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Hostage Negotiator Card Game (Base Game)

£13.495£26.99Clearance
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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. 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. 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. 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.

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 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. 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 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 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?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. The Final Girl Core Box includes your dice, player board, meeples, heart tokens and everything else you’ll need to play expansion content. You need the Core Box to do anything else; from there, you can add expansion content—known as Feature Film boxes—to your heart’s content. 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!) 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.

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. 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. The game, designed by A.J. Porfirio, comes in a robust and compact box for portability. Its art immediately impresses with a kinetically rendered split portrait which cleverly evokes the complimentary nature of the hostage taker/negotiator relationship. 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. 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.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!)

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