Review Details

Hostage Negotiator

Product Review (submitted on February 20, 2018):

I went into this game very excited. The theme really appeals to me and is pretty unique within board game. The game also looked like it had a lot of replay value with all of the small expansions available. Unfortunately, it ended up being a big miss for me. I thought this would feel like a narrative experience, but the narrative elements present (character backgrounds, quotes on Conversation cards) are very generic and cliché. The game really fails to deliver on what is a golden opportunity to develop really unique narrative play.

The components look like they SHOULD be first-rate. Nice wooden tokens, linen-finish cards, good use of color and iconography. This is why I gave the game high marks for value, despite low marks for quality. The quality is so low because these great components were ruined for me by very subpar production of them. Many cards are marked or even a little damaged right out of the shrink wrap. The dice are really cheap and in a couple places didn't even have paint in the numbers. The board that tracks everything has a bent and peeling corner. And to top it off, the art is really mediocre.

My final issue with the game is that there is far too much luck involved. A game with this serious a theme (people dyinig when you can't talk down a hostage taker) should rely much more on decisions from the player. It feels like I'm playing a light, silly game with random chance just EVERYWHERE, and that doesn't match the theme at all.

All in all, it seems clear that the creator of the game had a lot of good ideas, but lacked the funds to get a good production company to make the games, and had little to no access to quality playtesting. I wish I could give it a much better rating.