Final Girl and the storytelling power of solo board games
A great game cursed with a terrible business model
I love board games. I especially love them when they coincide with one of my other favorite things: horror movies. They’re not hard to find in the board gaming world, either. There has always been a presence there from the utter embarrassment of riches found in the ubiquitous HP Lovecraft games to titles like Last Night On Earth. But one game recently drifted into my awareness by way of one of my favorite board gaming sites, Shut Up And Sit Down.
Final Girl
For the people in the back, the Final Girl is a term which originates in Carol Clover’s 1992 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws, a critique of horror movies that explores the role of gender. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that it refers to the last woman standing in (mostly) slasher movies and if you’re reading this site, then you very likely already know what it is that I’m talking about. It makes perfect sense that the paradigm would one day be made into a game.
Final Girl is a unique title in gaming in the sense that it starts as a core box which contains all the common components you’ll need to play every scenario but then presents an unpleasant challenge. The core box contains no game. Luckily, the core and expansions are all reasonably priced at $20 a piece and with most board games retailing at $50 to $60, you can reasonably afford the core and two expansions for the price of one game. The biggest problem that I’ve encountered while trying to get my hands on this game is that each game shop that I’ve gone to has several episodes but no core box. On the upside, Final Girl is a solo-play game, only, which is great for isolated weirdos like me whose friends like game nights in theory but look for reasons to bail out in practice.
It’s a bit of a misnomer to call the expansions expansions, however. Since each expansion or episode is uniquely its own game which runs on a central Final Girl ruleset. In each scenario you are one of a handful of Final Girls. Each scenario comes with two and each girl modifies to ruleset slightly with her own abilities. You can mix and match Final Girls among the different scenarios as well. The scenarios span a number of easily identified horror movie tropes like A Nightmare on Elm Street, Alien, Poltergeist, etc. For this article, I’ll be discussing the scenario, Camp Happy Trails, which is legally distinct from Friday the 13th (even though the board is almost a 1:1 of the NES Friday the 13th map) but is basically that movie with its killer, a hulking silent death machine named Hans, who smashes his victims to death with a sledgehammer and then eats them. You can find other proper reviews of the game through that Shut Up and Sit Down link or quick google search, so I’ll leave the opinion and analysis to them. I quite like the game even though I’ve played it through a half dozen times and have yet to even come close to killing Hans. He’s a real pain in the ass and since he powers up with each victim killed, the game quickly spirals out of your control if you don’t have a solid strategy and some luck on your side. The thing that really struck me about this game was how I could tell myself a story as the game played out before me. Behold!
Final Night At Camp Happy Trails
This is a photo of a game setup mode called Bonfire. I am Laurie, one of the two girls included with the set. Laurie is represented by the meeple in the lower right of the map, the purple one. Hans is the red meeple in the upper left of the map, the red one. The yellow meeples are victims occupying various spots at the camp. You’ll notice a large group of them at the bottom on the left. This is a spot called The Fire Pit and it is really bad for me if Hans gets there before I do. Statistically speaking, even if I get there first, he will still reach that spot and murder the shit out of everyone there. Victim deaths are regrettable in a moral sense, of course, but they’re particularly bad in a rule sense because each kill powers Hans up more and more, meaning he moves faster, does more damage, and eventually comes to manifest some seriously bad news for me in the form of Dark Powers. Only Laurie seems to be aware of what’s happening.
The obvious story setting for me here is a celebration at the fire pit. It’s like the beginning of Madman where the counselors and campers at that gifted children’s Thanksgiving camp (I don’t know, either, we’ll be doing Madman on Brothers Grim this Thanksgiving). I imagined that it’s the last night of camp and the campers gather at the fire pit one last time before saying goodbye to friends for the year. There have been strange goings on at Camp Happy trails all summer. Supplies have gone missing. Kitchen staff vanished, assumed to have ghosted their summer job. But until tonight nothing truly terrible has happened until Laurie is attacked in her bunk with her boyfriend Trevor by a hulking behemoth in a black pig mask. Trevor is swiftly dragged off of Laurie by his legs and thrown to the floor leaving Laurie alone on the bed, frozen in fear, staring into the dead eyes of their assailant. Trevor’s death is not shown on screen but Hans swiftly bludgeons him to death with a single strike of the hammer. A struggle ensues as Hans attempts to drag Laurie to her fate with the hammer but she manages to break his grip and flees in terror. We fade to black on a shot of Hans from behind, standing in the doorway of the cabin, watching her run in terror into the forest.
Laurie makes it halfway around the lake before she realizes that the camp is full of counselors and campers still and that she is the only one there who knows what’s happening. Someone has to get them all to safety.
Laurie finds two teenage campers at the docks climbing out of a canoe and quickly explains that there’s no time to explain, they need to trust her and follow her to the parking lot where a bus waits to take them all to safety. She’s not making much sense, and the blood on her clothes from Hans’s blood hands frightens them but they follow her and will live to see another day. This moment of rest and hope gives Laurie time to think her next move through and she relaxes some. Maybe this will work out, after all.
