Game Salute Countdown: Special Ops Board Games

In the modular game Countdown: Special Ops, you are in charge of a special ops team with a special mission! Find hidden bombs and dismantle them, help hostages into safety, or take out terrorist leaders. Due to the high variation in goals, targets, threats and specific circumstances, players need to choose their set-up and strategy each time they start a mission or a campaign. Don’t just throw in grenades with your buster at public places such as airports and train stations, or else civilians might get hurt, resulting in negative points on your mission balance. (Plus, you know, injuring civilians is not cool.) Develop your primary skill, but don’t neglect your attack power, defense power and other skills if you want to stay alive in this thrilling new game.

Countdown: Special Ops is fully modular, with players being able to create their own game by adjusting four different aspects of play:

1. Game situations: With more than 200 playing cards, the challenges and threats are different each time you play.
2. Game mode: You can play a single mission, a campaign or a scenario; each game mode has its own level and duration, and you’re advised to start with a single mission on the lowest level (green).
3. Level up: Did you succeed a few times on level green? If so, you might want to try the next (orange) level or even a scenario, that is, three missions in a row with increasing difficulty!
4. Goals: Even players’ goals can be altered. Countdown: Special Ops is a co-operative game, but if you’d like to change the rules, you could add one or two traitors to the team and play “Traitor Mode”.

Development
You can develop your own Special Op by improving his or her skills. This is done in scenario or campaign play. This brings out interesting aspects of the game in which you have to choose how many risk you want to take to gain extra experience or if you want to move slow and stay alive at all cost…

This variation, combined with the 30-minute time limit per mission, makes the experience of a mission “feel” like an actual PC game in many aspects. Smart development is essential to survive the missions on higher threat levels.