Are you ready for the summer? So the song goes, and, sure, who isn't up for some archery, egg tosses, and relay races? Unfortunately, this isn't Camp North Star, and Bill Murray and Chris Makepeace are nowhere to be found. What you will find, however, are the bodies of the camp's new owners, lying slaughtered in the woods, and players, as the new counselors hired to get the place back in shape to open the season, will find themselves hunted through the cabins and around the lake by a mysterious killer who stalks Camp Apache.
Last Friday is a board game for 2-6 players wherein one player is the Maniac (a legally distinct stand-in for you-know-who), hunting down (and sometimes fleeing from) the other players in a series of one-versus-all scenarios. Designed by Antonio Ferrara and Sebastiano Fiorillo, Last Friday is an obvious paean to a genre and a specific franchise that is, no doubt, close to the heart of many Fango readers.
"We are simply obsessed with Crystal Lake's murderer with the hockey mask," say Ferrara and Fiorillo, "So, Last Friday was born as a love letter to Jason."
The game is divided into four chapters, each taking approximately 30 to 45 minutes to play. But players won't just be retreading the same scenario four times. Each chapter presents a shift in the objective and even the roles of the hunter and the hunted, creating a cinematic trajectory appropriate to the game's celluloid inspiration.
According to game designers Ferrara and Fiorillo, "The four chapters experience came to mind thinking about the film series. We wanted the players to feel like they were in a movie. Therefore, in the first chapter, there's the Maniac, stalking and chasing the campers. Then they get armed in the second chapter, and now the situation is reversed. They hunt the Maniac instead. In the third chapter, the Maniac is reborn from the lake and tries to kill the chosen one, the Final Girl, while in the last chapter, it's the Final Girl (provided she survived) who will have to obliterate the Maniac once and for all. In practice, this creates four different game modes, where the victims become tormentors and vice versa."
Each chapter lasts for 15 rounds, during which the Maniac and the campers will try to achieve their objective. If campers die early, it's not a problem. Players can pick a new camper from the box (there are three in each player color) and arrive at the beginning of the next chapter, fresh-faced and ready to rumble.
The large, tri-fold game board is a bird's-eye view of the camp. In the center is a lake with five cabins around the perimeter. Overlaying all of this is a network of numbered circles and solid white dots interconnected by lined paths. The players, as the campers, will move along the paths from solid dot to solid dot, skipping over the numbered circles, while the Maniac will move only from numbered circle to numbered circle. And the Maniac will move in secret.
Last Friday is a hidden movement game, with the Maniac's exact location mostly concealed from the other players. They will have some hints to point them in the right (or wrong) direction, but without a complete picture, the players must fill-in the rest to determine their best course of action. A mistake could cost them their lives. The hidden movement mechanism creates a wonderful tension akin to a submarine movie (or, if you're me, the Mutara Nebula sequence from Star Trek II), where you know they're out there… somewhere… circling you, shadowing you. Ferreting out their location and eliminating them is tricky, and doing it in time can be harrowing.
"The hidden movement mechanic seemed to us the most appropriate for this kind of game," said Ferrara and Fiorillo. "After all, in the movies, Jason is almost always hidden before the final rush, and we wanted to recreate the campers' tension in such a way."
Every three rounds, however, the Maniac will provide some valuable information by placing their pawn on a numbered space and declaring their position to all. Depending on the chapter, that space represents either the space they occupied three moves ago or the space they occupy currently. Either way, it leaves the other players wondering (and calculating) where the Maniac could be now or where they will be heading. If the Maniac is a little too close to players, the blood pressure goes up, along with the hackles on the back of the neck. The Maniac moves more quickly than the campers as the numbered circles are more spaced out from one another, while the solid dots the campers must follow seem to mire them and keep their goals just out of arm's reach. This was, of course, by design.
