Rescue precious artworks before it's too late

The A.R.T. Project is a game we just had to buy at #SPIEL23. The 2 mains factors were:

1️⃣ The Vincent Dutrait art is unbelievably gorgeous. 🤩
2️⃣ We love co-operative games, and the looks of this resemble Pandemic, which is an old-time favorite of ours.

You are part of the Art Rescue Team, fighting against the White Hand, an evil organization stealing famous works of art all around the world. Your job is travel around and try to stop them from getting out of hand (pun intended 😄) and recover these artifacts.

The game is for 1 to 6 players, and although we have only played 2p, I believe it will get harder the more players you have. That goes for most co-ops, but here you will need to coordinate with each other more than usual, as turn order is decided by the players each round. Basically it’s all about communication, resource-management and optimization.

In a round you first draw cards and decide in what order to play them, but there is only limited communication allowed. Cards will show resource costs, locations where White Hand agents spawn, and resources you will get. Finally, each card shows clue symbols - you collect played cards in a pile, and whenever you have a set of 3 icons, an art piece is placed in a matching city that can be recovered. This is also the victory condition: Collect all 7 art pieces to win! 🏆

There are 3 resource types, all in a shared storage. Whenever you have to pay for something but there isn’t any, you pay by removing Life tokens. Whenever you run out of Life tokens, the game is over for everyone! ☠️

After playing cards you can move on the map, and fight the White Hand in your location by rolling dice. 🎲 This introduces a big amount of output randomness 😬, though there are ways to mitigate bad rolls. You want to keep removing enemy Agents from cities, or else you might lose cities entirely, leading you towards defeat. Whenever you are at an artwork without any Agents you will recover it, bringing you closer to victory - however with each recovered artifact, the enemies will become stronger!

There is much more to say about this game, so stay tuned😉