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.