A solo board game by Van Ryder Games

Reiko took a moment to get her breath back. Travelling too close to Camp Happy Trails’ lake had been a gamble, too exposed in the light of the full moon. Still, the last time she saw Hans, he was stalking the north woods. Hopefully he would stay there. As the couples in the camp had paired off during the nighttime treasure hunt, Reiko had been left alone. She’d been one of these kids before, she knew to be there for them, but to keep her distance. Let the kids be kids. That meant she was the first to spot Hans; a giant of a man with a pig mask and a massive axe, a butcher’s apron fresh with recently-spilled blood. She had to get everyone to safety, before it was too late.

The door to the storage shed broke open with ease. “There’s got to be something here,” the couple she’d guided across the lake stared at her, dumbfounded. Hans was almost on them when Reiko showed up. Helpless kids, following Reiko closely, unable to provide help themselves.

”Ah ha!” Reiko said, dropping her knife when she saw the perfect replacement. An axe at the far end of the shed. It had a good weight to it, she could see why Hans favoured the weapon. “Finally, things are looking up.”

Reiko immediately regretted saying that. She sniffed the air. Fire. She pushed her way past the campers and saw the dock was ablaze. The old wood went up far too quickly, and walking through the smoke a giant silhouette. Dead eyes reflected the blaze through the holes in the pig mask. Hans was back…

The Game

A spiritual sequel to Hostage Negotiator, Final Girl is a horror-themed solo board game where you play a titular final girl as they flee a monster, rescue victims and then turn the fight back against the monsters. If you’re lucky, you might even survive. The more victims you rescue, the better you get until you unlock an ‘ultimate’ form. As a dark mirror, the more victims the monster kills, the tougher they get. They unlock randomised dark powers as they go, too.

You select a final girl, a killer and a location from your collection. All of these elements can be mixed, but I’ll get into that later. The simplest thing to do is to just select one box combining all of these elements and use that. Once you’ve got your selection, you get a randomised setup and event to kick things off, then your good to go. This way even playing the same combination has some new surprises.

Player turns involve you playing cards from your hand and rolling dice to see what result you get. Each card has results for one, two or no successes, which are 5-6 on a six-sided die. On a 3-4 you can discard cards to upgrade to a success, and 1-2 you’re screwed. This makes things tricky, especially as you’ll start at just two dice. As you play cards for actions, you draft new ones to craft your next turn, hopefully defusing things as you go.

The starting hand is all pretty basic, but essential. As the hand cycles, you’ll be praying for their swift return. Focus can lessen the Horror level of the monster, eventually giving you more dice (and getting further away from the dreaded one die zone). Short Rest heals you and Weak Attack allows a small amount of damage. Both of these cards also make good early game ammunition to discard on a 3 or 4 result. Then there’s Walk, which is the one which makes the game feel like a tricky sell. Yes, you have to play a card and roll dice to walk. It makes sense in the game, and you’ll always be able to move at least one space, even if you end up winded. Like many of these actions, these are going to cost you time, which is also the currency you use to buy better cards.

The tableau of better cards do things like turn 3-4 into a success, heal you for a lot, sprint, search for items, and cause a lot of damage (admittedly at more of a risk to yourself). There are also rerolls and defensive ‘reaction’ cards to help block enemies.

On your turn, you’ll play these cards and perform these actions to round up and escort victims off the map, and also to gear up against the killer. Once you’re done playing actions (or sometimes when a card abruptly ends the phase), you’ll use what time you’ve got left to buy new cards. 

Then the killer takes their turn. They perform an action on their board which normally sees them walk towards a victim or the girl (whichever’s nearest) and stabbing them. Then a Terror card is played from a deck mixed up between killer and location-based challenges. They could do things like cause a fire to break out at a random location, panic the victims into random directions, send the killer on a spree or put a new event into play. 

Whenever a victim dies, the killer’s Bloodlust track goes up, which will often increase their damage and speed. It’ll also unlock a new ability at a certain point, and if the Terror Deck runs out, they reach their final form. These are randomised and always awful.

