Final Girl: A New Player Arms Himself With the Funk, Is Murdered

This is adapted from the script of Episode 105, “Final Girl: Killer from Tomorrow vs. Madness in the Dark,” which you should check out if you want to hear full audio of the pre- and post-game interviews I did with Fritz.

Final Girl is back on the table. Not just for replay value, but because I showed it to a non-tabletop buddy and he was sprung on sight.

In Episode 105 you can hear what happens as one dude in Wyoming struggles against a robot killer for the very first time and another dude in Colorado reacquaints himself with the joys of finding a hook-handled bone hammer in a utility closet.

Final Girl Killer from Tomorrow: Fritz got two successes on a search and found a Craig Mack CD in the used bin at the Sunny Days Mall

Most of the time when you tell people you play solo boardgames, you are met with bemusement and pity.

I think people understand in the abstract that there are all kinds of things that are cool to do with a group or by yourself. Hell, even sex has a pretty decent solo mode. But for some reason, solo board gaming registers as a preference for the lost and the eccentric.

But sometimes the light flips on and all your feverish elevator pitches for solo boardgaming are vindicated.

Friend of the show and occasional Breakup Gaming Society contributor Fritz Godard visited Starkville this summer, and, after several beers and a smoked chicken, he told me that out of all the games he’s heard me discuss on the show, Final Girl was the one that intrigued him the most. 

So I got my base game and Madness in the Dark module out and we played a few turns. Within a few weeks he had his own base game and the Killer from Tomorrow module, one of dozens of movie-inspired scenarios you can take on in Final Girl.

“I didn’t know a board game could do that,” he told me later.

So we did two interviews in the lead-up to Halloween: Fritz was up in Wyoming with his Killer from Tomorrow movie set up for the very first time. I was here in Starkville. The idea was to compare his very first look at the game with my umpteenth trip through the grimy halls of Wolfe Asylum.

Fritz is such a beautiful anachronistic kind of guy. Before we started our games, he sent me a pic of Craig Mack CD from 1994 that he was about to throw in his boombox.

This is not a retro hipster pose. He’s the kind of dude who genuinely gets more joy from the pages of a yellowed second-hand paperback than he does from being online.

I think we both feel misplaced in this century and susceptible to the charms of physical media: Like spending an evening getting your ass absolutely kicked in a shopping mall while being hunted by a robotic assassin.

Fritz didn’t have enough trust with the Savior (a.k.a. the young John Connor), so the punk forced him to pitch his only weapon card. Fritz really needed that gun.

A few nights after our pre-game call, I checked back in with Fritz to see how his first battle in Sunnyvale Mall went. Did his attraction to the concept survive the level of detail and general difficulty of surviving as a Final Girl?

It did. I was satisfied to hear that he’d gotten his head around a lot of the game’s many wrinkles and had notched the honor of his first lopsided loss. It was heartwarming, like watching your kid get his first concussion in a Pop Warner league.

This franchise seems to still be pulling new players deep inside its clever, magnetic VCR-style game boxes.

If I’m reading the online chatter correctly, Final Girl recently became the first solo-only board game design to break the BoardGameGeek Top 100. Congrats to the team at Van Ryder games for that one. I also raise a bruised fist for all the Final Girls out there and wish Fritz many more good deaths.

I am also going to try new interesting ways to die: Cycling this on the table again inspired me to get the Knock at the Door movie, based on The Strangers’ home-invasion situation. Stay tuned this winter for a glimpse of what that’s like.

---

May I send you a custom cocktail booklet and this handsome frog?

A Sublime Moonlight Massacre: Fritz Godard Lands in Starkville

This is adapted from the script of Episode 92 — “Faraway Review + My First Time on Board Game Arena” if you’d rather listen than read.

“There’s two things you need to know about this place,” I told Fritz Godard when he pulled up in my weed-choked driveway a couple nights ago. “I got in way over my head when I bought this old place, and I cleaned today until I got bored, which was 12 minutes.”

