Once upon a time, an American sniper won World War II alone. At least if you’ve played any of the Sniper Elite series video games. Now that Rebellion is buying digital IP on the desktop, you too can have one super-powerful stealth sniper win over the three German defending squads (Watch it on amazon). Or this time, the Germans may actually win to ensure it’s a competitive game.
What’s in the box
There is no ray tracing or brutal killcam to move to the table top, but you can use a military miniature washed with 10 inks instead. There are nine slots in three sets of colored bases representing German squads, each with an officer. The other is the sniper himself for the time shown on the board.
They are mounted on a board that shows the submarine’s pen on one side and the launch facility on the other. Maps are often drawn with clear walls, elevations and iconography to facilitate smooth play. There are also two minimaps for the sniper to go secretly and a low quality dry wipe pen to show his path.
Several bags of plastic cubes and decks of cards conclude the component manifest. One deck is for sniper weapons, one is for special soldiers, one is for solo board gameplay, and the last deck is for sniper purposes. They are all good and nice, and the deck of interest is printed to look like a kind of playing card used by Allied intelligence to send information to prisoners.
Rules and how they work
Sniper Elite is a game of asymmetric hidden movements. One player controls the sniper character. The sniper character unfolds in secret and moves off the map, trying to reach two randomly drawn spaces on the board. Others control the German garrison whose mission is to hunt down, kill or delay the snipers, allowing them to reduce their turn counts before they reach their goals.
Up to 3 players can control a German squad, but it’s probably best to play one-on-one. Two German players need to share a squad, but three are at risk of one player bossing the other.
If the sniper moves through multiple spaces and there are adjacent guards, the sniper should warn the enemy that he has heard noise. In turn, their list of actions includes spots and searches. The former lets them specify a single space, and the sniper must reveal if they are there. In the latter case, they can specify three spaces and have to say if the sniper is in one of them, but not know which one. The squad can also sacrifice both actions to perform a sweep that tells if the sniper is in the same board area.
This is the basic dynamics that drive the game. The sniper makes 10 turns to complete one target, then another 10 turns to complete the second target. Given the complex walls and doors of the two maps, the sniper will have at least 7 or 8 spaces for any purpose at the start of the game. Therefore, even under ideal circumstances, sneaking along one space per turn leaves a very high amount of time pressure. And the longer they take, the more Germans can use those spots and search actions to identify snipers. With each turn you pass, the tension on both sides increases.
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Snipers can of course sniper to clear the path and reduce the number of enemy actions. It uses a strange mechanism that announces the number of tokens to draw from the bag and requires as many aiming tokens as the space to the target. However, alongside those tokens, there are recoil tokens that are unexploded ordnance and noise tokens that can reveal your position. Certain conditions, such as completing the first purpose, will add tokens to the bag. This will add a noise token to indicate that the alert status has increased.
Pulling tokens is tense and blind pulls are a good way to simulate the potential for noise to get attention, but the board is simply too small to feel like a sniper. Nothing beats the open world feel of video games. Instead, they tend to prefer short-range shots in tight spaces to reduce the number of tokens drawn. As a result, the result of the shot is rarely suspicious. Instead, the main risk is to reveal your position, which is exciting but feels like you’ve missed a bit of an opportunity.
However, shooting is only part of the game, and Sniper Elite: The Board Game works great in all other respects. This is an old-fashioned hidden move, unlike the Mind MGMT slowburn puzzle, where snipers are cornered and slip into the darkness many times.
Thanks to the hidden information, both sides are working on a constant sense of being just one step away from losing. Snipers are under time pressure and must take the constant risk of giving clues, but it’s up to them to take the risk. German players, on the other hand, need to use this piece of information to approach, block major routes, hurt snipers, and run 24 hours a day.
In addition to the fun, both sniper and German squads get special cards from a decent number of options to change things. For snipers, it’s like an S-Mine that kills an unfortunate German soldier they can put secretly on the map and fail. Second, they have a squad specialty, such as a medic who can keep soldiers shot by snipers on the board twice per game. There are even German snipers that can be shot back using the sniper’s shot bag. Overall, there is a lot of variety to support long-term reproducibility.
Where to buy
For more information, see Best Board Game Recommendations to Play in 2022.
