I've been provided with a review copy of the Sniper Elite: The Board Game, and its first expansion, by publisher Rebellion Unplugged; I'm in the process of testing them. My early impressions are that the game is good, really good - but there's a very real danger that I'm going to be fatally distracted before I can write a review. See, the Nazi-popping stealth action in the board game is so compelling, I finally want to try the videogame series it's based on.
The Sniper Elite series has been around since 2005, and it's not as if I've been avoiding it - it's just never made it to the top of my teetering 'to play' pile for videogames. I like stealth action games; I'm fine with WW2 as a setting; I'm even morbidly curious about Sniper Elite's X-ray kill system, which shows you detailed closeups of the damage your bullets do to the enemies. But it's only now that I'm testing this strategy board game adaptation of the series that I'm genuinely eager to play the videogames.
Sniper Elite: The Board Game is a hidden movement game. There are three Nazi squads controlled by up to three players, tasked with patrolling a well illustrated map, which in the base game is either a docks or a submarine launch facility. The remaining player controls the sniper who, most of the time, isn't on the board. The sniper player tracks his movement secretly on a smaller copy of the main map using a dry-erase marker, trying to complete two objectives before time runs out or they get shot to death.
Playing as either side is tense. The sniper has the advantage of secrecy - the Nazis have no idea where he is, at least to start with. If he moves rapidly past a guard they will hear him, but won't know which of the surrounding spaces he moved through. And taking a shot - by drawing tokens from a big bag and hoping to reveal sufficient 'aim' tokens and as few 'noise' markers as possible - lets you shoot guards off their feet, clearing the way.
But the Nazis have numbers, and can respawn their dead soldiers. As soon as they know roughly where the sniper is - because he let off a noisy shot, or achieved his first objective - they can begin to close the noose, blocking his escape routes with their bodies, sweeping areas to pinpoint his location, and ultimately riddling him with bullets.
I've only tested the game twice, once as the sniper and once as the fash - far too little to decide if this has a place on Wargamer's guide to the best board games ever. But I am already very impressed. What I didn't expect from the game was how much it makes me want to play the Sniper Elite videogames.
It might just be stewing in the theme. My significant other asked why the game was set in WW2 - with the sniper functionally invisible, couldn't this be a Predator game? Mechanically, yes, and in one sense this is only a WW2 board game because it's based on a WW2 videogame. But that's a genuinely good era for a sniping stealth game - with media like Enemy at the Games, or the memorialisation of historical snipers like the White Death or Lyudmila Pavlichenko, sniper duels in WW2 have more of an aura of romance than in any other era.
It could also be the strategy. Playing as the sniper you can stay hidden for a long time, but not only is there a strict time limit to complete your mission, the longer you delay the more time the enemy has to gather intel and draw in troops from across the board to close you in a steel ring. You've got to be pro-active, picking sniping targets both to advance your plans and to misdirect the enemy, and stay on the move, turning this into a game of nerves and wits.
Now, does the AI in the Sniper Elite videogames have the subtlety to match a human opponent? I've no idea - but I want to find out. And as a fall-back, it should be really good fun to blow a Nazi officer's testicles off, which is something the videogame lets you do but which isn't represented in the board game (or in the expansion - I checked).
If you've played the Sniper Elite series, which game should I start with? Or are you a hidden movement board game aficionado with a game to recommend? Come and let me know in the official Wargamer Discord community.
Check out Wargamer's guide to the best WW2 games if you're a big fan of the era. The list skews heavily towards strategy games and massively multiplayer shooters, but perhaps one of the Sniper Elite games will earn a place on the list when I'm done testing them?