We’ve previously featured both V-Commandos and the V-Commandos: Résistance expansion on Board’s Eye View. The game has since been renamed as V-Sabotage. That’s apparently for legal reasons but the new name does perhaps better sum up the nature of the game, where players are usually allied troops or resistance fighters on missions to sabotage German installations in World War II.
V-Sabotage: Ghost then is Triton Noir’s latest addition to the V-Sabotage/V-Commandos collection. It’s an expansion that introduces new characters and new missions. It also adds in ‘red dice’. These differ from those in the base game not merely by colour but also by the fact that they have a second ‘6’ face in place of the ‘1’. There are new tokens, including those representing luck and danger, and ‘XP’ cards that can be earned by players to give them an additional ability. To accommodate the new XP cards, there are paper mats on which you place your commando card and those XP cards you have available to you. The Ghost expansion also comes with a small sheet of stickers. These are medals that you stick in the rule book to mark your squad’s record of success across various categories. When you unlock a medal, it gives you access to a specific XP card on your subsequent games.
You can see then that the use of medals and corresponding XP cards reinforces V-Sabotage as a campaign game and entices players to return to tackle further missions. The rulebook specifically encourages playing out a campaign in ‘Lone Wolf’ mode – an especially challenging solo play option in this Ghost expansion where you control just one commando, albeit equipped with the cards and tokens that would normally be shared out among the multiple commandos who you’d otherwise have at your disposal.
There’s a lot in the V-Sabotage: Ghost box but not quite everything you’ll need to play it as a standalone game: you’ll need the tokens, some tiles and cards from the base game and/or Résistance expansion. If you’ve enjoyed playing Thibaud de la Touanne’s V-Sabotage/V-Commandos then you’ll definitely want to add Ghost to take this stealth game to the next level.
In our original Board’s Eye View review of V-Commandos way back in 2017, we mused on the fact that the game lent itself to the use of minis in place of the commando and stormtrooper tokens and we commented at the time that the game would’ve made a much bigger splash if it had come with minis. Since then, publishers Triton Noir have published their Assassins Creed game, which was at its heart a reskin of V-Commandos and which was produced with box loads of minis. It’s come as no surprise to learn then that Triton Noir have also now published boxes of minis for V-Sabotage/V-Commandos so that players can deluxify their copies of the base game and expansions. The miniature packs also contain opaque cloth bags, which again we highlighted in our 2017 review as an omission from the base game. If we can get our hands and our 360º cameras on the V-Sabotage miniatures packs, we'll showcase them too on Board’s Eye View.