WBG Score: 9
Player Count: 1-4
You’ll like this if you like: Sniper Elite
Published by: Word Forge Games
Designed by: Robert Butler, James Churchill
This is a review copy. See our review policy here
Since this is a game all about stealth and keeping quiet, I figured the review should also follow suit. So from here on out the entire review is going to be written in whispers. Unfortunately, since I can’t really convey whispers in a written format I’ll need to ask everyone to please read this review in hushed tones. Thank you for your cooperation. Now ON TO THE REVIEW!, sorry, sorry, too loud.
How to sneak.
First, pick your mission and your operators. Each operator has two different sets of weapons and tools so pick whichever is best for the particular mission or just go with whichever sounds more fun. Set out the sentry’s on their spots and the relevant patrolmen on their paths on one of the starting arrows and facing in that direction. Each one has two different starting spots so feel free to pick the one that’s advantageous to you. Set up the event deck with any extra cards, should the mission call for it, place the alarm marker on your desired difficulty and away you go.
The game has two distinct phases. A stealth phase and a battle phase and starting with the stealth phase which goes on until the alarm track gets to zero and triggers the battle phase. Both phases play out in similar ways but have very different feels. On your turn you get 4 Action points and a plethora of different actions to use them on. Moving is one but you can also spend two AP (action points) to sprint three spaces. You can crouch, attack, place mines, traps, do combined actions like pop up and shoot or move and attack. You can aim at a target for an advantage when you attack them or you could mark them meaning you can take an attack action on them during the enemy phase if/when they move into a better position. You can even use a free action to pick up an object on your spot. There’s a few things that you’ll want to pick up like traps you’ve placed down, fuel barrels so you can set them up to help you explode things in the future or, probably more important, picking up a body or dropping one off in a nearby bush all in the name of stealth. There’s really no point taking you time to cleverly take out an enemy only to leave a mess behind you. It’s the in game equivalent of taking a cookie from the jar and leaving a trail of crumbs.
Many things you do can potentially alert an enemy to your presence. So if you fire a loud weapon, any enemy within its earshot range will become alert and turn to face the direction of the shot. They’ll also alert any other enemies within four spaces of them. They'll also alert if they see the body of a fallen comrade or see you moving within their line of sight. If you are seen then you become spotted.
Once players have taken all their actions the enemies will go. If you’ve been spotted, they’ll try and move into a position to attack you. Then you'll flip over an event card and check the left side of the card. This will either advance the alarm tracker or rotate the sentries or the patrolmen round in a specific direction. The direction matters because if you (or a body) fall into their line of sight as they turn they'll become alert. Then the patrolmen will move four spaces on their track with the colours alternating. Black lines on the first round, white on the second etc. Any enemies that moved, or are alert and have line of sight on you will attack.
Once the alarm track hits zero, which will usually be by combination of using loud weapons, having alert enemies at the end of a round, the event deck or from the use of explosives (which instantly drops it to zero) the game will head to battle mode. This plays out in pretty much the same as stealth mode except now all enemies are alert and will head for the nearest spotted operator. If you’ve not been spotted then you can still be sneaky but if, when the alarm goes off there are no spotted operators then you have to pick someone to be spotted, just so the enemies have someone to head towards. Spawned units will enter the board and now the event deck will spawn more enemies. The game will end when either all the operators have been taken out or they’ve escaped or a combination of both. You’ll then count up your mission points and see how you did. Missions will award you points for completing objectives and for getting operators back safely and will give you point targets for a minor and a major victory.
It’s oh so quiet
If you’d have told me that someone was going to make a board game that was essentially a stealth simulator that tries to mimic those great stealth video games, but had the potential to have you sitting around not doing anything for a few turns. Well I probably would have steered clear because dead turns in a board game is one of my pet peeves and yes, in Rogue Regiment you can have moments of doing nothing on your turn. But somehow this game makes them really interesting and tension filled and almost essential if you want to play efficiently. It captures the very essence of those stealth video games perfectly as you lie in wait just hoping an enemy will move so you can either make a run for it, run up and stick a cheeky knife in their back or throw down a bear trap for them to walk into. It gives you that little buzz of excitement and makes you want to pat yourself on the back (quietly) for a plan well executed.
What makes this whole thing even more tension-filled is that event deck. The partly programmed enemy movement means that you can spend your time making a plan so good that it would make the whole Oceans Eleven gang immediately retire, only to flip an event card that rotates an enemy and before you know it you’re awkwardly standing, knife in hand, staring face to face with the person you were just about to expertly off. It’s moments like that though that really make this game shine. As much as it stands to ruin some well thought out plan, you’ll find it hard not to laugh at the situation. It makes for some awesome in-game stories that you’re sure to be talking about from game to game. That unpredictability of the game means that there are very few truly safe spaces on the board, so you find yourself holding up on a space that should be safe, just so long as that one sentry doesn’t turn around. At that point all you can do is hold your breath as that next card gets flipped over in what feels like slow motion. Not only that, but it ups the ante when in terms of replayability. You could play the games the same way each time and every card flip will shape the game into a wholly different experience. It elevates this game from what could have been a solvable puzzle to being a tension filled pot of sneaky joy.
