Animal Rescue Team
- Board's Eye View
- Apr 29
- 3 min read
With Matt Leacock as co-designer with Lisa Towell, it won't come as a surprise that Play to Z's Animal Rescue Team is built around a mechanic that you'll recognise from Pandemic (Z-Man Games) and the Forbidden Island (Schmidt Spiele) series of games. That doesn't mean it's a mere Pandemic clone, however. One of the reasons Matt Leacock has had such success with his post-Pandemic game designs is the way the core mechanic can be adapted and moulded in line with a game's theme. That's certainly the case with Animal Rescue Team, which BoardGameGeek lists rather as a reimplementation of Thunderbirds, which was published by Modiphius in 2015.
In this fully cooperative game, the 1-4 players are veterinary and ancillary professionals, each with their unique special ability. There are six specialists in the box so not all will be in play as players' alter egos but the others will still be on call as non-player characters (NPCs). There's a bunch of wooden meeples representing a wide range of large and small animals, from mice to horses, that you'll be scurrying around the map to rescue.
In place of Pandemic's card collection, rescues in Animal Rescue Team uses modified dice rolls. The game comes with two custom six-side dice, and to rescue animals you need to be at their location and match or beat the number on their card, albeit subject to modification due to the specialists, equipment tokens and vehicles on hand. Yes, this game comes with an array of different vehicles. And they aren't just decorative flavour; you'll need different vehicles to rescue different animals: you can readily rescue rabbits in the back of your car but you can't fit a cow in the back of that vehicle so, for larger animals, you'll need another type of transport or a trailer. The timer icon on the dice advances a marker on a timer track which can trigger negative Events and which will lose you the game if it reaches the spot of a mission that you haven't yet completed. You also lose if you fail to complete a rescue before its card is bumped off the queue.
Animal Rescue Team is also a pick up and deliver game because to complete a rescue you need to transport your animals to an animal shelter. Rescuing animals earns you a choice of reward tokens, and you'll need these to equip you for more difficult rescues and to complete missions.
The theme, all the animal meeples and the various vehicles all help to add to this game's appeal, including to children. There's a lot to do tho', and a few unlucky dice rolls can put you under a lot of time pressure, so Animal Rescue Team isn't the light game you might expect from the components. It can be quite unforgiving and tough to beat and it's not a children's game, tho' because it's cooperative it's a game that parents can play with their children - helping younger kids with their turns. Just don't 'help' in that way if all the players are adults: an 'alpha player' can ruin the experience of the game by overly directing other players; a common pitfall of cooperative games.
There are some rules in Animal Rescue Team that can seem fiddly on the face of it but they all make logical sense; so, for example, you can move the boat freely along the waterways but you need to tow it to move it across land, and if your vehicle is towing something it reduces the distance your vehicle can move on your turn. Just be warned that some of these rules - for example, the prohibition on leaving animals in unattended vehicles - make the game harder, even if they do make thematic sense. There's inevitably a lot of 'fire-fighting' to keep on top of the most urgent rescue but to succeed in this game you'll need to plan ahead so your rescue teams get where they need to be as the pressure mounts. For parents playing the game with their children, Animal Rescue Team then is a good way of teaching the need to plan and efficiently sequence actions; a lesson that will stand them in good stead in other games.
