Final Girl: A Knock at the Door’s First Turn is a Brutal Reunion With This System
Final Girl: A Knock at the Door - The Grad Party setup, with The Outsider (white meeple) hanging out in the bathroom. Trying to extract that victim before the trio of bastards at the bottom got to them cost Ava everything.
A scant four, maybe five, turns in to my first game of Final Girl: A Knock at the Door: Ava, our hero, is cornered in the garage of Wingard Cottage as all three intruders converge. The first blow reduces her health to less than half and she’s got no way to slow them down.
“Boy, I can’t wait to hit pause on SETI and get back into some Ameritrash!” Be careful what you wish for, asshole. It’s like the two-dozen-plus plays I logged with the Madness in the Dark movie meant nothing.
The trio of killers completely overwhelmed the map, killing all but two of the cottage’s innocent victims in a merry dash through the cottage driven by their early acquisition of the Coordinated Attack Dark Power — and amphetamines, which are handy for syncing a room-to-room murder spree, I’m told.
On top of this, my event card brought out a special victim called The Outsider. The killers are programmed to kill their way to this victim in a straight line. I was trying to get The Outsider off the map for my first sequence of plays, but one of the killers bum-rushed the room and slabbed them right in front of me. A poignant early setback.
Outside of saving two victims, the only thing Ava achieved was finding some discarded tools — which eventually could have been crafted into some cool weapons or traps, but that would have taken more time.
Final Girl: A Knock at the Door is based on The Strangers home invasion movie franchise. Emphasis on invasion, apparently. My first play gave me flashbacks of those nature films where a few hornets clear out a whole hive of bees in a few minutes.
Ever since I got my buddy Fritz hooked on Final Girl last year, I’ve been slowly shopping this runaway hit’s constantly expanding lineup of maps and villains: I finally opted for Knock at the Door because I liked this one’s twist. You have to thwart three killers at once with the option to rig up grisly homemade weapons from stuff you find around the house.
In my first setup of cards, it looked like I had the chance to eventually craft a thingamajig called The Obliterator. I’ve always wanted an Obliterator. Maybe next game.
So here we are again, back in the stew of Final Girl’s pressurized action, its intimate use of tropes to create variety, its humor and sudden collapses.
I reset the game immediately after Ava tapped out and expect to play several more times before Episode 113 (releasing end of March), where I promise you a fuller picture of my second dive into this franchise.
UPDATE: Several games later, I am handed a pile of gifts: the Security System event card back to back with the Battle Ready event card, which netted Ava a shotgun that she used twice on Zeke. He lived, but was susceptible to a polishing-off with a Weak Attack card. Even the Terror cards were helping: One produced three victims in the Boathouse, where Ava was already hefting her newfound bat.
The good breaks didn’t stop there: Ava had the ingredients to fashion snares. For several turns, the Intruders couldn’t get into the house and quickly exhausted targets outside of the house. That left them and Ava, her bat, and a no-nonsense alternating sequence of Furious Strike/Retaliate plays. There were 11 victims inside the house eating Fiddle Faddle and moving window to window as Ava mauled Trish, Zeke, and Baghead one by one.
What else happened? And how did this franchise bypass all my usual resistance to games with lots of expansions/constant releases?
Hear that story in Episode 113.