Sniper Elite: The Board Game First Impressions

Sniper Elite: The Board Game is a hidden movement game based on the video game.

I haven’t played that, but I have this now!

Sniper Elite: The Board Game is a hidden movement game based on the iconic video game series.

Sniper Elite: The Board Game Game Play

TL;DR One player is using hidden movement to move a sniper and complete objectives, the others are trying to stop them.

Theme

I mean, basically just any army/war theme? One sneaky dude and a bunch of indeterminate nationality (but definitely 100% German) guards trying to kill them.

Setup

Board out and minis out. The guards and the Sniper have to pick action cards, apart from that the hard part is figuring out which side of the board to use.

Components & Artwork

The minis are ok and the detail on the map is pretty nice. The rest is meh.

Ease of Teaching

The game itself is easy to teach. Obviously, just don’t let any new/unsure/beginner players play as the Sniper and you’re all good.

Sniper Elite: The Board Game Summary

There are plenty of hidden movement games around with Specter Ops probably still my favourite. I like that you still have 3 hunters and 1 agent, but the theme and gameplay are just better.

The big problems are that the Sniper turns were 5-10 seconds long. For the guards 3 people were chatting and planning, then moving and activating 9 minis. It was taking a long, long time to do this.

Also, I’m not sure what the official rules are for playing as the guards but we had issues there. There was no one in charge, we were moving by committee. None of us wanted to be the leading voice/quarterback so our turns took even longer.

I feel it should be a 2-player game or a 4-player game where the guards work independently.

Another issue is that, for a sniper game, no one fired a gun in the two games I played. The guards never had enough info to shoot at an empty space. The Sniper never found it worth the risk of making too much noise and revealing themselves.

Ironically, the Sniper game can be given a miss.

Jesta ThaRogue