Sniper! was developed by Jim Dunnigan, Hank Zucker, John Young, Ed Curran, Bob Felice, Bill Sullivan, Angel Gomez, and Hal Vaughn. The game is significant in the history of commercial tactical board wargaming for being the first treatment of man-to-man combat in the Second World War. Specifically, the game focused on urban combat between American and German forces.

The game was published in three different formats by SPI; in a simple white box (a trademark of early SPI games), in the more common black counter tray with wraparound cover, and in a "Designer's Edition" with colour box and mounted mapboards. The game was notable for a Simultaneous Movement system of play where orders were pre-plotted and turns were executed simultaneously.

The rulesheet was an unwieldy single page 23" by 35", folded along the divisions between the 10 pages on each side of the sheet. The rules were reasonably complex with procedures for facing and sighting, both horizontal and vertical movement (including ladders, staircases, jumping, and lying prone), fire combat, hand-to-hand combat, rifle grenades, satchel charges, tanks and vehicles, traffic accidents, rocket launchers, flamethrowers, and an eponymous chapter on sniper fire.  A set of optional rules discussed in the designer's notes covered sewer movement and combat.

The map was unique in depicting buildings as parallelograms (though printed material incorrectly used the term trapezoid) in order that the abstracted shapes would allow for consistency in Line of Sight rules.

The game included 1 34" x 22" Map, 2 Sniper charts and tables, Game Rules, 1 Pad of Simultaneous Movement Sheets,  two sets of 2 tanks, two sets of 2 APC's and two sets of 2 trucks as well as one counter sheet with 400 die-cut counters in olive green for the Allies, grey for the Germans, and white system counters. The map itself was in shades of red. Scenarios covered situations on the Eastern Front, North Africa, Italy, France, Yugoslavia, and the Polish uprising. In all, this was a surprisingly comprehensive look at the subject given how early in the history of tactical wargaming this release was made.

The game was fairly well supported by variant articles in Moves magazine, though the additional content was generally shallow in nature, with no new counters, nationalities, vehicles or maps appearing. The game is often linked with Patrol, which appeared in 1974 and focused on man-to-man combat in rural areas. The two games were in fact combined by TSR, Inc. when it acquired SPI properties in the early 1980s, and marketed as the 2nd Edition of Sniper!, and followed by two companion games as well as a science-fiction version.

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