SAS Rogue Regiment is a solo/cooperative board game in which players take on the roles of covert operatives performing daring missions behind enemy lines during World War II. I use the term “board game” very loosely here: While SAS Rogue Regiment is packaged and marketed like a board game, and does indeed use a (modular) board, it plays like a miniature skirmish game. But without miniatures.
A Miniatures Game With No Miniatures
The game board consists of modular tiles representing a variety of different locations and terrain – these tiles are arranged in various combinations depending on the mission being played. The specific mission will also detail which SAS Operators (player characters) to use, what their objectives are, and the types and quantities of Axis soldiers (and sometimes vehicles) that will stand in opposition. All the characters are represented by round tokens with top view artwork, and the art and production value is top-notch.
Players move their Operators around the board, using a set number of action points to move, attack, and perform other tasks such as setting traps or hiding bodies. Movement and range uses a simple grid system. The goal is to remain hidden for as long as possible, avoiding the guards’ line of sight and dragging dispatched soldiers’ corpses into the bushes before they’re discovered. At the end of each turn an event card is drawn, detailing which guards move and where. But lest you think it’s all bad, there are a few helpful cards sprinkled into the event deck, such as the coveted “cigarette token” that allows a player to single out a guard who stops to light a cigarette, preventing them from moving or seeing anything for that round.
During this “stealth section” of the game, guards follow set patrol routes, making their movements easy to predict. But the event cards will occasionally throw a spanner in the works by having them suddenly change facing, ruining your plan to dash across the road unobserved, or catching one of your operators in the act of creeping up behind an unsuspecting sentry.
The game really leans into the stealth concept, with simple but detailed rules that cover everything from crouching behind hedges to how much noise a gun makes. It leads to a lot of interesting decision making during the game, as you will often find yourself leaving an Operator in the bushes for several turns waiting for just the right moment to strike a guard while no one is looking, or carefully plotting when you need to hide the bodies and when you can just leave them where they fall.
Bring on the Noise
All that sneaking around is well and good, but eventually you will have made enough noise to cause the alarm to sound, starting the “battle section” of the game. It’s important to note that the alarm going off is an inevitability rather than a sign of failure, and honestly it’s usually pretty liberating when your Operators can stop hiding in the bushes and start laying waste with grenades and machine guns. At this point most of the guards will stop following their predictable patrol routes and start chasing and shooting, using a simple set of “target the closest Operator, move to optimal position and fire” rules.
During this part of the game, more Axis troops will start spawning and moving in, so it’s never a question of “kill all the bad guys.” Once the battle section starts, the players will need to make a mad dash to complete their objectives and escape – the tone of the game becomes less puzzle-like (avoiding line of sight, predicting where patrols will be) and more tactical (using cover, taking out as many enemies as possible).
Garbled Orders
While the game play itself is very smooth and well thought out, I must admit that the rule book is not. While learning the game I found myself flipping back and forth through the rule book constantly, and frequently going to BoardGameGeek in search of clarifications. As often seems to be the case with single-designer games, the rules have been written from the point of view of someone who has been playing the game for months. Critical rules will be mentioned once in passing and never brought up again, there are no step-by-step setup instructions, and the “tutorial” missions, while useful for learning how the different Operators play, don’t really teach you how to play the game, and are actually quite difficult – it took me three or four tries to win at each one.
That said, confusing rule books are a fact of life in hobby gaming, and judging a game strictly on a bad rule book is akin to shooting the messenger. There is a very good game here, and if you have the patience to muddle through your first few games, the system will eventually click into place, as happens with all good games.
It’s a Lonely Life in the Special Air Service
SAS Rogue Regiment is a true co-op game, so much so that if you have two or more players it isn’t even all that important to decide who is playing which character, other than deciding who gets to roll for which character. The game seems designed primarily with solo play in mind, which should make it particularly appealing for solo gamers.
That’s not to say that it’s strictly a solo game – it plays just fine with two or more (after the tutorials, most of the missions specify using 3 or 4 Operators). I’ve played it both solo and multiplayer, and found it to be just as fun either way, with the real fun of multiplayer being discussing strategy as a group and coming to a consensus, then deciding who to blame when it all goes wrong.
And if you really want a two-player experience, there is an expansion – Jaeger – that allows one player to take on the role of the Axis soldiers, providing a potentially less predictable and more devious opponent.
But Seriously, No Miniatures?
At first I was sure I would want to add miniatures to this game. There’s no shortage of WWII models to choose from, and on first glance the two dimensional tokens seem a little boring. Not to mention that, with the top view artwork, it seems like it might be challenging to tell the characters apart. But after playing a few games, I found that the tokens didn’t interfere with my immersion at all, and it’s actually pretty easy to tell everyone apart – the heroes all have different colored hats or hair, and the Axis soldiers have differences in their artwork that makes them pretty easy to tell apart.
In many ways the tokens are better. It’s easy to see who and where everything is, and the artwork on the boards and the tokens is of very high quality, making it very easy to imagine that a WWII commando movie is taking place on the table. I am increasingly of the opinion that a full-color token or standee with artwork that matches the other game components is far better than gray plastic miniatures, especially for board games or even hybrids like this one. In this case I imagine that miniatures for all the characters and especially the vehicles in the game would add considerably to the game’s cost, and I’m certain they would add to its bulk, which is an important consideration for those of us whose game shelves are full to bursting.
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