Review: Animal Rescue Team (Play to Z)

When disaster strikes, first responders are there to help the people in danger. But what about their animals? The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina changed the way the country approaches emergency response by requiring formal disaster planning and training to take care of animals in affected areas.

In Animal Rescue Team, a cooperative game from Play to Z, you and the other players work together to rescue 12 types of animals from dangers like floods, fires, or falling into wells. Dispatch your team of specialists with the right gear and the proper vehicles to resolve each time-sensitive assignment while gathering what you need to complete the big missions and overcome unexpected events.

Grab your gear and monitor your radio, because it’s time to explore the top five things you need to know about Animal Rescue Team!

Meeting Your Crew

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The game includes six rescue specialists with unique skills. For example, the rope rescuer specializes in vertical rescue situations, while the extraction specialist gets animals out of tight spaces.

At the beginning of the game, each player either chooses or is randomly assigned a specialist to play. The remaining specialists are on the board as well. Players can take them on missions to improve the chances of a successful rescue.

Gathering Gear

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Each specialist starts the game with a piece of gear unique to their expertise. For example, the swift water technician has a drysuit, while the veterinarian has an animal medical kit. Every piece of equipment has its own token on the game board and needs to be carried from location to location as needed.

To make those rescues happen, you, your gear, and the animals you’re rescuing need some transportation. That’s why the game includes six unique vehicles: a motorcycle, a car, an SUV, and a truck, plus a towable boat and livestock trailer.

The board itself also gets two pieces of gear: a large and small animal shelter. Every time you play, the shelters go in two regions on the board. After a successful rescue, you drop off the animals at one of the shelters where it can safely rest. But the shelters can only hold so many animals — overcrowding isn’t allowed!

Missions and Rescues

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To win at Animal Rescue Team, players need to complete three large-scale missions while also juggling random rescue calls pop up every turn.

Completing missions requires players to deliver a certain mix of reward tokens to one or more areas on the board. This represents the infrastructure, materials, funding, and sometimes just plain luck that goes into emergency response work.

But while you work on the big issues, you also need to cover the random pop-up emergencies from the rescue cards. Each rescue card describes your assignment and its difficulty, along with the specialists, gear, and vehicles that will help you succeed. All rescues are time-sensitive (more about that in a moment), but some get harder if you let time go by.

The rescue cards also tell you which rewards you get for completing that rescue. Those rewards help you resolve your team’s larger missions.

Mission Time Ticking

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Managing time is your biggest challenge in this game. And let me tell you, time does not want to be managed here.

The mission time track along the bottom of the board is your primary game clock. It moves ahead randomly based on rescue card pulls and die rolls. When it moves, it can trigger events (rarely a positive thing) and empty out animal shelters (giving you room for more drop-offs). It also tracks the time left to complete your big missions.

If the time marker enters a deadline space, and you haven’t finished that mission, the game ends and another team gets called in. You lose the game.

Rescue Right Away!

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The rescue track sits on right side of the board. It has seven spaces for rescue cards.

The game begins with three rescue cards face up on this track. These are the current rescues you need to perform. At the end of each player’s turn, you shift the current cards down one space and add another card to the top of the track.

When you complete a rescue, you flip the card face down, but leave it on the track. It eventually “falls off” the track when you advance the cards at the end of the turn.

If a face-up rescue card “falls off” the track, then your team didn’t get to that rescue in time, so another team is called in. You lose the game, the same as if you don’t complete a mission in time.

Verdict

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Animal Rescue Team delivers a challenging and fun cooperative playing experience. We love the tension it builds for players due to multiple time stresses and the way it encourages creative team problem-solving.

The game’s immersive feeling comes from the partnership between award-winning cooperative game designer Matt Leacock and real-life animal rescue expert Lisa Towell. Many of the rescue situations described in the game come from her personal experience and interviews with her colleagues.

The game’s table presence brings the rescue situations to life. It’s a blast to load your team into a vehicle, take off across the board, and then pick up the animals so you can take them to one of the two shelters.

Although the game portrays dangerous moments, it focuses on the rescue aspects, not the perils. That makes the gameplay family-friendly without compromising on tension.