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What’s It All About
If you’re familiar with the Final Girl series you can skip this first section and get to the North Pole Nightmare specifics. If not, read on.
Final Girl is a solo game based on horror films, mainly from the 1980s, in which you are the titular final girl, the girl who is still alive in the climax of the film and the only one who can fight the killer.
It’s an elegant system. You buy the Final Girl Core Box which gives you a board, some cards, dice and the meeples that you’ll need in every game of Final Girl. You then buy a Feature Film box that contains specific stuff related to the location and the killer. For example, a Freddy Krueger-type who lives on Maple Lane, or a Jason-style killer who stalks around Camp Happy Trails.
The great thing is the modularity of the game. You can choose a Final Girl you currently own, put her in any of the locations, and then choose any of the killers. The replayability is huge.
The general flow of the game is that you’ll choose one of your cards and then roll some dice to see how well you perform that action. You’ll then move around the board, pick up useful items, fight the killer, and rescue other victims. Once you’ve used up as many cards as you want to, it’s the killer’s turn where they charge around slaughtering everyone in sight.
So what does The North Pole Nightmare bring to the Final Girl Party?
The North Pole Nightmare
This expansion isn’t based on a film like the others; it pits you against Krampus and takes place at Santa’s Workshop at the North Pole. It also contains miniatures. The other feature film boxes don’t contain these, and they have to be bought separately. But here they come ready for you in the box. That’s because this game is a one-off and isn’t part of any particular season of Final Girl.
The main gameplay difference in this box is the inclusion of presents. Krampus drops presents all over the board that either you or the elves—the victims in this game—can open. You can choose whether you want to open a present which probability-wise won’t be great, but the elves open any present by flipping the present token that’s in their space and carrying out any good or bad stuff that it shows. There are some special Krampus presents that are really bad and they’re the ones that I always seem to open. To balance this, Santa has left some special presents too and they’re great. But pretty much without fail, the elves always open these and thieve the contents. Out of my five games of this, I’ve had one Santa present. The rest of the time the elves nick them.
The elves are a pain for another reason: whenever you move into a space with one or more elves you must lose time, one for each elf. It’s so harsh. I hate elves so much. I almost feel like just sitting back at the start of the game, putting the kettle on, and having a little snooze while Krampus slaughters all the little pointy-eared £%^&*$. They deserve it.
How Hard Is It
I’m not sure whether I’ve been unlucky or not, but this feature film box feels really hard. Normally, my win rate is about 50% with the Final Girl games and I generally play using the extreme difficulty mode. But with this expansion, I always play on the easiest difficulty and it still hammered me. It certainly could be luck though. As I said earlier, I only ever got one of Santa’s presents, and that happens to be the one game where I managed to scrape a win. It became a joke for me every time an elf turned over a present token. I always thought, this will be one of Santa’s presents. And it generally was. Then I turn over a present token. Bam! Krampus present. Noooooo!
The game feels pretty hard with the inclusion of presents but then you add in the crippling rule about losing time when you move into an elf’s space and it becomes rather tough indeed.
Is It Any Good
Does this difficulty put me off? No, the opposite, in fact. I enjoy the challenge. When I won my one game of this, I was rather happy and told Krampus what I thought of him and his present-littering ways.
Gameplay-wise, I’d rate this pretty highly. I don’t have any connection to Krampus. The theme of this box set didn’t excite me in the slightest, whereas other boxes in the series have made me a tad happy, such as the one based on The Thing. So the theme of this one doesn’t lift my overall rating into the stratosphere, but it is good to have a Christmas-based game to play in the festive season.
One other knock on this game is the usability of the art. It’s by Vincent Dutrait and I’m starting to get a little tired of his art style. Added to this is the difficulty in seeing the locations and paths on the board. It’s all too busy and the lines demarcating the locations are too thin. It’s only a minor quibble because after a while I got used to where the locations and paths were.
Conclusion
Overall, I’ve enjoyed this Feature Film set. I’ve battled against snowstorms, ridden a reindeer, and even smacked Krampus about the chops with Mrs Christmas’s rolling pin. In terms of the other feature film sets, I’d say this is a lower mid-table offering. Even so, it’s still a very good game and comes recommended.