Through the eyeholes in the pig mask we watch two counselors straightening up the cabin area from a concealed position behind the forest brush. They don’t realize that he’s there, watching them, waiting. Courtney the counselor is the first to go when she gets too close to the edge of the forest. Hans silently erupts from hiding and pulls her off her feet and into the darkness. He manages to stifle her scream but all we see is the shaking of bushes. The scuffle is enough to catch Kurt the counselor’s attention and he nears the scene of the crime slowly and cautiously, calling out to Courtney. As he nears her last known position, we expect Hans to burst from the bushes and grab him too, but while Kurt is occupied looking for Courtney, Hans enters the frame behind him and brings his hammer down on Kurt’s head. We see a split-second’s contact before we cut back to Laurie.
From her position at the far end of the campground she can hear music and singing. Her head clears suddenly and we dolly-zoom on Laurie as she remembers that nearly the entire camp is currently at the fire pit and that she can’t possibly the only person on the campground who hears the noise. Laurie begins a sprint along the trail, praying that she arrives in time to get everyone to safety.
We cut back to Hans at the cabins. We see him from behind, crouched in the moonlight. We can only see Kurt’s legs, the rest of his corpse obscured behind Hans’s massive frame. Hans seems to be working diligently at some unseen task on the ground. The sound effects are wet and Kurt’s body jiggles in time with Hans’s movements. The shot cuts closer to Hans, framing his head fully in the shot. There is a thick coating of blood on his scarred cheek and we realize that his mask is lifted but we still can’t see his face. Beyond the sound of the crickets we can hear the music and singing and Hans suddenly stops what he’s doing and turns his head slightly, his face still turned away from us and we cut back to a shot of Hans working on the body but what is revealed is that he now holds the severed arm of Kurt in one hand. He stands and turns toward us, walking into the foreground, toward the noise, his body covered in shadow.
Stragglers arrive late to the fire pit as Hans nears. Marie the camper, running along the path, hoping to reach the bonfire before it’s too late to say goodbye instead runs directly into Hans on the dark path in the woods. He grabs her by the neck and lifts her off her feet. We cut to Laurie, running frantically, breathing heavy. She arrives at the head of the trail to the firepit in time to see Hans there, standing silently, unmoving. He seems to take in his prey, realizing that they have few options for escape. He raises the hammer to hold it in both hands, adjusting his grip on the handle, readying his attack before lumbering forward to a massacre. Laurie has no choice. She has to give chase and follows him in.
No one has noticed the approaching terror yet. Not knowing what else to do, Laurie shouts for everyone to run but no one does. They turn in unison. The music stops. Hans runs at the counselor with the acoustic guitar and before he even realizes what is happening, he is booted into the roaring fire at the center of the campers. Mayhem ensues. Campers and counselors flee in every direction and for every person with the sense to run, one of them stands frozen in place, watching Hans hammer their friends to death, awaiting their turn with the hammer.
When the dust has settled and three bodies, once hopeful and full of life, now lay smashed to pieces and silent. Only Laurie and Hans remain, the rest of the campers having fled the fire pit to a neighboring area. He silently sizes her up from across the pit, the flames casting a frightening orange glare against the darkness of the night, as though he is every bit a part of the fire between them. She can barely control her fear, realizing that if she doesn’t buy them time, Hans will kill the rest.
Hans raises the hammer high overhead and lets out a bellowing cry and starts after Laurie who turns and runs, having no way to protect herself. She follows after the campers who fled the firepit and finds in a nearby clearing arguing over what to do next and does her best to convince them to follow her but they begin arguing with her as well. It gives Hans plenty of time to catch up. He is suddenly upon them and grabs the nearest camper with one hand, lifting them and thrusting them on to the broken branch of a nearby tree. Another turns to run but he hooks them with the hammer’s head and sends them to the ground, in a perfect position to be smashed. The last remaining camper stands there, frozen in fear. Hans approaches them slowly, realizing that he has all the time in the world. Left with no option, Laurie turns to run. We hear the last victim’s scream in the distance behind her.
Alone at the camp’s entry, Laurie takes a moment to breathe deeply. Her clothes are stained with blood and it seems as if every inch of her skin is dirty. She watches the trail behind her with a powerful intensity, expecting Hans to come lumbering along any second but he never does. Feeling safer in he moment, she turns to leave.
Laurie limps slowly for the parking lot where the bus awaits but a thickly muscled arm, covered in thick black blood of campers reaches suddenly from the edge of the forest and holds Laurie by the throat. He lifts her off her feet and emerges from the brush. Terrified and unable to breathe she looks into the face of death before her and sees beneath the mask a pair of a perfectly black eyes of the killer looking back. For the film’s coup de grace, he raises her suddenly in both hands and breaks her over his knee like dry firewood and tosses her aside, lumbering slowly toward the waiting bus in the distance with our last two survivors in it.
Roll silent credits as Hans nears boards the bus and the screen fades to black.
Every game plays out for me like this. The engine is very good at keeping the killer moving and the player at a constant disadvantage and the game’s d6 randomness mixes it up in such a way that each game tells a story that’s only similar in its campground murderer theme and some of the setup cards have flavor to them that feels like a sequel. One of them sets up Hans in the lake like Friday part 7. It’s a hell of a game and I’m looking forward to trying the others.
I cannot recommend it more strongly.