Hostage Negotiator

Hostage Negotiator: Text

Publisher: Van Ryder Games

Designer: A. J. Porfirio

Overview

Hostage Negotiator was the first solo only game I ever played. It is a dice rolling game where you take the roll of a hostage negotiator, and through the power of conversation and skills of extraction, attempt to rescue people taken as hostages.

The game is for one player only and takes about 15-20 minutes and is quick and easy to set up. Straight out of the box there are 3 abductors to choose from, which have slightly different difficulty and set up.

Components

The game comes with a cardboard negotiator tracker which is a sort of dashboard to record everything that's going on in the game. There are 5 plastic dice, wooden meeples and a conversation point tracker. The cards are standard size (as per Fantasy Flight sleeves).

The cards include conversation cards, pivotal event cards, terror cards, abductor cards and demand cards. The artwork on these is pretty standard but reasonably thematic. The conversation cards have little snippets of conversation at the bottom to read which is a nice addition and helps to create the atmosphere of the game. Everything is nice and bold so all cards are really easy to read and it's easy to follow what's going on.

One of the main problems I've had with this

game is with the dice, and I'm not sure if my

blame is warranted or not. The dice have

symbols carved into the number 4, 5 and 6,

with 3, 2 and 1 being blank. I often have runs

of very bad dice rolls in this game (and I have

also read I'm not the only person to experience

this!) so it could be that these dice are subject

to bias due to their design, whether this was

intentional or non-intentional.

Gameplay

Your aim in this game is to rescue all of the hostages, and capture or eliminate the abductor. If over half of the hostages are killed in the game, you immediately lose.

On your turn, conversation cards are played and a number of dice are rolled according to the threat level. The outcome of the roll determine how successful that conversation was, and if you are lucky, you may save a hostage, earn yourself some extra conversation points or calm the abductor down a bit. If you roll badly however, the situation escalates and hostages may be killed, they may get angry, or even end the conversation. Any conversation points earned in the conversation can be used to buy more powerful conversation cards for another round. Once you have finished the conversation with the abductor one way or another and spent any points available, a terror card is revealed which usually results in something bad happening and the situation worsening.

The game ends when you have either rescued all hostages and eliminated or caught the abductor, or over half the hostages are killed.

Thoughts

I have not yet been able to get over the dice rolling in this game. I have only ever won once, and that was by cheating. The booklet tells you to start with the abductor Arkayne, and the game starts with the threat level on 4, which means when you resolve any conversation cards you roll two dice. With only 5 and 6 classed as successes, this means that statistically there is only a 1 in 9 chance of rolling double successes with any roll. Even rolling a single success should be reasonably easy to come by. But is it?! Even with occasional successes, these result in such little gains, that by the next roll I find that I'm back to being in a dire situation.

Rolling failures has such detrimental effects (it can end the conversation immediately, minus conversation points, kill a hostage, or increase the threat) that I feel the game is quite unbalanced and massively favours the negative outcomes. The possibility that the dice are weighted coupled with minor success advantages makes for a frustrating game.

I have read that I am not alone in this, and took someone's advice to decrease the difficulty of the game. With these house rules, I assumed that whatever roll I made, there was at least one success on the dice. This is the time I won the game, but it was still really close! Surely a game where you cheat and only just scrape a win isn't quite balanced correctly…?

Despite this, when you get into the groove of the game, it is quite exciting when you have managed to get a few hostages free and can see a bit of progress.

I feel like this game would benefit from some ability to manipulate the dice. There are demand cards that can be revealed for the abductor, and if you concede to these, they can give you a leg up, however there is usually a very detrimental negative consequence to conceding so I have not yet found a time where these would be beneficial. There is also one conversation card that can be used to re-roll just one dice, or, when a 4 is rolled, to play two conversation cards to turn the 4 into a success. I do not feel these are powerful enough to give the player enough advantage to win.

Thoughts for solo play

This game can only be played solo (nothing stopping a second player helping however).

Overall, I feel like this game is just too hard to win (and I have played Robinson Crusoe and have managed to win so I know what a challenging game feels like!). Despite this however, I do continue to play this game and I do enjoy it when in the mood. I am continuing to play with my altered rules and plan to play the game as per the rulebook if/when I can win more often. I cannot quite decide whether I am just not good at this game, or if the dice rolling is against the player!

Pros

Unique theme with interesting mechanics
Good sense of tension built up in the game
Portable and quick set up time, with not a huge amount of table space needed

Cons

Dice rolling seems to make the game impossibly difficult to win

Overall rating:

1- Poor, didn't really enjoy it much at all
2- It was ok. I wouldn't recommend it to play
3- Average game that does not particularly stand out and/or has a few negative points
4- Pretty good game that is enjoyable
5- Highly recommended to play
6- A must play!