Designed by Galen McCown, with art by H S Law, Super Snipers is a game where two players (or just the one if you are playing solitaire against the 'AI') are racing to score three kills before their opponent.
Tho' this may sound like a head-to-head tactical war game, Super Snipers is actually a polyomino-driven puzzle game. You first have to detect which of three locations your opponent is in. You do this by drawing and placing out polyomino pieces. There are three different colours of polyomino and the first piece of each colour has to connect with the edge of the grid on which it is placed; subsequent matching colour pieces need to have one or more points of orthogonal adjacency. Your aim is to 'isolate' the enemy icon on the grid (ie: surround it so that it cannot trace a path to the edge of the grid). Do this and you get to flip a card that will tell whether that is the location of your foe or if it is a 'miss' - in which case you need to rinse and repeat on one of the other two grids.
Finding your enemy's location tho' is only the first step. You still have to carry out the kill. That requires a new larger grid. The new grid will also have the location of innocent bystanders. For a clean kill, you need to place your polyominoes so that they 'isolate' all of the innocents as well as the target. First player to three kills is the winner. And because players almost certainly won't identify their opponent's location at the same time, you'll mostly find one player has moved on to the target phase while the other is still trying to find their enemy's location. You can see that represented in our Board's Eye View 360. We were pleased to see tho' that the game incorporates catch up mechanisms for the player who is behind on their kills.
Super Snipers is a puzzle optimisation game because, given the placement rules, you need to carefully plan the positioning of your polyomino pieces for best effect. Just place them willy nilly and you could find you are making it difficult or even impossible to 'isolate' your target. You draw polyomino pieces blind from a bag (a process that can be prone to 'cheating' as it's all too easy to 'accidentally' feel for the shape you need). The polyominoes you draw go into a queue that you can manage and manipulate using your character's special powers and/or the single-use tokens you can access by covering up the corresponding spaces on a grid.
Tho' the Board's Eye View team has only had a short time to play the preview prototype, we could see that Galen's Games have put together a versatile package. You can play Super Snipers as a turn-based game or you can use the sand timers provided to inject real-time adrenaline into the game: you need to complete your turn before the sand runs out or your opponent will, in effect, get an extra turn. You can also play Super Snipers as a solitaire game in two different ways.
Super Snipers is just coming to the end of its run on Kickstarter. Indeed, today is the very last day of the campaign so click here now to check it out.