Final Girl: A New Player Arms Himself With the Funk, Is Murdered
Not even Craig Mack could save my man Fritz during his first-ever try at Final Girl: Killer from Tomorrow.
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.
