and fighting can only be used if you have the necessary card in your hand, but even then it requires a dice roll to succeed, with only a 5 or 6 on a D6 considered a definite success. Of course, as the killer gets stronger so does the horror level which can reduce the number of dice you get to roll for each action.

Time, aside from being a key currency in the game used to purchase actions and often forfeited for unsuccessful rolls, it is represented through the deck of Terror cards. This deck indicates what horrible events or actions your nemesis does each turn. Once depleted your time's up and you move into the End Game. The killer unleashes one final power in their attempt to stop you, which unless you're in a strong position already will usually spell the end of your Final Girl.

A really neat mechanic the game uses for it's health trackers for both Final Girl and the killers who can actually be, well... killed, is the Final Health Tokens. These tokens act as the final health markers for both hero and villain but once they are spent they are flipped over. The back will reveal a number of hearts from 0-3 that the character regenerates. I love the suspense this creates. The murderer lies prone at your feet and you hold your breath as you check to see whether they are truly dead or if they will spring back in a final jump-scare cliché. Or perhaps it is you who has been defeated and you get to punch the air as your Final Girl, beaten and bruised, finds the inner strength to pull herself up and rescue her young charge from the clutches of the poltergeist?

If you're successful in defeating the threat, the game includes a reward for the Final Girl you are playing as. A small envelope comes with each Feature Film addressed to each of the Final Girls inside with instructions to open after a successful game. I won't say any more than that here but I will note that it was a nice surprise to find a legacy element in the box. It felt like a pleasant after-thought on the part of the designers.

He's slicing off his own fingers!

You can probably tell that I think very highly of this game, and I'm not the only one. My local board game shop has said that Final Girl has become one of their top-selling games this year, which is a pretty high accolade for a solo game.

Whilst the mechanics, the artwork, the theme, and the novelty of the Feature Film pick-and-play design are all excellent reasons to enjoy Final Girl, the thing that stands out for me above all else is its capacity for story telling. Everything about the game is built to recreate a scene we all know well, from the flavour text on the item cards to the titles of the Dark Powers, and this all works together to create an environment that activates the player's imagination. Each success and failure adds another line to the unfolding story so that by the end you will be completely invested in the experience.

Although this is a solo-game at heart, I think there is a lot to say for sitting around a table with some friends and enjoying it together. We're all comfortable sitting around a horror video game such as Alien: Isolation and taking it in turns with the controller. This is the board game equivalent. It is a game designed around one character but I think it can entertain an audience of more. 

As ever I recommend pairing this game with theme appropriate music, specifically some 80s-style Horror Synthwave. Nothing like hearing the chilling sounds of Ki Ki Ki Ma Ma Ma to get the hairs on your neck to stand on end...

Have you tried any of the Final Girl games? We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Final Girl is designed by Evan Derrick and A. J. Porfirio. Artwork by Tyler Johnson and Roland MacDonald. Published by Van Ryder Games.