If you’re not a fan of slasher movies, the ‘final girl’ trope and comic books, stop reading now!
On the other hand, if you know who Cassie Hack and Vlad are, what could well be the deckbuilding card game for you has landed on Kickstarter. (If you don’t recognise the names, check out the Hack/Slash page on Image Comics—you can read the first issue of the comic there.)
Hack/Slash: The Card Game is a 1–6 player, 45–90 minute solo/cooperative game from Zoop Games. The current Kickstarter campaign is described as the second edition of the game, the first having appeared at the start of 2025, but I’ve been unable to find out what differences exist between the two.
Note, this game is absolutely not to be confused with Hack & Slash—totally different games!
Zoop’s game blurb reads: ‘This long running comic book series is returning to crowdfunding, but this time…fans will do the slashing! Fan-favorite “Slasher” villains from the series’ 20-year history will terrorize 1–6 players in a pulse-pounding cooperative deckbuilding card game that recreates key events from the comics!’
Game Play
In the game, everyone plays as Cassie and Vlad, kind of. The two heroes appear as tokens which can move between locations where the action takes place, giving an advantage when players are doing battle in locations containing one of the them. And that’s pretty much all.
Bad guys (the ‘minions’) continuously stream across the Action Track and your job is to defeat them before the reach the end. There’s more in the Action Deck than just bad guys: victims can pop up on the Action Track, in need of rescue; or the locations mentioned above, which drop into specific spaces on the board and modify gameplay when players are interacting with the linked part of the Action Track; and slasher villains, also to be placed in particular spaces. There are 4 villains in total, and defeating all of them results in winning the game—but that’s not going to be easy.
On your side are the Hero Cards, which provide Draft Energy (ability to draw more cards) and Attack Energy (combat strength).
At the start of each turn, an Action Card is revealed: if it’s a location or villain, it goes in the appropriate space on the board; if it’s a victim or minion, it drops into the first slot of the Action Track, pushing adjacent ones along a space. If a card falls off the far end of the Action Track, you lose a life—no more lives, and it’s game over, everyone loses.
Next, you can spend one or more of the cards in your hand to draft or attack. You can use the Draft Energy on your cards to rescue victims in the Action Track, freeing up a space on the track, thus postponing your ultimate demise. Alternatively, you can use it to take cards from the Hero Marketplace, but when you draft cards, you don’t get to use them immediately; instead, they go to the discard pile, which will be shuffled to form a new draw deck when that’s empty. In addition, Draft Energy can be used to move Cassie or Vlad between locations.
Attack Energy can be used against minions in the Action Track (as with victims, the aim being to free up a space) or against villains, making progress towards ending the game successfully. Battle is a simple matter of having a higher amount of Attack Energy on cards in your hand than the number marked on the bad guy’s card.
Impressions
While the game is quick and easy to play, and looks quite fun, this does feels like a game mainly for Hack/Slash fans—I feel the selling point is the use of characters, places and storylines from the comic books. On that note, the project has a special fan, in the form of the comic book’s creator, Tim Seeley. (For quite a few bucks extra, you can get his autograph on the game.)
There is very little difference between solo and cooperative play; the latter case, players take turns to play cards from the same decks, but each player gets to keep the victory points from enemies defeated on their turn at the wheel for end-game ‘bragging rights.’ This really does feel like a solo game like the Final Girl series, but with less complexity.
The Kickstarter campaign offers a few upgrades: acrylic standees for Cassie and Vlad, in place of the rather boring cardboard tokens, and a neoprene board replacement. A range of expansions is also available, adding more material that will be familiar to readers of the comic books.
I mentioned earlier that I was unable to work out what had changed between editions, but hidden among the project rewards is a ‘1st Edition Upgrade Bundle.’ The description merely says this includes the standees and neoprene mat, strongly suggesting this project is a reprint rather than a rework.
To summarise, this is a fun-looking game, but mainly appealing to existing fans—and based on the longevity of the comic books, there must be plenty of those. You can find out more on the project’s page or Zoop’s site. Finally, I do hope there’s a Pooch card somewhere in there, though I doubt if he’ll be in the Hero Deck. A victim, maybe.
About the Author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