"The numbers and points-based grid composing the campsite has not been easy to realize," Ferrara and Fiorillo share, "because we needed the Maniac to always be faster than the victims somehow, while at the same time, we needed the victims to have the chance of surviving. Therefore one of the most difficult parts of the development was precisely about balancing the web of the several paths and routes of the campsite."
Indeed, the Maniac seems to have quite a few advantages, including special "Maniac Tokens" that can be earned based on the difference in the number of survivors and corpses at the end of each chapter. Maniac tokens provide special, one-time use powers such as "Supernatural Speed", allowing the Maniac to move twice in a turn, "Invisible," letting the Maniac player keep his position secret on one occasion when he otherwise should reveal it, and my favorite, "Plot Twist," which allows the Maniac to extend the chapter by one final, possibly crucial turn.
Campers also get their own special abilities in the form of clue tokens. These are dropped by the Maniac at the end of every third round when forced to reveal their position. These are special items and abilities like "Bear Trap," which allows the campers to create an obstacle for the Maniac, "Lantern," which makes a pool of illumination to give away the Maniac's position should they venture past, and "Acute Hearing," which forces the Maniac to indicate if they are in the vicinity of the camper. And then there's the "Shovel," which lets you bury corpses… a grim reminder of the likelihood of an increasing body count. And burying fresh corpses is important in Last Friday. No one has to say a eulogy, but unburied corpses help determine how many special tokens the Maniac gets in the next chapter, so get those bodies in the dirt!
Chapter IV is titled "The Final Chapter," but Fango readers know a blatant lie when they see one. Is it ever really "The Final Chapter"? Hell no! That's why, in 2017, Last Friday: Return to Camp Apache was released. The expansion provided handfuls of more special tokens and characters to use in the base game as well as a second killer to choose from. The Demon (who, ahem, inhabits your dreams) brings his own special tokens like "Hell Claws" (natch!), "Splitting", allowing the Demon to bilocate during the reveal rounds, "Deception" enabling the Demon to pass other characters and lighted zones unseen, and several others.
This installment introduces two new characters, the Sheriff and the Witch, who both start the game in a trance induced by the Demon. Once the campers awaken them, they become powerful allies in the fight against their supernatural foe. The new characters are controlled by the player who revived them, and they each get their own special tokens. The Sheriff has a nice selection of firearms, and the Witch has decidedly more phantasmagorical weapons at her disposal.
Return to Camp Apache also includes two additional chapters, Chapter V: Escape for Survival, and Chapter VI: The Hunt, picking up where the base game left off, of course. These two new chapters are where the game gets "bigger" and really goes for the cinematic finish. Players use both killers, the Maniac and the Demon, with each of them trying to kill as many campers as possible. At the end of Chapter V, the killer with the higher body count becomes "The Predator", and the one with fewer notches on either their machete or claw becomes "The Prey." In Chapter VI, the campers attempt to hunt down the Predator to eliminate him, while the Prey tries to kill as many campers as possible before they do. Meanwhile, the Predator is after the Prey, hell-bent on being the last killer standing. All of this is set against the backdrop of an increasing wildfire that threatens to engulf the entire camp.
Wow! What an ending!
Last Friday recently enjoyed a revised edition reprint with very few changes from the original release. Changes were mostly cosmetic, with one very obvious one being the cover. According to Ferrara and Fiorillo, "The game was reprinted because many years had passed since the original release, and we took advantage of that to cut out of the cover 'Bruce Willis in a tank top', substituting him with a bigger fella, better-dressed for a long weekend of terror."
In Last Friday, the cinematic influence is evident, as is Ferrara and Fiorillo's love for the genre. If you dare to attempt to reopen Camp Apache yourselves, I recommend the appropriate accompanying soundtrack. At the very least, find some ambient tracks on YouTube of the woods at night. Crickets, a breeze rustling the branches, and the sound of… footsteps? Ah, I'm sure it was nothing…
Last Friday is available from Ares Games, and wherever hobby board games are sold.
