Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Harder to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
How it plays
How does it play?
Welcome to 1950s USA — the era of huge cars, rock 'n' roll, and alien activity! To prevent a mass panic, the President has ordered his generals to store all evidence of the existence of aliens.
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Area Majority
Compete to have the strongest presence in areas that award control or points.
Action Queue
Place actions into an ordered queue that resolves now or on later turns.
Deck / Bag Building
Add new pieces during play to improve the cards, tokens, or dice drawn later.
Pick Up and Deliver
Collect goods at one location and transport them to another for rewards.
Read the full game description
Welcome to 1950s USA — the era of huge cars, rock 'n' roll, and alien activity! To prevent a mass panic, the President has ordered his generals to store all evidence of the existence of aliens. In Area 51, a secret military base in the Nevada desert, players store all the futuristic weapons, unbelievable tools, and alien corpses in high-end storage facilities. However, this base is capable of hiding only certain artifacts and must be improved all the time. The generals try to outperform each other in building and upgrading the facilities and the infrastructure in addition to finding the optimal logistics for storing the artifacts to please the President. In Area 51: Top Secret, players encounter several categories of artifacts — ships, weapons, tools, etc. — which are numbered 1-4 to show how dangerous they are (and therefore what security level is needed to store them). Players must build storage facilities to store these artifacts. Artifact cards need to be collected, but the decisive element in the game is that once a player chooses to pick up a pile of artifact cards to place them into storage facilities, they need to store ALL cards possible, including those that will score points for the other players. The main strategy of the game is thus to use the existing storage facilities and transportation vehicles to optimize one's own scoring.