It helps to say these things next to a Char-Griller with sweet oak and tangy mesquite smoke pouring out of it, and to follow it up with a cold pint. I figured I’d get a rapid buzz in this dude and the black grime on the kitchen baseboards would make him feel at ease and generally better about himself, if he noticed it at all.

I had two six-packs on ice: Avery Brewing’s White Rascal — I’ve always enjoyed having the Rascal around as temperatures climb — and Leinenkugel Berry Weiss. It seemed like a decent side bet, considering this was the year’s first string of cloudless high-70s days.

Beer and boardgames: The Hamm’s vintage beer goblets are broken out to celebrate Fritz’s safe arrival.

The taste of the Rascal reminded me I had two old friends in the house. I love nearly every Avery Brewing product I’ve ever had. White Rascal brought what I always remembered: suppleness while still being crisp, the orange zest playing along on the beer’s body like sundogs. These got crushed quickly as I taught Fritz how to run Project L, which I reviewed back in Episode 88.

Pivoting from that to the Leinenkugel Berry was the evening’s only disappointing turn: The whiff of orange that comes off a White Rascal is girded by an actual beer around it. These Leinies had a tinny ring of artificial-tasting berry and nothing else.

“It reminds me of what Vitamin Water tasted like in 2008, like they were trying to come up with something to compete with a boozy seltzer,” I said.

Learning Project L: Fritz ponders what to do with the nice base of pieces he’s acquired; he used them to nip me 21-20 in our second game.

“This is like what you give a niece or nephew who are having their first beer ever,” said Fritz.

The digitized berry startup sound that was the entirety of the beer’s personality stuck in my mouth for several minutes after, as if I’d been trance-eating SweetTarts or Spree while watching schlock on YouTube.

I dislike this beer intensely. I’d reach for a Keystone Light before I’d ever open one of these again. It is an annoying beverage. Know what sounds like Berry Weiss? Bari Weiss, which is also trash.

This was when Fritz’s time bartending and being a semipro lush in Louisville, Kentucky paid off. After pouring, trying, and touring his way through bottles, shelves and vats of brown liquors made in the Southeastern U.S., he pulled his favorite from that era of his life out of a brown paper bag: a bottle of Michter’s Rye.

The first belt of that Michter’s after that candy nothing beer, the reopening of the senses, was akin to the relief of being in a room where somebody is blasting anime theme music over a phone speaker for 20 minutes and you don’t realize your body’s been slowly tensing up in rage, but all of a sudden it stops because somebody else just drowned it out by throwing on some vinyl, maybe MC5 or Thin Lizzy.

Fritz said Michter’s became his go-to for its blend of bite and smoothness. And it was all there, that sharp, woody, upfront first hit, then a layered mellowness across the middle and back.

We knocked it back neat the rest of the night, stopping only to savage the half chicken and pickled okra I dropped between us on a cutting board, popping out back occasionally to watch the progress of a full moon and let the chill spring breeze from the south rake surplus heat off our boozy faces.

I showed him the ropes on Final Girl: Madness in the Dark before we succumbed to the ranks of unmedicated maniacs on the asylum map and passed out, him on the eastern couch, me on the southern couch, all the lights killed except, the orange accent strips on the floor beneath the couches, all sounds cut except the brisk tenor of the narrator. I’d thrown on an audiobook of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World. The rhythm of the words made drunkard’s hammocks in the middle of the book’s sweltering post-apocalyptic lagoons.

Damage report: 1.75 six packs, a chicken, most of a fifth of rye and several residential patients of Wolfe Asylum were destroyed in the making of this session.

I woke up several chapters later, Fritz’s eastern couch vacated, the moon and its jamboree mass having pulled with it in its western plummet the last strains of fight songs from fabled bandit enclaves in Brooklyn, the sun arrived to police chicken bones, the drying husks of night-bloom playlists, shot glasses, dice and the many yellow victim meeples from Final Girl that didn’t survive the second, deadlier night inside Wolfe Asylum.