The A.R.T. Project

• Designers: Florian Sirieix and Benoit Turpin
• Publisher: The Op / Lumberjacks
• Players: 1-6
• Age: 12+
• Time: 40 minutes
• Played with copy provided by The Op

You are part of the Art Rescue Team, with the aim of fighting against “The White Hand”, an organization responsible for many thefts of priceless works across the planet. Your team of specialists, the best in their field, will travel from Japan to Rio de Janeiro via Scandinavia in order to recover stolen works of art. Will you manage to gather, together, enough clues in the allotted time to stop this cultural looting?

In the co-operative game The A.R.T. Project, you play together against the game. Each player draws two mission cards at the beginning of each round, then all players decide the order of the round. Your jerrycan reserves, weapons, allies, and clues are all held in common, and their management is essential. When you play a mission, you spend common resources and find clues that will be useful to everyone. Try to save seven works before the end of the mission deck…

There are 6 different Missions in the game, each with their own map.  Choose the one you want to play on.  The Japan map is supposed to be the base game and the other 5 each have their own special rules to make them different (though not necessarily more difficult).  Each player gets their player material (card, die, pawn) and 3 Health.  If you want to change the difficulty level, you can pick anywhere from 1 (hard) to 4 health (easy) to start.  The groups supply is filled with 3 Fuel, 3 Walkie Talkies and 3 Guns.  The player pawns are placed on the starting city (red flag icon) and each other city gets 2 Agent pawns.  The mission card deck is shuffled, and the End tile is placed on top of the last 12 cards in that deck.

The game is played in a series of rounds until one of the end game conditions is met.  In each round, there are 4 phases

A] The Mission – each player draws 2 Mission cards from the deck; this can be in any order, you can use the clue info on the back of the card to help you decide – though the player who draws must draw both at the same time.  Once all are drawn, players can explain all aspects of their cards but cannot show them. Eventually, each player will play 1 Mission card after discussion is had about the order of play.

There are 4 parts to a Mission card, and they are always resolved top to bottom

• Spend resources on the top line – spend from the common supply, if it is not available, the player can spend one of the Health tokens instead.
• Place the Agent(s) on the cities shown – if you run out of Agents, you will lose the game!
• Collect the resources shown in the 3rd line.  Most resources go back to the Van group supply board.  Health can be given to any player
• Collect clues – place the card facedown in a stack on the table. If there are 3 identical icons, that particular work of art is discovered.  Place an Art Piece token on the city with the corresponding symbol.  If there is already an Art Piece there or you are to place in a Lost City – do not place the Art Piece; but you STILL have to discard the cards

B] The Movement – In any order, each player gets to move their Player Pawn.  You must follow the roads on the map, and each step costs a Fuel.  The order is again important because only the active player can spend Health in place of Fuel (and only when there is no Fuel available). After movement, any Art Pieces on cities that have no agents are collected – they are placed on the Art Track.

C] The Fight – Now, in cities where there are both player pawn(S) and Agents, there can be a fight; it does not have to happen.  In each city, there is a maximum of one fight.  A Leader is chosen (who will take penalties if the fight is lost), and then all players there roll their die, and all unlocked Ally dice are rolled as well.  Ally dice are gained when the team chooses to spend Walkie Talkies.  All the good guy dice are summed.   The enemy strength is calculated by the number of agents in the city, the current threat rating on the Art track and and agents on the White Hand spot on the board.  If the players are equal or higher than the enemy count, they win.  All the agents are removed from that city.  If there is an Art Piece there, it is immediately collected – and this will affect the strength of agents in later battles.  If the players lose, players can choose to discard a clue card to reroll any die per clue on that card.  Players can also spend a gun token to increase their strength by 2.  If this is still not enough to win, the fight is over, and the Leader must place a Health token back in the supply.

D] End of the Round – check to see if any city has 5 or more agents in it; if so, the bad guys take it over and it becomes a Lost City.  Place a Lost City token on that location.  If you cannot do so, you lose the game immediately.  If players are in a newly Lost City, they must move out of it on the next turn; if they cannot, the game is lost.  Later in the game, if you are ever supposed to place agents in a Lost City; place them instead on the White Hand spot on the board, causing a permanent +1 to all enemy strength.

End Game Triggers:

The game is won if the Art Track is filled with all 7 recovered Art Pieces.

The game is lost if:

• Any player loses their last Health token
• If the End tile is revealed in the deck, finish the round in which it was revealed, and if all the art is not collected by then
• If you cannot place an Agent on the board (because they are all already on the board)
• If you cannot place a Lost City token
• If you cannot move off a Lost City on the first available chance

My thoughts on the game

So, there is a really interesting multi-layered puzzle to solve here in The A.R.T. Project.  In the abstract sense, it’s a logistics game.  You have to manage your inventory – both the shared goods in the van as well as the player’s Health tokens, and the timing of the action cards is critical in this aspect.

The team will have to figure out what is the best organization in which to play the cards, watching what things will be spent, which will be gained, etc.  There are going to be plenty of times where you won’t have the correct items, and the active player will have to expend a Health token to use as a wild card.  It is critical to remember that only the active player can use a Health token, and you can only do it if there are no matching items in the group inventory.  

