Hostage Negotiator: Career

Hostage Negotiator (2015) by Van Ryder Games is difficult to classify. The original game is clearly a solo, simple beer-and-pretzels, dice chucking, press-your-luck little adventure...if you like your adventures to have all of the drama of corrugated cardboard. Then they expanded the game system, kind of, by adding abductor packs and Hostage Negotiator: Crimewave (2017), which really turned the whole thing into more of an expandable card game. But then the people over at Van Ryder Games added Hostage Negotiator: Career (2020) which took the rest of the Hostage Negotiator system and transformed it into part expandable card game, part narrative-driven game, part legacy game, and part game system.

Something that started out as either relatively uninteresting or frustratingly simple turned into an immersive, meaningful experience in which you incorporate all these elements and live the life of a hostage negotiator over 10 years of their career. The player gets immersed in a world of stressors: marriage, promotion and lack of promotion, trauma, and even the possibility of their car breaking down.

It really comes down to this: We think Hostage Negotiator started out as the equivalent of an annoying amount of poorly-placed police academy recruitment leaflets, but since then has been transformed into a magnum opus of gaming experience. So check Pete’s unboxing of Hostage Negotiator Career (2020), designed by A. J. Porfirio and published by Van Ryder Games.