Animal Rescue Team – Saving the World Without Existential Dread

There are a few key releases in the last few decades of board gaming. Klaus Teuber’s Settlers of Catan was released 31 years ago in 1995. The late 90’s saw games like For Sale, Fluxx, and Bohnanza. Ticket to Ride came out in 2004.

But nothing brought players together against the board like Z-Man Games 2008 release, Pandemic. Uniting to save the world from deadly viruses, 2-4 players would travel the world, cure patients squash diseases, and emerge victorious. While cooperative games pre-existed Pandemic, Matt Leacock’s instant classic set the standard for cooperative play and remains an evergreen even today, after though many gamers still suffer from the PTSD of the COVID pandemic.

But for those of us who are looking to get past the dark days of the early 2020’s, Matt has reunited with Zev Shlasinger and his new publishing company, Play-To-Z Games, to release Animal Rescue Team.

Animal Rescue Team is a 1-4 player cooperative board game that takes just under an hour to play. Matt Leacock paired with Lisa Towell to create another cooperative classic. This time, you’re saving animals. And this time, the game’s got some toy factor.

Setup

Randomly select one of the four setup cards, which tells you where to place all of the specialists, shelters, and vehicles.

Distribute the setup cards as player references to each player and give each player a specialist, however you want to choose them. There are six specialists in the game: you’ll use them all no matter what your player count. Players’ specialists get their accompanying equipment in their starting spot. Other specialists’ equipment remains off the board for now.

Place three Rescue cards face up along the rescue track. Find these animals in the meeple supply and put them on the map in the appropriate location(s).

Then shuffle and place mission cards face-down along the bottom of the board where the flags are. Which level of mission card you use depends on your chosen difficulty. Turn the first mission face-up.

Finally, shuffle the logistics cards and place them on the bottom left of the board. Turn two face up. Shuffle the event cards and place them face down near the logistics cards.

Let’s save some animals!

Gameplay

Your goal is to complete the three missions at the bottom of the board. These missions require having equipment and possibly vehicles in multiple locations on the board, while simultaneously spending reward tokens in other locations – which requires player specialists in those locations.

With your eyes fixed on that goal, you’ll also be buffeted by new animal rescue requirements every turn. If any animal rescue falls off the end of the time track, you lose. If the time token ever proceeds past an incomplete mission, you lose. You’ll need to work with your friends to keep everything in balance.

You’ll recognize the familiar pattern of play in Animal Rescue Team. Each player has three actions they may perform each turn, and they can do the same one multiple times, unless told otherwise. These are Move, Rescue, and their special specialist action.

The Move Action

In Animal Rescue Team, players can’t just walk across the map. They’ll need a vehicle. Fortunately, five vehicles are available at all times, and they all do different things.

Need to move yourself and not much else, and do it quickly? Hop in the motorcycle which can move four spaces in a single move action. Of course, you can’t carry much.

Need to save a horse or a cow? Grab the truck or van and hook up the horse trailer. Both of these vehicles have a move rate of two spaces in a single move action, but towing the trailer or boat slows you down to just one space per action.

The Rescue Action

Once you identify the animal(s) you want to save, you may want to bring some friends or equipment along for the ride. Depending on the rescue, certain specialists or certain gear will provide benefits that will make the rescue easier. For each icon you have in your location, the rescue threshold drops by one. If the active specialist’s icon is there and ringed by yellow, that drops the threshold by two!

Calculate the required difficulty threshold for the rescue and roll the dice. Hope you save some animals! Hourglasses move the time token at the bottom of the board.

If you beat the threshold, gain the rewards on the bottom-left of the rescue card, flip the card over and put the animals in your vehicle. You must load the animals into a vehicle and can never leave them unattended.

If you failed the threshold, try, try again!

Eventually, you’ll want to move vehicles to shelters where animals can be offloaded, freeing the vehicles for more rescues.

Free Actions

At any time during your turn you can spend reward tokens, complete a mission, or transfer animals, people, or equipment in or out of vehicles or shelters.

To complete a mission, all vehicles and equipment must be in the required locations, and players must spend reward tokens, at the same time, from the correct locations. When completing a mission, the active player draws a logistics card.

You may need to spend reward tokens to influence die rolls or buy necessary equipment to fulfill a mission.

Ending a Turn

After you take your three actions, draw a new rescue card. If it’s a Time Ticks On card, move the time token at the bottom of the board. Some spaces on the time track have events that occur, like resetting the face-up logistics cards, or emptying a shelter.

If the card is another rescue, slide the rescue cards down one slot and put the new rescue in slot 1. If any incomplete rescue falls off the track, the team immediately loses the game.

See if you can keep the animal rescue needs at bay while completing critical missions! Save the animals!

Impressions

Animal Rescue Team (ART) came with a fair amount of hype – reuniting Matt and Zev to iterate on a tried-and-true formula. And from the first moment we put the game on the table, it felt familiar. Although ART has some clear differences – vehicles, equipment – the pace of play was incredibly familiar.

Alyssa McCarthy & Jeff Langevin’s art was beautiful, and the graphic design was always clear and required minimal explanation.

Rescue cards have small stories, which we would always read out loud and coo or sigh at. Poor Mei Mei the dog! It’s undeniable the feel-good story of ART is a refreshing take on conflict with so many games’ topics being profoundly troubled.

It’s clear ART went through a lot of balancing too – when we played we often went through a range of emotions from comfort, to desperation, to elation.

We really loved the level of flexibility ART offers as well. Players can take the boat through the rivers to access the island communities, or drive over bridges – it all depended on how the organic challenges came out. Choosing to muscle all of the equipment around the map could be helpful, but there was always a struggle trying to fit everything in a vehicle. Collaboration was a requirement with this game.

This does leave room for quarterbacking, though. If you have gamers with this tendency, they’ll need to pull back for better teamwork.

From the cooperation to the feel-good stories of the game to the undeniable toy factor of the vehicles, Animal Rescue Team hit home runs across the board. We can’t think of a better cooperative game to sit down with your family around the table than this.

Get your own copy directly from Play to Z, on Amazon, or at your friendly local game store.

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Play to Z provided The Family Gamers with a promotional copy of Animal Rescue Team for this review.

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