While Health tokens can only be spent by the active player, a gained Health token can be spread around to anyone.  Of course, once given, it can’t be moved around, so this is another sort of puzzle to be worked on during the game.

Also important to remember is that a trio of symbols automatically resolves – so the order in which you play the cards might also matter – i.e. you don’t want to make a set of movie cards which then makes a music symbol disappear on one of those cards.  Later in the game, we found that we also could manage the symbols by re-rolling dice to remove unwanted icons from the clue area.

The next thing to consider is the map situation.  The team will have to move their members around to both claim Art tokens and fight off agents in the cities.  All of this requires fuel; so that is one more aspect of the inventory logistic management puzzle.  The actual fight does rely a bit upon dice luck; but you can generally know what the enemy strength will be and make decisions based upon that.

The order of fighting is also important to consider; remember that each time you collect an Art Token, the enemy gets that much stronger as the strength number on the track increases with each one.  Choosing the right order in which to fight the bad guys is important!  Getting ally dice is super critical.  The addition of a permanent extra d6 with every roll is huge; and now that i’ve played a few times, it might even be worth losing some hearts early on to get an extra die as soon as possible.

So, now let me take a break to discuss some more general things about cooperative games – what to do about the quarterbacking possibility.  Here, the answer seems to be: you can’t show your cards to everyone else.  But the rules explicitly say ““players can explain all aspects of their cards but cannot show them”  To me, this invokes the Joe Huber rule of trackable info.  If I can tell you everything on the card, someone could just write it down on a piece of paper and then we can figure out the plan.  Or… isn’t it really the same to just let the cards be open?  The restriction of not being able to show the cards just makes this an artificial obstacle to good planning.  The turn structure is such that the whole group makes a plan, decides what order to do things in, and then executes it.  Quarterbacking is obviously possible in this scenario, though in our group, we all are equally loud/stubborn, so we’re forced to discuss.

In general, I’m also not a big fan of games that try to enforce a communication rule that seems superfluous or artificial.  I completely understand that I might not have a popular stance on this, and admittedly, I’ve never been the greatest champion of the genre – so I’m probably negatively predisposed to this sort of thing at baseline.  Other Opinionated Gamers aren’t bothered by it at all, and tell me that I just need to go with the flow, play the game as the designer has intended, and not make a big deal of it.    The designer has responded to a similar question posed online here: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3168442/mission-card-information 

From my standpoint, there’s no reason not to show the cards because we’re going to tell each other everything anyways, and then discuss what to do together.  For my right-brained mind, just save me the time of having to listen, let me see all the choices, and we can work together to make the best plan.   There is no agency or decision making for a player to make when reading the cards, and there’s nothing to be gained by leaving things out.   In my mind, there would be ways to do this – what if each player had to choose only one of their cards to be able to read out loud.  Or… what if players were able to only discuss two of the three top lines – then, there would be some skill and decision making on which piece of information to withhold. 

So, for me, with the rules as written, the cooperative game is a bit frustrating.  In the end, the group is coming up with a single plan.  We don’t have special abilities or unique inventory items to pass around – in this game, the quarterbacking issue is mainly that there isn’t anything for a player to do to make an individual decision.  And there’s nothing wrong with this at all… it’s just a style of game I have found that I would rather play solo.  (For the record, this same issue was one I had with another recent game: LotR Journey to Mt Doom… Sure, the “active” player got to roll the dice, but otherwise, the group was always working on a single plan without players having anything individual to contribute to the plan.)  Admittedly, when we played it multiplayer, we did so by the rules – not showing the cards – and it worked – AND the players enjoyed it; but to me it just felt like it was a bunch of repeating things to make sure we knew what was on the cards.  The other OGers playing weren’t as bothered by this as myself; so again, this is definitely looking to be a “me” problem, not an issue with the game.   

The puzzle itself in The A.R.T. Project is really good.  I have played the game solo, both with the rules for the solo game as written as well as a mock 4p game where everything was just open on the table, and I found it really enjoyable.  The logistics challenge is definitely a tough puzzle, especially on the harder difficulty levels.   Having different scenarios also keeps it fresh as each different city adds in a new rule or two that cause you to approach the game differently.  I have only played two so far, but I’ve read the rules for all 6 – and yes, each will definitely require a new puzzle to be solved.  In that sense, it’s almost like getting 6 times the replayability in the box.

If you like cooperative games, this is one that is likely worth checking out.  It does have a nice level of tension, and once things crank up, there is definitely that Pandemic-like feeling of “the whole thing could blow up if we draw/play the wrong card” etc.   If you’re like me, and not the biggest fan of this type of cooperative game, it’s OK – mostly because I like the problem solving part of it.  However, for me, I prefer working it as a solo puzzle – again, just personal preference; but as I feel that I get much of the same experience from this game on my own, I’d save my limited multi-player time for games that thrive from having other humans in the room not games that are essentially solo games with discussion about how to take a turn..  I am well aware that I hold a minority opinion in that regard, and thus, I still would recommend this to anyone who likes cooperative games.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale (solo), James N, Ryan
• Neutral. Dale (coop)
• Not for me.