Rainbow Six Siege is getting an official board game from the minds at Mythic Games, the same folks who made Super Fantasy Brawl and the official Darkest Dungeon board game. Called 6: Siege, the board game adaption was announced back in February, but launched its Kickstarter today to start taking pre-orders. The standard edition starts at $70, but you can also buy in at $200 for access to five planned expansions.
The board game aims to recreate the tactical FPS action of Siege in a 1v1 board game, a feat that seems harder than most board game adaptations. The base version features all 20 operators that the videogame launched with in 2015, and subsequent expansions will add a lot more when the game ships next year. As a bonus exclusive to this campaign, backing now will also earn you the Zero (AKA Sam Fisher from Splinter Cell) operator.
I tend to like my board games on the simplistic side, but 6: Siege sounds pretty complicated compared to other multi-hour tabletop games. I'm still confused after watching the entirety of Geek & Sundry's thorough demonstration of the game (embedded below if you're curious), but the gist is that players pre-place their operators on the map Battleship-style and take turns moving, leaning, shooting, and using gadgets against the other player's operators. There are even door barricades and, I believe, a mechanic for shooting through walls into adjacent rooms.
Just like in the videogame, each operator has a unique gadget or ability as well as a few backup grenades and an armor rating. Of course, seeing the other player's operators on the board defeats the purpose of stealth, so there's also a pre-discovery phase where you actually control two versions of your character with only one being real.
If that was hard to follow, then we're on the same page. I'm sure I could get a handle on how it plays after a few practice rounds, but it's certainly not the type of game I'd bring to a party. I do love just how closely the game has tried to emulate elements from the videogame like line-of-sight, though: If a player gets shot at and doesn't believe your operator could really see them from their current angle, they can issue a challenge and bust out the included "line-of-sight-ruler" to settle the dispute once and for all. I kinda wish I had one of those in the videogame when enemies yell at me in text chat for shooting when they were around the corner (they weren't).
Unsurprisingly, the Kickstarter has already blasted past its $100,000 goal and is sitting at over $400,000 at the time of this writing. The campaign will only last another 10 days, so jump now if you're sold on it. The game is expected to ship by June 2022.
