David Thompson and Roger Tankersley's hidden-movement masterpiece, Sniper Elite: The Board Game, perfectly captured the tense, agonizing cat-and-mouse dynamic of its digital counterpart. But a good marksman never stays in the same nest for long.
I’ll be the first to admit, I didn’t get along with the only other game I’ve played in a similar vein to this, SAS Rogue Regiment. I’m also cognisant of the fact I am probably the only one that didn’t get along with it if you read reviews and ratings - I found it rules heavy and too interpretative and went from a simple jump over a wall and take out a sentry to chaos in a matter of moments - some might like that - we didn’t. So it was with a little bit of trepidation we approached Sniper Elite and the subject of this review, the expansion Eagle's Nest.
We need not had worried. It was out of the box and on the table and played through in just over an hour and again within another hour. It is just the right amount of well, pretty much everything.
Rules are straightforward and intuitive, the core character and subsequent characters are distinct enough to be individual without daft levels of asymmetry but give enough of a difference such that there is a distinct choice between them.
The maps are clear and thematic to the missions, the minis are functional (and yes I did feel like a kid again playing soldiers with Lego buildings and matchsticks) and the relatively small deck still allows for replayabiltiy as you can vary the sniper and defender loadouts and setup respectively, and then add new characters and two new maps.
Enter the Eagle's Nest expansion, bringing new snipers, new loadouts and two new maps.
The Geography of Tension
The meat of this expansion lies in its those two new maps, which act as complete tonal opposites
- The Eagle's Nest: A claustrophobic, room-to-room interior gauntlet. Here, interior walls entirely block lines of sight, transforming doorways into lethal chokepoints.
- The Heavy Water Facility: A sweeping, macro-scale tactical arena. It introduces significant elevation changes and river barriers, pushing players to evaluate spatial efficiency over raw speed.
To navigate these environments, the expansion provides specialized loadouts. The climbing and diving gear offering elegant solutions to environmental hazards, but it's the Fairbairn-Sykes Fighting Knife that stands out—allowing the sniper to eliminate a defender silently at their location at the steep cost of a temporary position reveal. Time that right and you’re onto a winner.
The tension of the hidden movement is always the central theme of the gameplay for me, I didn’t think it would be as fun and literally as tense as it was to play.
Asymmetry and the Ghost Variant
The addition of four new allied snipers—including Rosa, Jun, and Major Eazy—injects excellent mechanical asymmetry into the setup. Each sniper fundamentally alters the risk/reward loop of pulling tokens from the shot bag. For example, Karl relies on sheer aiming efficiency, while Rosa operates with a deadly, calculated range threshold, and again as with another game I reviewed recently, the addition of a female protagonist gives it a real element of truism to real war counter insurgency tactics - not all the heroes were men.
The inclusion of the "Ghost Variant" is perhaps the design's greatest subtle masterstroke. By keeping your chosen sniper’s identity hidden from the defenders until they utilize a character-specific ability, it adds a delicious extra layer of bluffing and deduction right from turn one. In our games this tipped the advantage the way of the sniper but with more plays and familiarity I’m sure it will even out. We really like the trade off between movement efficiency and impact on stealth it made that risk reward tension incredibly real. Suffice it to say I wasn’t very good at this. I don’t have a poker face and I end up scrambling for shots and out in the open. But I did love the tight eagles nest map with the knife and got both objectives half the time.
Who is this for?
It’s a tricky one but I would say straight off, anyone who was a fan of the video game should give this a go - it’s a pretty faithful, thematically anyway, adaptation. In a hobby world recent flooded with console and video game adaptations - some more successful than others, I would put this near the top of those lists and the expansions add more of the same fun and more variety - what’s not to like.
Also I think anyone looking for something a bit different - the hidden board, the secrecy and the limited information make it a puzzle for both sides - although I do think it will work better 1v1 and its done in an hour.
Final Thoughts
While the openness of certain quadrants on the larger maps can occasionally drag the game out for the defenders, the structural modularity here is fantastic. Eagle’s Nest doesn’t reinvent the core systems, but it expands the tactical sandbox significantly. Four maps and four different snipers is a great choice, how to select the combo? Do what we do to roll a D4 and let the dice decide!
