Cool Mini or Not | Project: Elite | Board Game | 1-6 Players | Ages 14+ | 60 Minute Playing Time

Product Information

Project: ELITE is a cooperative, real-time, science fiction board game in which you attempt to stop a group of invading aliens and complete different missions. This new edition of the game was designed by Konstantinos Kokkinis, Marco Portugal, and Sotirios Tsantilas, and it’s co-published by Artipia Games and CMON. But I’d also take a moment to talk about the god awful artwork. Project: ELITE‘s artwork is generic 90’s sci-fi at best. You can tell that the artist was going for a first person perspective based on the rifle on the right side of the box, a generic space marine on the left, some nondescript viscera that’s never seen in-game, and an alien that also wasn’t featured in the game. It looks like the kind of game I would have desperately wanted when I was eight years old. It’s a genuine shame because no matter matter how many times the old adage gets repeated, there will always be people who judge a game by its box art. This Project: ELITE review was made after playing the game eight times. This is a review of the base game. While technically not deception, what they offer is about as close to a legal scam as you can get. The contract will detail just what a terrible deal you are signing up for so they can show that you were fully aware and signed in full knowledge, but it may not reflect the words of the salesman which you cannot rely on.

Depending on how well you and your team perform, a full game of Project: ELITEcan take as little as thirty minutes and no more than sixty, making it an excellent way to start out any game night. It’s also an incredibly easy game to teach.All infrastructures within the Solar System have been destroyed. The Mars colony has been wiped out of existence. The aliens from Proxima Centauri b have now reached Earth and, from their massive fleet hidden behind the moon, they rain down destruction with total impunity, performing mass abductions and destroying our research facilities at the first opportunity. They have been forced to abandon their home world, scorched by the sun, and they turned their eyes toward Earth, determined to seize it by any means. For the first time in History, humanity stands united against a common enemy. Only one hope for free Earth remains - Project: ELITE!

Gameplay: Imagine a cross between Aliens and Starship Troopers: you have surgical precision objectives to achieve, and leave the battlefield as a team, wounded maybe, but alive. And all this within 8 game turns, without any character dying, and without any alien reaching the recovery area.

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Depending on what difficulty players selected, players will draw and resolve a number of Swarm Spawn cards, followed by Boss Spawn cards. In a Medium difficulty game, players resolve one Swarm Spawn card per player and two Boss Spawns cards . This system guarantees that the more ELITE operatives there are on the board the greater the opposing force will be without upsetting the difficulty balance.

There are 5 variations of gameplay available so you can certainly keep things relevant and interesting. I have tried all 5 of these variations and they offer a good variety and while they may not be massively different in some regards, I am more than happy to have the option to choose which objective to play during each game. Not helping this daunting look to the game is that, while there is an easy difficulty, the game doesn’t suggest an objective mission nor a side of the board to start on. Exterminate is one of the easier ones to play, as the objectives are out on the board for all to see from the beginning. Still, despite being in the rulebook first there is no attempt at saying is it mission 1 or that it is a good one to start with. Unfortunately, the missions do feel a bit similar with only some minor differences, such as carrying the objective with you to a location. Surprisingly, there isn’t a simple survival waves mode, which the game is surely capable of.

Core Sets

This is a game that needed asymmetry between the characters, and it got it in both its previous as well as its current iteration. It is immediately obvious that some characters are more oriented towards the lower player counts, while others like Kinje are more useful in higher counts, yet everybody has something to offer. The fact that everybody begins the game in with a different weapon every single time keeps the experience fresh. The rule about a maximum number of two weapons and unlimited items keeps the game honest and imposes hard choices on the group.

I’ve always liked the tension in real-time cooperative games, and the tension level is pretty insane in Project: ELITE. Those two minutes fly by as you frantically roll your dice, move your hero, move the aliens, shoot the aliens, and try to complete those objectives. All of that does the job of making you feel like you’re in a super-fast-paced action scene in a sci-fi movie. CMON Limited announced today they are producing an updated edition of the widely-acclaimed board game Project: ELITEby designers Konstantinos Kokkinis and Sotirios Tsantilas. Originally released in 2016, Project: ELITEis a unique real-time, cooperative board game like no other. Overall, I find Project: ELITE to be a fairly easy game. So much so, that I’ve never bothered attempting to play on Easy mode. My wife and I learned to play on the medium difficulty and it came close a few times, but we managed to hold a 100% win rate playing with a range of two to four players. It wasn’t until we started playing on the hardest difficulty that we truly found the game to be challenging.This new edition of Project: ELITE will have new art, new miniatures, new card designs, new weapons, new ELITE members, new enemies, and more. Project Elite’s mission system does leave something to be desired. It’s nice to have five mission options, but honestly, there are actually only three. Extermination, Demolition, and Recon are all just “go to a location and roll dice until you fill up spaces”. Capture is fundamentally similar but gets a free pass because you actually have to activate the traps while aliens are on them. Exploration is the only really unique mission mode as you’re tasked with flipping over tokens that can have an effect on the board state. In Project: ELITE, you’ll play up to eight rounds trying to hold off the alien invasion and complete your mission’s objective. The five missions have different objectives, including setting up explosives, capturing aliens, and gathering intelligence. The game comes with two maps and you can play any of the missions on either one.