There is a lot to admire in the design of the game.
The game is a tour de force of hidden movement, deduction and perfect balance. Each hunter and agent comes with a unique miniature and unique powers to make things harder for the other team.Įmerson Matsuuchi picks up where he left up in Specter Ops: Broken Covenant. Both the original Specter Ops and Broken Covenant come with four hunters and four agents. The game is spiced up further with unique character powers. At the highest player count, things change a little and one out of the four hunters is secretly on the side of the agent. The game actually plays up to five players. Their objective is to find the agent and deal damage to them at close range OR prevent the agent completing their goals in 40 moves. Up to three hunters move around on the board trying to find the agent (which can be controlled by a single player, if, like me, you need to be able to play at two). They are trying to reach three out of four objectives scattered around the board, before escaping without being killed. Both Specter Ops games have the same core mechanics: a lone agent moves secretly around a board, using a pad to track their movement. I hadn't either before buying Broken Covenant (although, I'll admit, I tracked down and bought the first game soon after buying this one). I'm not going to assume that you've played Specter Ops before reading this. Would Broken Covenant be as good? Specter Ops: The Basics We loved the original here at Zatu, with our reviewer giving it a whopping 90% score. Worst of all, this rulebook that fails to completely teach the game contains tips for roleplaying your game, which is fine if that’s what you’re into, but it needs to do its job first.Specter Ops: Broken Covenant is the first standalone expansion for Emerson Matsuuchi's original Specter Ops game. Even with the examples, there are important rules and situations where the wording is vague enough to be open to multiple valid interpretations. It’s smattered with helpful gameplay examples, but there are some rules that only appear there. I’d liken it to board gaming’s necronomicon, as you need to be prepared to glean anything from it, but even then it may drive you insane. It’s never a good sign when there’s a megathread on the BGG forums for rules inquiries and clarifications. The general shallowness of gameplay and advertised play time suggest that this is a light filler game, but the uniqueness that would be a boon to a deeper game make the teach so lengthy and cumbersome to prevent that.Īnd let’s talk about the rulebook.
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.
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