Players: Manu, Ben, Ed, Tim

Setting: A Caribbean Cruise Ship, "Princess Susanna."

Killer: A Body-Possessing Ghost: the idea was that the actual physical person doing the killing might change throughout the course of play, but there was only one actual "Killer."

Victim (Character) Roster:

(1) Gail White, lonely widow
(2) Tally, the hopeful adolescent who stowed away on the ship in search of adventure
(3) Bruce, college athlete given the cruise as a "perk" for winning the championship
(4) Lyndzie, the apathetic lifeguard
(5) Delilah "Del" Courtney, investigative reporter
(6) Matt "Muscles" Grenig, buff but smart photographer
(7) Dahua, the talented beautician
(8) Susan Monroe, an underpaid and resentful sous chef
(9) Dr. Samuel Parsons, ship's doctor
(10) Jed and his faithful companion Gilumny, ship ventriloquist
(11) "Bimmie" Rogers, who is on the run from the law
(12) Mark Walt, the wealthy and arrogant health insurance executive

If that seems like a lot of characters, don't worry, all but two will be dead shortly.

Play: The first three scenes set up relationships between the characters. This is important because in the fourth scene, "First Blood," the 3 characters with the least relationships die. Bruce, Susan, and Matt shared this dubious and unfortunate honor. Here, in our first of two back-to-back poolside massacre scenes, we were first introduced to our Killer (or at least our Killer's host body), who wears a hoodie, wields a club with a pointed end (which we later discovered was the source of the possession), and is always very curious whether his victims have "Seen the Light."

The game mechanics required that a character die in every scene from that point on--although only the cards determine who--so the game moved at a relatively fast pace and our poor main characters only lasted a little more than 24 hours of game time. Due to "luck" of the draw, three of the characters all ended up dying simultaneously--including, unfortunately, my favorite character Tally--as the Killer locked the Boiler Room door and ummm...turned up the heat. A couple NPC's bit the dust as well, including the captain and the ship's chaplain, the second of which died with a whole clip of ammo in his chest as he was being possessed by the Killer. In the end, Del--fearless reporter, and the "Final Girl"--fell from the side of the ship clutching a life boat, as the Killer club possessed Mark Walt (not a particularly nice guy to begin with) to continue its evil errand. Later the ship would be found floating in the middle of the Atlantic with no one on board, and Del would write a book about her experiences--only to be debunked, disbelieved, and generally laughed at by her peers.

This game works best, from my perspective, when the word "scene" is defined very loosely. Two game rules--that a character must die in every scene and that the Killer cannot attack the same character twice in a row--make it a little odd to play if a scene is defined as a single event taking place at a single location. I think it works better to look at a scene as a single player's turn as the Killer, ending when they successfully kill one of the characters. We did a couple of our scenes this way (including the last one, in which 2 characters must die) and I think switching it up like that helped to add variety to the story.

Final thought: If you ever do go on a cruise, Stay the Hell Away From the Pool at Night (and the Boiler Room...but why would you be down there?).

Thanks to Manu for facilitating and to Ben, Ed, and Manu (again) for senselessly murdering tourists and cruise employees with me!

Thanks for the write-up, Tim! One of my favorite lines was "my corns hurt when EVIl is afoot!" :-)

Your point about the word 'scene' is good; 'turn' is a better way of talking about it. There's no reason why you can't have several scenes in one Killer's turn.

Yeah, like we talked about after the game, I think it's odd that for a game emulating slasher flicks you have to really go out of your way to frame anything with a lone victim. Which is why a lot of scenes turned into melees instead of murders.

(dibs on Melees & Murders as a game title)

I think it depends on the nature of the killer. If the killer is a ravenous horde of zombies or say a murderous congress of undead baboons, there's no problem having multiple scenes in one killer turn. It does become awkward if the killer is the lone slasher, though :)

Yeah, that's why it surprised me. I thought it was all about slasher flicks (given the title and cover). I went back and looked at the description of the game, just to make sure I wasn't misinterpreting:

Something out there is hunting us. The captain of the football team was
dragged into a manhole. The class president was found dead in her
shower. And everyone remembers what happened to the school janitor,
and seeing what was left of him on the first day of school. Now we're
the only ones left. Will any of us make it out of this alive?

The Final Girl is a horror movie roleplaying game meant to emulate
slashers or any other horror movie where the characters are picked off
one by one until only one survivor remains to confront the killer.

This is not a game that makes it easy to find someone dead in a shower, or pick people off one by one without an audience. It's bizarre.

It turns out that if you attack the whole group, the character with the high card survives. So someone would have made it out of the hold. That's better.

Oops! My bad.