You got to cherish your Fridays. You never know which is your Last Friday. Do you remember what were you doing your Last Friday? Well, I can tell you, you will remember this one. Cos you are going to visit the camp Apache. And this can indeed be your Last Friday. So you better open-up your Last Friday Bottle of Wine, Taste your Last Ice-cream, eat some of your last gummy bears or make-out your last time. But better not with this dude! Just look at him!
Introduction
Do you know that you are visiting the camp with a guy named Jason???? He is creeping me out already. When you talk to him, you notice that he’s just not sociable at all, then you find out that he is carrying a bear trap! And the feeling gets even worse. I would probably not be able to fall asleep at the camp if I were you – it is the Last Friday and there is a JASON IN IT! HOW CONVENIENT.
Last Friday board game, a horror, serial killer themed board game for 2 to 6 players, from 30 minutes to few hours of terrific, horrific or I would even call that “Jasoning” experience. “-You better not get Jasoned tonight”.
Try to survive or hunt your friends in this strategic, exciting, and gory game. As a killer, creep on the campers and go for the kills, while being a camper, survive the night and try bringing down the killer throughout the day. So yes, everybody hunts in Apache. Unless all the campers would die through the first night, and there would be nobody else left to hunt the maniac. But that happens…almost never.
Review details
The review will be covered in the following structure:
- Fun
- Replay value
- Art & parts
- Game price
Feel free to read the review details, or just scroll down to the review summary.
Fun
One of the funniest things about this Last Friday board game is the mood, the atmosphere. Nobody knows where the maniac is since he is working his way through a secret miniature Maniac tracking screen, with a miniaturized game board, where he notes his movements. You can only see those little eyes sticking out of the little holes of the tracking screen… This brings such excitement, you basically never know when you are going to be struck down, until the very moment it happens.
What is more, the game offers some differentiated experience for all the players. As there are numerous parts of the game, called chapters, where players have different goals. In some chapters, campers must escape and survive, in others, hunt the hunter. So all the players get to experience those two main roles – hunter and the hunted.
Moving forward, we honestly enjoy the strategic elements of Last Friday. As a killer, you set the terms for the game, you can plan all sorts of things to influence camper movement and behavior throughout the game. And just sit like Mr. Burns, saying “Eeeeeexellent” without forgetting that finger movement when you get closer and closer to the campers. The campers as well have some actions, special abilities that influence the gameplay progression or even provide opportunities to outplay the killer, such as moving additional distance, laying traps, revealing the killer, and more.
Now there are some negative issues about Last Friday board game, in relation to fun and interest. First of all, if this is your first game, and you did not play any similar board games, and you are a killer…It is likely that you will have some difficult time and some limited amount of JOY. Unfortunately, this game has quite a barrier in terms of experience, especially playing the maniac.
What is more, we find it a bit unbalanced from a storyline perspective. There are 4 chapters, in 1st and 3rd, the maniac chases the campers for the kills, in 2nd and 4th, campers try to defeat the killer. How often do you find killers being chased and pressed for half a movie or a game? This seems a bit overextended. We feel like 3 chapters could do more of a job for the game, 2 for the killer to chase campers and 1 vice versa. And finally, the 4th chapter feels quite unbalanced, meaning the killer is having a very hard time surviving if it comes to this Chapter.
Replay value
It seems the more you play this game, the more you enjoy it. You get a little bit more understanding about it, and what is great about the game – is that you can select and play the best parts of it! Every single chapter (part) of the game can be played separately. If you were to play all 4 chapters, this would certainly take a third or even a half of your day. Now we do not say that this is not an enjoyable experience, we even recommend playing all chapters in a row. But now, you can throw in that game in as little as a 30-minute time interval, and play the parts that you enjoy the most.
One of the best parts of the Last Friday Board game (in my opinion) is the first chapter. This is about the arrival to the camp Apache. Campers obviously start camping, and they notice the killer. They got to find the keys from cabins located somewhere around the camp, nearby the lake in order to barricade themselves to safely spend the night. The fun part is that the killer plants them, and exactly knows where to find them. And in the process of 15 rounds of a chapter, every third-round, players are revealed with killer’s past location (always 3 rounds back). Now, this is brilliant! It brings all kinds of emotions and faces from players!
The experience I enjoy replaying over and over and getting different results most of the time. But be careful, different experiences may mean even a bad experience for everyone, if a killer is not experienced. The first chapter requires a killer to perform quite well in order that other chapters would be challenging and interesting to everyone. If this fails, I feel that it’s even better to replay the first chapter a few times before proceeding to other chapters.
Moving forward, there are a whole lot of campers to choose from. For every camper pawn, there are 3 camper characters of respective colors to choose from, in total giving 15 different characters. You can try different ones to see what kind of playstyle is more convenient to you and makes the maniac to think as well as to adapt in order to get you.
I would conclude that the replay value is certainly sufficient.
Art & parts
The art of the Last Friday board game looks decent and without too violent aspects. The game board is nice, more like a horror movie camp, with a lake, cozy little houses, woods, campfire, a farm, and even a cemetery! I just hope it is not a pet cemetery… Camper cards portray the characters really well, they seem to be quite creepy, every single one of them, well maybe except Buby, who reminds me of a Scooby-Doo, which fits the theme perfectly as well.
The quality of components is fine, the pawns are wooden, tokens feel strong. Clue tokens look quite small, but this is probably due to the fact that you need to put them on white dots which indicate campers’ movement path, and they are quite small, to begin with.
Last Friday colorblindness review
Below, the image summarizes the main game components that are in question in terms of colorblindness suitability.
We can see that player cards (tiles) that are green and red are very hard to distinguish for Deuteranope and Protanope cases. In addition to that, green, brown, and red keys are also very similar. As a result, we assign a colorblindness rating of F (not recommended). Please note that if you have a partial color deficiency (not 100%), it is likely very much playable.
Price
We should say that there is quiet an amount of components of the game. Given the game price (we do not specify it as it fluctuates), all seems fair. We are just not sure that the game value itself is worth the money for everyone. If you are a fan of serial killer games or purchasing a present for somebody who is, that is ok! Go on and get Last Friday board game! Otherwise, think about it and check some replays before the purchase. You can check the prices at the end of the review.