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You are one of the few members of the Art Recovery Team, an elite group of mercenaries with one goal and one goal alone – protect all forms of art, at all costs. Your team is seeing its biggest threat yet as of late, the White Hand, a group of thieves and criminals from all around the world, hell-bent on swiping every piece of art they can get their hands on. Alone or with your task force, you must take on the White Hand, and put a stop to them in The A.R.T Project!
How Does It Play?
The A.R.T. Project is a co-operative “putting-out-fires” style game where you and your friends move around a map trying to clear locations of the ever-threatening White Hand agents; who can take over entire cities if their numbers are kept unchecked. Your goal is to find where the White Hand is hiding stolen art pieces and to recover them all. The game consists of you and your team finding clues, and utilising a shared cache of resources; gas, guns and radios. Gas is used to move around the map, guns are used to aid in combat and radios are used to call in allies to aid you in your struggle. Players also have an individual resource; their health. Health can be spent in place of any resource that is currently out of stock; but beware – if one character loses all their health, the game is over.
At the beginning of the game, each player draws two cards and plays one. Each card generally has a cost where resources must be removed from your van (or hearts must be lost if the resource is unavailable), a threat where agents spawn on a location, and a reward usually in the form of more resources. Each card played has an icon that references a location, and if three icons of the same type are ever in play at the same time the cards are discarded, and an art piece spawns there.
The movement phase allows players to move using gas cans, usually trying to deal with huge clumps of agents or trying to get to a space with an art piece to claim. If 5 agents or more are on a space at the start of a round, the location is lost, and can no longer be travelled through. After the movement phase, the players must battle any agents on their space, rolling dice to match or beat a difficulty number that will increase during the game. Each character has a die of their own, so grouping up can increase the chances of success. Spending radios can grant the players extra permanent dice to roll, guns can be spent to increase the result, and spare clues can be discarded to re-roll dice – so there is a lot of room for mitigation. If the players succeed, they kill the agents and gain the art piece, if there is one. If they fail, the leader of the fight will lose a heart.
What Do We Think?
This game delivers on a few things: Firstly, it's a gorgeous production; the art on the boards is fantastic, as are the beautiful little components. There are other little positive production oddities here too, like a poster and even a postcard that is included, and the rulebook even has little dividers! Secondly, the game is quick and simple – lightning fast in comparison to other co-ops in this similar vein; a single session can be played to completion in a matter of 30 minutes or so,
once everyone has a bit of experience. Lastly, the game has so much variety in one little box. There are 6 different maps on 3 double sided boards, each of them drastically switching up theme and required strategies, and there are four different difficulties you can approach the game with. For those that might be interested, there is also a decent little solo mode included.
The game isn't perfect however, and it may prove to have some issues that may not fit your group’s preferences. For example, the game can be rather swingy. Pulling clue cards can sometimes just lead to a loss because people don't have the resources to spend nor the hearts to back it up, and dice rolls are tough because the numbers you need to roll rise at astronomical speeds – so all those wonderful mitigation mechanisms can sometimes still struggle to help you reach success. Another issue is that the game mostly squeezes into the middle of its player count range, playing best at 2-4 players. Its solo mode is nice, albeit rather difficult in comparison to multiplayer, but at the 5-6 player range the game doesn't really scale naturally. You pull more clue cards, which means art spawns quickly, as do agents, but the balance fizzles a bit when you realise you have the exact amount of shared resources as you do with two players as you do six, and that can get rough pretty quickly when you've got three gas cans but six people want to move. The game is also quite difficult in general, and playing anything harder than normal is a real struggle even once you've got a good strategy down.
