Final Girl: Carnage At The Carnival Review

Roll up, roll up, right this way, folks! Feast your eyes upon the wonders of the carnival! Become one of the family in this wonderful, once in a lifetime experience!... Or at least, that’s the façade that hides a dark and sinister plot. Geppetto has always wanted to build his family and after years of failure, he decided to make his own, utilising dark rituals and his favourite stories to bring puppets to life. Not content with his made puppets, Geppetto takes the punters of the carnival and creates new puppets for his family. Only you can stand up and cut the strings as you are the Final Girl surviving the Carnage at the Carnival.

The Cast and Crew

All the Final Girl feature films use the same basic rules from the core set. However, they all have their own quirks and special rules, which makes them unique. Here's Carnage at the Carnivals:

The Final Girls: Asami & Charlie

Asami has five health and four spots for rescued victims. Once she has saved her victims, her power unlocks, allowing you to draw two item cards each time you draw an Item card, choosing one. The other goes face up back on the top of the draw deck it came from. In addition, Asami becomes immune to Item Traps cards in this set and additional saved victims restore Asami’s health.
Charlie is tough. She has seven health, six victim spots and refuses to be intimidated by the killer. After she rescues her victims, she unlocks the ability to add the Critical Blow action card to her hand at the cost of three health. Combined with her three victim spots which let her turn down the terror level, she gets into a good position to use as many dice as possible and smash through the Killer’s health.

The Killer: Geppetto

Geppetto isn’t the friendly puppet maker we might remember from Pinocchio. He is a dark and vicious killer, turning his victims into puppets, which he uses as minions to cause greater chaos. In Carnage at the Carnival these minions mostly move around to position themselves within groups of victims, which is dangerous when the Terror cards come up. These can trigger a rapid fire killing spree that launches Geppetto up the bloodlust track and can be scary very quickly.
At the start of the Killer Phase until the Finale is revealed, one of the three puppets will spawn into the board next to Geppetto. Puppets have one health and will deal one damage if they attack. Their movement is the same as Geppetto’s but they are limited to be up to two spaces away from Geppetto. If a puppet is killed, it goes off the board onto the Puppets card in the Exhausted section and will become Ready after the Minion step of the Killer Phase. Some Terror cards will give actions for the Puppets and will trigger all of them unless the card specifies a location. If it is all of the puppets, you choose the order they trigger.

The Location: The Carnival of Blood

In Carnage at the Carnival, the Carnival of Blood is not advertised as such, for obvious reasons. The Manager of the House of Mirrors notes they are still trying to sell tickets. As with all of the locations, you have the usual Event, Setup, Items and Terror cards, but here, we have some new features because the Carnival is trapped. Three Item Trap cards are hidden within the three search locations, one in each stack, but there are trap cards hidden within the Terror deck. These traps may turn up randomly and will have special ongoing effects that will hinder you in some way.

Final Thoughts

In what will turn out to be a common theme in the reviews I write for the Final Girl expansions, I haven’t seen the inspirational film for this particular expansion, which I think is Puppet Master. I’m not a horror watcher, but this was the second feature film I picked up because I find the concept fascinating. I’m also not a huge fan of the circus, which makes this doubly confusing as to why I wanted to give this a go. The reality is this expansion is a really good addition. The puppets are a little irritating as they have an extra step to put out on the board, but they really add something when a Terror card comes up that gets them to slaughter victims. If the positioning isn’t in your favour, and you haven’t saved the victims, you are in for a world of pain as the bloodlust track rapidly shoots up.
I haven’t yet explored all of the boxes, so I don’t know how true this might be, but Asami’s ability feels the most restricted to this feature film. I get that the key ability of drawing two item cards is very useful, but immunity to item traps might be unique to this one. On the flip side, Charlie is a complete badass, taking three damage to take the Critical Blow action card into your hand and gaining more time for bonus victims saved. Her ability was clutch in the last game I played which was really fun.
The traps are very interesting in this game, because the Item traps are almost enough of a deterrent to tempt you away from the Search action. Couple that with the rapidly spawning puppets who can cause chaos in a heartbeat and I found myself moving away from searching in my second playthrough in favour of just saving the victims. Is this perhaps the job of the Item traps? Probably, and I’m kinda for it.
I really enjoyed my two playthroughs of Carnage at the Carnival, once with each character and one victory and one loss on my record. There is a really interesting balance thrown in this box between saving the victims and dealing damage to Geppetto and you have to really go for one or the other early on or you’ll get overwhelmed really quickly. I love it though. More fun at the circus please!