The two phases of the game both bring their own challenges and puzzles while also bringing their own distinct vibes. The stealth phase is all about doing your best Elmer Fudd impressions and trying to be vewy, vewy quiet. It’s all about being meticulous in your planning and trying your best to do as much of the mission as possible before all hell breaks loose in the battle phase. It’s this phase (I’d imagine from all of my plays) that will make up the bulk of your games. You can’t help but feel inventive and a little bit clever as you sneakily plant traps or hide in bushes and mark an enemy so you can get them as they walk past you. It has a real sandbox feel to the game as you and the other players come up with a myriad of different ways to play out your missions. For me it really captures everything I’d want in a stealth game but still has plenty of room for more potential things down the line. In fact some of the Kickstarter extras included an operator that can use a disguise and someone that can throw rocks for distractions. Two small things in terms of what they can do but huge in terms of how you can approach the game. It just goes to show how much they could do with some small changes in the future.
We’re in the Endgame now
The battle phase, like Thanos or taxes, is inevitable, either from the game ticking the clock down or from your own choosing by using explosives for example. It's at this point the game goes from players taking a precision approach, to being a wrecking crew in a game that resembles an all out action movie. There’s still some room to be a bit sneaky because as long as you’ve not been spotted you can still pull this off without the attention, but now it’s all about the hustle because the longer you leave it, the more units are going to flood the board and the harder the final dash to victory is going to be. Once you do get spotted though you’d better hope that you’ve done enough of the mission that you can just run towards the exit because the game is going to ramp up. Actually, after all that stealthy tension in the previous phase it can be quite a nice release to break out the big guns (literally) and have no restrictions. That’s not to say that the tension drops though. It’s just been swapped out for a different type.
I spoke about replayability and the sandbox nature of the game and I love how this game gives you so many options in how you can approach each mission. One time you could hitch a rowboat across the river, the next time you could attempt to get across the bridge or send an operator over the river in scuba gear to take out some enemies before you make an advance. You could go full stealth and choose not to use loud weapons or you could just go all hell for leather and storm in firing and throwing grenades.
I love the customisation this gives you. Not only from a “how to play out a mission” standpoint, but from how you can change up the maps. The first mission for example seems like a solo only affair and acts as a tutorial in some respects. But if you want to play with more players then just add a few more tiles to open out the map. Similarly, if you think a mission is too big or could take too long then just remove a couple of tiles. Burned through the missions in the book? Don’t worry, just make up your own. This is definitely a game that gives you all the tools and encouragement to be as creative as you want. The missions are just there to get you started or for people who just want to set up and play.
The whole thing is built to be played how you want but there’s room to add so much cool stuff down the line as evidenced by the recent trailer for their new Kickstarter which has got me really excited for what’s coming.
Talking of setup. The majority of my plays of this have been solo and generally if a game is too big or fiddly to set up it tends to me off of playing it a lot solo. I wouldn’t say Rogue Regiment is a quick setup, nor is it a “I’ll get to the club early to set up” job. But it’s the type that would generally put me off soloing other games. This game has broken the mould because regardless of the setup I still keep wanting to pull this out and run through another mission and experiment with it.
Go big or go rogue
I hope you’ve got a big table because this game can be a table hog as the missions get bigger. Each double sided tile is about 28cm by 28cm and at minimum you’ll be using four and at most all nine with one side taking up the entire width of my table! That’s without having to add the operator boards and any spawn tiles on it. As I mentioned earlier there are ways to make missions smaller or bigger which is a great touch for people with smaller tables, but it’s worth being aware of if you want to play the missions by the book.
If I’ve got any other niggles it’s that it can be difficult to tell the difference between the normal riflemen and the SMG riflemen so it’s worth keeping them in separate compartments if you can. I also don’t love that the alarm track is printed in the mission book. The game can already take up a decent amount of space so having to have a book out on the table, doesn’t make that any better. I kinda wish the alarm tracker from the Kickstarter (a cardboard wheel in the shape of a watch) was included in the retail version. I’ve taken to printing out my own separate tracker for it just to help with table economy.
Something else that may just be a me thing (let me know) is that the measuring tool you’re given measures 8 spaces (which is the how far the enemy can see) but it’s only accurate for diagonal measuring. I mention this because all my games up to and including half of my first multiplayer game I'd been using to measure straight and not counting the 8 spaces and it counts way more spaces that way. It actually made the game harder than it should have been. It was no less fun, but it definitely made my head spin more trying to get myself out of some situations.
I don’t back Kickstarters for many reasons, but sometimes a game like this turns up and makes me want to reconsider that decision. Because now it’s here and I’ve played it, I want everything. I've just got the retail box and I’ve seen unboxings of people with their all in black boxes full of all the expansions, event cards, the extra operators and with all the missions and I want all of them and honestly, it’s not often that I fall this hard this quickly. Thankfully some of those you can get at retail and unfortunately some you can’t, but I’m certainly going to try and pick up what I can. On the subject of Kickstarter, I want to applaud everyone involved for not falling down the miniatures rabbit hole. This could so easily have been a box……sorry boxes! filled with minis and potentially sold double but I think the tokens are all that’s needed here. They’re good quality, practical and don’t require people to have painting skills to make them pop.
SAS Rogue Regiment gives me everything I want in a stealth game whilst giving me enough freedom to tell my own stories, play the game however I want and let me tailor it to my own needs. Even though this is largely a game about keeping quiet I think we need to be making enough noise about it to get this in front of as many people as possible.
Right, I’m off to sneak around my house and hope that my wife doesn’t spot me. Not for any nefarious reasons, but because I’ve come home later than I should have and I think I’m going to be in trouble. Wish me luck!