I absolutely love the way designers David Thompson and Roger Tankersley handled this one… a tense and harrowing affair Punchboard Media 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. It was very edge-of-your-seat… I would play it over and over again. I need to have this. The Secret Cabal 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.

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… 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.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. 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.

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 former allows them 0-1 spaces while the latter up to 3. But if they move noisily and pass adjacent to a German in any part of that move, they need to tell the hunter they have heard something, but no more. Once the sniper has moved the Germans have a choice of actions to take which include moving, re-deploying, spawning and a range of different search actions. 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 Screen To try and clear a path and reduce the number of enemy actions, the sniper can, of course, snipe. This uses an odd mechanic where you announce how many tokens you’re drawing from a bag, needing as many aim tokens as there are spaces to the target. But alongside those tokens are recoil tokens, which are duds, and noise tokens which can reveal your position. Certain conditions add tokens to the bag, like completing your first objective, which adds a noise token to indicate the heightened state of alert.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.