The flow of the game tends to go: lowering the threat level, shooing victims off the map, gearing up and fighting the killer. Of course, there are too many random factors to make this an easy or consistent job. Sometimes your only path to success forces you to abandon victims, spend all your nice items or take some lumps and hope you roll well.

A couple of other things to know are the little cards. Events change things up or upgrade victims to special roles. Examples are the boyfriend and girlfriend cards in Camp Happy Trails, or a passing police car in the suburbia map (although that bastard rolled by and ignored the killer). Items will help with damage, healing and do fun things. You could distract the killer with a firework show or drop a banana skin for them to slip on.

This is all well and good, but where the game really shines are the scenarios, combining a Killer and Location. All of the cards aside from actions come from these scenarios and provide enough variation to make things different. All but the first scenario have changes to rules which make them different experiences. You might have a location which shifts constantly, a suburb full of distrusting neighbours or an old spaceship. The same with the killers, they could have a weird dream puzzle to get past, be a bunch of birds or be a psychic ghost who can’t even be physically harmed. 

As a system, while I’ve been frustrated at times with the die rolls, I’ve grown to get good enough that I’ve succeeded about two thirds of the time in the last year. Even when I’ve lost, I’ve enjoyed each game I’ve had. The thing is, I’ve found it a bit tricky to talk about as the system on its own isn’t enough to play a game. Because of that, I’m also going to talk about the first scenario, which I recommend as people’s first one to try and Van Ryder often bundle with the core set.

Happy Trails Horror

Inspirations: Halloween & Friday the 13th

Final Girls: Laurie Carpenter & Reiko Rivers

Camp Happy Trails is a summer camp with a lake in the middle. There are woods and campsites, a way to cut across the water and a lot of fun activity items like bows, fireworks and even keys to a boat.

Hans the Butcher is a hulking monster with an axe. He does a brutal amount of damage, but walks slowly across the map. He has minor powers which speed him up and make him even more damaging. Worse, sometimes he’ll just stomp and slash through people like a relentless whirlwind.

My most recent experience with the scenario saw Reiko acting as camp counselor during a treasure hunt. Couples were pairing up and worse, if one died, the other would, too. A great start, especially with this slow-moving murder machine wandering around.

I pretty much always try to prioritise getting the Horror level down and getting to three dice. Unfortunately some bad rolls slowed me down and Reiko found a lone person in a cabin. “He’s just standing there,” she said, looking at Hans in the distance, bringing the Horror level right back up. 

Reiko sprinted, but also failed. There are options to still move by taking an injury, so she couldn’t reach a couple in time, but reached a fire pit with a couple more campers. After a close call, Hans gained some speed, I assume momentum after stomping around enough. He also gained some rage and Reiko managed to block his attack, distract him and run off.

After running to the cabins, Reiko found a couple and a knife, but Hans caught up. Reiko blocked his axe swing and retaliated with a quick stab. She caught up with the couple who were fleeing from the sight of Hans, just as others were investigating the noises.

Reiko shoved one couple out of the gates to the park and hit her ultimate form. It wasn’t time to fight yet, instead she fled to the docks which were far away from Hans. In proper slasher monster style he popped up in a dock cabin and after improvising and grabbing a fire axe, one of the cabins caught fire. A massive axe-on-axe fight ensued with a critical blow taking him down, then a final small attack when he popped up for one last go.

This is a classic scenario for a reason. The lake makes traversal tricky but not impossible, with clusters of campers and isolated places to look for equipment before Hans catches up with you. He’s slow, but there are minor powers which mitigate that and need to get taken down. Both the Killer and Location don’t have any special rules, but aren’t to be underestimated as I think I’ve still only got up to a 50% success rate. Hans can be underestimated at times with his speed, but he’s a meaty boy with too much health and some dark powers which heal him (annoyingly I got one in this playthrough). The location has some fun tropes and when I’ve had a complex box, I’ve mixed it with this so only one is tricksy. 

If you’re playing Final Girl for the first time, people recommend this to start with and I can definitely see why. Mechanically it’s ‘pure’ and lets the game show itself to you before doing anything odd. Thematically it’s just a classic of the genre.

I recommend Final Girl and Happy Trails Horror. Good luck trying to survive it!