A perfectly balanced game of deadly hide and seek brings the hidden movement genre right up to date. Impossibly smart, and thoroughly immersive. And someone said they even made a video game of it… It was very edge-of-your-seat… I would play it over and over again. I need to have this. The Secret Cabal Well, yes. Start to finish, which includes learning the board and playing a round on one of the two base maps for Sniper Elite: The Board Game, I completed a solo mission in about 90 minutes. With up to three additional players (controlling the Sniper and up to three patrols of three guards each), Sniper Elite, designed by Roger Tankersley and David Thompson for Rebellion Unplugged, can still hit an hour or more, but the game has a baked-in time limit to keep missions from continuing indefinitely. If the Sniper can’t complete an objective in the span of nine rounds of turn-based activity, they lose.

Mechanically the core off Sniper Elite is very familiar to anyone that has played one of the other cat and mouse games. The sniper has two objectives to complete and starts the game in one of the two other board zones that doesn’t contain their goals. They will take their movement on a separate, personal board using a dry wipe marker and choose whether to move quietly or noisily. However, the spice in all of this, as one might expect, is the sniping. A sniper can take an action before or after movement and the most common one you might take is shooting (at) Germans. You have a sniping bag containing aim, recoil and noise tokens. One player takes the role of allied sniper Karl Fairburne, while up to three others control squads of German soldiers trying to strike a balance between defending their base and hunting Karl down. Whilst we will do everything we can to meet the delivery times above, there may be factors outside of our control and we cannot guarantee delivery within this time frame.As the sniper, the first part of the game – before the first reveal – makes you feel like the Predator hunting down Arnie and co. You can drop soldiers easily, or even set mines for them to trip on – while you’re nearly on the other side of the map. Once your position is given away however, the defenders have a good chance of being able to pen you in – only smart dodges and shots will get you out of this. As the defender this feeling is reversed – you’re powerless at the start and have all the cards in your hand after the first reveal. Eventually you feel inevitable. One thing I would say is that while Sniper Elite stays close to its source material in presentation and overall theme, in the multiplayer at least there is very little long range sniping in my experience. Often I was snapping off shots at 2 or three spaces distant; sometimes even from an adjacent space. And while sniping feels like the whole point of the video games, for me, in the board game I have seen the sniper win with ne’er firing a shot. Not that I find any of this a problem. The sniper can take shots at the defenders, drawing a number of tokens from the bag to see if their shot reaches (you need a number of hit tokens equal to the number of spaces, including the one the target is on). Draw two noise tokens, or five non-shot tokens, and you’ve either misfired or alerted the defenders to your position. The sniper can improve their bag through kills, especially on officers – and because the sniper always decides how many tokens to draw the risk and reward is in their own hands.

While drawing tokens is tense and the blind pull is a good way of simulating the possibility of noise attracting attention, the boards are simply too small for this to feel like sniping. There’s nothing like the open-world feeling of the video games: instead, you’ll tend to favour short-range shots in cramped spaces to reduce the number of tokens drawn. As a result, it’s rare that a result of a shot is in doubt. Instead, the major risk is revealing your position which, while exciting, feels a bit of a missed opportunity. Sniper Elite, the hit video game of sneaking and shooting baddies has landed on our tabletops finally, and it’s like it should have always been with us. It’s got none of the fat that you usually get in video game to board game translations. Instead of the bloat that comes with nods to fans and weird capitulations the main thing that’s been offered to fans here is… a really good game. The Sniper fires his weapon by naming the number of tokens they want to pull from the shot bag and then drawing them at random. The shot bag’s tokens — Aim, Recoil, Noise, and Suppression — combine to either make the kill, thwart it, or even reveal The Sniper’s position. This means players who pride themselves on being a one-shot-one-kill sniper need to maintain a strong awareness of the bag odds. The game begins with six Aim tokens (needed to make a kill), three recoil tokens (can spoil a shot), and two noise tokens (spoil a shot and give away the Sniper’s location). These are added and subtracted according to outcomes of other events leading up to the shot. (The solo version of Sniper Elite: The Board Game has the player adding tokens to the shot bag for extended movement, for example.) Sniper Elite is a one vs many, hidden movement game which shares common DNA with Scotland Yard, Letters from Whitechapel/Whitehall Mystery and Fury of Dracula. It’s also based on the video game IP of the same name which has a WWII Allied Sniper sneaking around open levels, completing objectives and crucially, sniping myriad Germans - the results of which are captured via a glorious/gratuitous bullet cam. Sniping From Behind The ScreenThe maps themselves are well balanced and well illustrated, with surprise chokepoints, slow-moving hazard areas, and even elevated terrain coming into play sometimes spontaneously. One time, I realized that I was not, in fact, adjacent to a guard; I had scrambled up a catwalk, and the nearest access was two spaces behind me, so I was well on my way to escaping. The 1 1/2-inch plastic miniatures are individualized and richly detailed, with no flimsy rifle barrels or appendages; you can fix colored discs to their base so you know which sector they’re assigned to.

While up to three players can control German squads, it’s perhaps best played one on one. Two German players have to share a squad, while three runs the risk of one player bossing the others around.Sniper Elite: The Board Game’s shot bag and time limit combine to deliver some strong pacing and tension. Sniper Elite is an asymmetrical hidden movement game. One player controls the sniper character, who deploys in secret and moves off-map to try and reach two randomly-drawn objective spaces on the board. The others control the German defenders whose job it is to hunt down and either kill or delay the sniper so that the turn count runs down before he can complete those objectives.