Final Girl Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Final Girl, a horror-themed board game published by Van Ryder Games. Final Girl is a solo board game that drops players in the shoes of the final girl in a slasher film.

This is a guest post from Matt Kiser.

Laurie Strode. Nancy Thompson. Ginny Field.

These are the heroines in whose footsteps you run when Final Girl is on the table. For the uninitiated, the final girl is the last one standing at the end of a horror movie. The term, first used by film scholar Carol J. Clover, refers to a cinematic trope where a lone female protagonist survives a terrifying bloodbath, having escaped (maybe even defeated) the movie’s murderous villain.

Final Girl is a solo game that places you in the role of the final girl in a horror film, fighting to survive the relentless onslaught of a homicidal foe dealing death across a specific location. The game system itself is unique in that there are multiple “feature films” that can be mixed and matched to create dozens of killer and location combinations. Each feature film box contains a killer with differing behaviors and mechanisms as well as a location featuring a map with distinct gameplay and rules. A single core box contains the basic components used in each game of Final Girl, but at least one feature film box is required to actually sit down and play.

Final Girl is a thematic hand management and dice rolling game for 1 survivor that plays in about 30-60 minutes (or 90 minutes, if you take your sweet time like me; or maybe even 15 minutes if the dice betray you and you get murdered quick).

You begin setup for a game of Final Girl by choosing which killer you’ll face and the location where your epic showdown will take place. As mentioned before, multiple scenarios are possible