The A.R.T. Project | Cooperative Strategy Board Game | Card Drafting, Zone of Control Game | Coop and Solo Play for Adults and Teens | Ages 12+ | 1-6 Players | 45 Minute Play Time

My game group mostly plays collaborative games because we get far too competitive when we play against each other. So, I'm always on the hunt for fun, collaborative, pretty games. The A.R.T Project fills those boxes easily. It is a very straightforward game: you and/or some of your friends work to retrieve art pieces. You need to take out the people stealing the art, manage supplies to do this and work together to offset losses and gains. There are many moving pieces, but three 30-somethings could play it with a rampaging toddler running around quite easily. The only thing I will say is that I think the team behind it is French (why do the French game makers make the prettiest games?), and a few grammatical issues in the instructions caught my attention, possibly from a translation issue. Thankfully, they don't make the instructions unintelligible or vague, but they do make you double back and reread the sentence and go, "Ah, that's what they meant to say." It's more imprecise English than anything. Again, the instructions are intelligible; there are a few things that a copy editor might have smoothed out, but they are not that big of a deal.

This is a fun cooperative game. Sturdy and nice game pieces. Good for adults and teens. We play a lot of games, and we looked forward to playing it again to work out our mistakes from the first gameplay.

This game is similar to pandemic in many ways. The game is played on one of the six maps included. Each map alters gameplay and difficulty creating a replayable experience. Also the game has rules to make it harder or easier. In the game you control one of the six agents to recover stolen art by the organization called the white hand. During each turn each player will draw two cards and pkay one (in solo mode you draw three and play two cards) and discard the other. Each card has three sections that needs to be resolved. The first sections takes resoirces from you which are walkie-talkies to unlock assits dice, guns to add +2 to yiur combat roles, gas for movement and hearts of health (hearts are like wild resource you can discard anytime to replace a resource you dont have.) the second tells you where to add white hand agents and the third provide clues for where the art is. If you collect three clues of the same an art crate is placed in the location matching the clue icons. Then you can move, fight white hand agents on your location and or pick up art. Each art you pick makes assit dice cheaper but white hand agents stronger. You must defeat agents or risk losing the city if you have 5 or more agents in one city at the end of the turn. What i like -easy game play - entretaining and similar to pandemic - low table space - easy set up - clear rules - variability in the maps What i dont like - characters dont have any differentiation aside from their color. They are all the same. - hard and somewhat luck based as resources are limited to the luck of the draw and combat is governed by dice rolls that can be rerolled by discarding clues. - you can lose at the begining specially solo if you dont have resources and are forced to discard hearts. Overall it was a fun experience and engaging. A filler game but also a good gateway game. A somewhat sinplified pandemic with more map options and each map brings some extra rules amd set up that keeps it interesting. Also some campaign rules to play each map back to back. The only big issue i see is price. At the same level of pandemic specially pandemic starwars or pandemic word of warcraft not sure many will jump in on this.

We love this game. We play it often as its replayability is high, as is the fun factor. We like the fact that the came spurs conversation as you try to figure out the best strategies to win. We also like that there are various difficulty levels. We can play an easier version when introducing others to the game or play a more difficult map when seasoned players are at the table. GET THIS GAME!!!

The components are good, the game just wasn't for me.

This game is very fun! It is easy to learn, participants work as a team to beat the board of "white-hands". Definitely fosters collaboration, patience and valuing the opinions of others. We play with our 12yr. old son. It has become his "go to" favorite on game night!!

I have played several cooperative games, and this is a really cool one! It reminds me a bit of Pandemic, but there are more ways to lose in A.R.T. The rules seem daunting at first, but it is pretty easy to learn. My 12-year-old and his friend learned the rules and played it (and won). One of the coolest things about this game is the fact that it comes with so many boards. There are 3 double sided, so you have 6 different boards to play on. They are all different countries or areas. The options are Egypt, U.S., Scandinavia, Polynesia Islands, Rio De Janeiro, and Japan. There are also different modes of difficulties, and you can play a solo version of this game. So, this game has so many different ways to play, it won't become routine any time soon, which is great. Some games are really fun, but after a few times playing them, they can get predictable, but this game has so many options! I also love the look of this game and the quality. For a game called A.R.T., it definitely has cool artwork. All of the pieces, cards, boards, etc are high quality. The premise of the game is that you are part of an art rescue team going up against "The White Hand" which is a group of organized art thieves. Every round has 4 phases- the mission, movement, fight, and the round ending. The A.R.T team wins when they recover all of the stolen art. It's a fun game, but it is more on the level of Settlers of Catan, Pandemic, Ticket to Ride. It's not on the same level as Monopoly, Sorry, Clue. I love all of those games, so not knocking any of them. It's just going to seem somewhat complicated to people who don't usually play games like this. That said, I really recommend looking into games that seem more challenging at first, because there's a whole world of awesome games out there! This one wasn't too hard to learn. I love adding this one to our collection. Co-operative games are really special, because of the teamwork involved. This one requires strategy and utilizing resources wisely, all the while making sure you don't do something that makes you lose the game. As I wrote, there are a few ways to lose. Cooperative games are built to be harder, because it's really no fun if you win all the time. My only, very slight, complaint is some of the rule book has print that is hard to read, because of the pale color or lack of contrast against the background. Small complaint, because even the instructions look cool and fit in with the style of the game. I highly recommend this game! I look at reviews a lot when shopping. I hope this review helps!

I'm an experienced boardgamer, having played hundreds of hobby boardgames for over 20 years - I even owned a small tabletop store for a while. So I've seen quite a few of these games, and I must say I'm impressed with this one. It's more satisfying and well done than I expected, and I suggest anyone looking for a decent cooperative game give this a try. The components and production quality of the game are solid. The instructions are decent, which isn't a given in the industry. The cards might be of *slightly* less quality than other modern games, but not really bad at all. There is no organizer insert, but the included baggies are more than adequate. The game is cooperative...which is a divisive issue among boardgamers. Myself included. But I was pleased to discover the design of the game prevents "quarterbacking" to a great extent. The rules are simple enough to where anyone who played the game before isn't at a great advantage. And because a lot of the important information is only revealed to a single player at a time everyone can contribute fairly equally. I found the playing experience to be great fun and it definitely felt like a cooperative effort with no bad feelings or annoyance with others around the table. Quite a feat! So far all my games have been 3-player, and I imagine that with more players it'll be impossible for anyone to get a full mental image of everything that's going on at once. But I think that's intentional and would make for a great experience. The game should scale very well, as the number of players directly influences both how many enemies appear and how many dice you get to fight them. The difficulty is surprisingly well balanced. In all of my plays, we were always struggling to have enough health and resources, yet never feeling like we were facing impossible odds or unreasonable challenges. It felt like if we coasted and didn't think too much we'd have a 25-35% chance of success...which we could maybe push to 65-75% if we were clever enough. (That's just how it emotionally felt; I'm not sure of the actual odds.) This is a good balance in my opinion. The game comes with 6 different maps to play on. They are all about the same difficulty, just with one or two changes to the base rules to mix things up and keep it interesting. But I've only played on the basic Japan map thus far, as the game has offered sufficient variety and surprises to where we've not yet felt a need to change the map. So if you're interested in coop games but find it hard to solve the "quarterbacking" problem, I suggest giving this a try. It might be a very different experience with 5-6 players however, so your mileage may vary. In any case it's a fairly quick game (45-60 minutes I'd say, although your first game may be more like 90).