Unfortunately, the poor graphic design and cheap components that the latter crowd would gloss over won’t pass muster with hobbyists. Right off the bat, you should know this is a gamer’s game, with how much it depends upon familiarity with modern board game mechanics, but the marketing and Bond anniversary sticker suggest it’s for the more casual crowd. Well, there’s SPECTRE in a nutshell, but if the meat has interesting and unique components, the overall presentation is of a game with an identity crisis. Finally, players are handed out numbered titles according to their placement on the Spectre track, each with increasingly powerful abilities as a player is further behind. Importantly, each of the 8 spaces are tied to an area for area majority rewards that are doled out every round.Īfter everyone has placed their pawns and the mission has been resolved, the current leader rolls the Bond dice to decide where he shows his face, either visiting a player personally, making one of their powers more expensive to unlock, or a region of the board, wiping everyone’s agent cubes there and preventing use of the action space in the upcoming round. The main board’s action spaces feature a bevy of rewards, including agent cubes for area majority, resources for unlocking new features on your player boards, and even advancement on the Spectre track, functionally SPECTRE’s VP. Afterwards, players take turns placing their villain and henchman pawns, either on the shared main board or on their asymmetric player boards to unlock and activate powers. SPECTRE is such a game, with its intriguing blend of mechanics that work as a seasoning around the core protein and starch of area control and worker placement.Įach of the game’s 7 rounds starts with revealing that round’s mission card, a semi-cooperative objective mix of board state and resource bidding that will reward the player that contributed the most and punish everyone if not fulfilled.

Every now and then, a game comes around that is so mechanically unique and interesting that I have to make room for it in my collection regardless of how good it actually winds up, if only to just show it off to other hobbyists.

Spectre ops rules