The Great Art Robbery is a light/medium weight game straightforward to play with quick turns, no nastiness and enough to think about without being a brain burner.
The Aim of the Game
To be the player whose stack of stolen art is worth the most money at game end.
The Set Up
On a map of Europe we see 7 Cities with Art Galleries located in a coloured region linked to 7 coloured boxes across the top. In each of these boxes deal a random Gold card and a Bronze card. The Gold cards are worth more and are harder to steal
The remaining Art cards are placed face down in 2 separate draw piles.
An 8th city in the centre, Geneva, marks the art thieves’ hideout..
These are linked in a simplified grid to show routes.
A red cop car is placed at the start of the time track. It is moved along 1 space each time an Art card is “stolen” when it reaches the 17th space the game ends.
Each player starts with 10 Robber cards: 2 copies of 5 types, a getaway car token, a getaway car card and 3 marker cubes all in their chosen colour. They place a cube in
the starting space of the Suspicion Track and the Hideout Track. Turn their getaway card to the available side (not covered up) and place the car token on the city of their choice.
Note: Whilst each robber team has different names and looks each start team is the same in gameplay terms and will not be equipped to steal Art.
Specialists
On a 4 x 5 tableau alongside the map are set up the display of specialists. They are the more powerful and costly cards containing greater functional strengths and also the skills needed to steal the art. There are 4 possible skills shown as coloured circles.
There are 4 coloured rows for these cards to be laid out in. These rows add a premium of from 0 to +3 coins to their printed price. There are 3 copies of each card. With 5 players all are played; with 3 or 4 players only 2 copies are used and with 2 players there is only one of each type.
Note: The rulebook describes these as copies but they are not all exact copies; as can be seen in the picture some have differing skills. This is never acknowledged so you must decide yourselves how to choose which versions are removed and if there are 2 or 3 differing copies in the stack are buyers allowed to pick and choose?
Gameplay
The Great Art Robbery is a deck-building game. You need to enhance your pack to get the skills you need to steal Art and it will help if you weed out lower value cards.
Each card has 1 or more of the base symbols: Coins and Wheels.
Specialists will have more base symbols, plus skills or extra abilities.
Symbols can be in horizontal rows where you can use all of them or vertical rows where you must choose 1 row to use.
Your starting deck of 10 Robbers has 2 each of the following 5 types :- 1 Wheel; 1 Coin; 2 Wheels horizontally; 2 Coins horizontally; 1 Wheel 1 Coin vertically.
Each player shuffles their 10 Robber cards and deals themselves a hand of 5. On their turn they play the cards they wish and either use Wheels to move their car or take Actions if they are in a City. All 5 cards are then put in the discard pile and they draw another 5 cards for the next round. this can change later via Hideout actions.
You can also use your Getaway car token to add 1 Coin or 1 Wheel to your total and flip it to its used covered side. It can be reactivated by paying any combination of 3 wheels or coins at any time or via a specialist skill.
City Actions with a Gallery are - Hire a Specialist; Steal Art.
You can do both but only 1 time in that City until you have moved to another City and performed an Action there. To show this you place your marker where your Action took place.
Hire a Specialist – pay the cost + any premium in Coins and place in your discard pile. It will only be available when shuffled back into your hand.
Steal Art - play the required skills shown on the bottom of the Art and take it. Move your marker and anyone else in that City along the Suspicion track. Move the marker along the Time Track. If it ends on a police car symbol the player or players with the highest level of suspicion must take a useless Interpol card to weaken their deck and all suspicion markers are reset to zero. If it is at the end of the Time track the game ends immediately.
Geneva Action – Upgrade hideout – Each time you are in Geneva you can move your Action marker there and pay any combination of 5 Coins and/or Wheels to upgrade. The 3 upgrade levels allow you to keep back 1 or 2 unplayed cards and increase your hand size to 6.
Elimination
You can improve your deck by eliminating (permanently discarding) any weaker cards and/or penalty Interpol cards by paying 1 Coin and 1 Wheel per card when you are on an Elimination Space on the map, a red circle with a cross in it or when playing a Specialist card with that symbol.
Game End
Play ends as soon as the Time track marker reaches the last space after a heist.
Total the value of your spoils less 1 point for each Interpol card you have and the player with the most points wins.
Points to remember
- you can hire any specialist you can afford in any gallery City but you will not be able to use them immediately to steal Art
- not all “copies” of Specialists necessarily have the same skills
- When there a pile of Specialists is empty move the ones in higher rows down making them cheaper to hire
- you have to move to another City and take an action there before you can take a 2nd action in a city
- apart from that there is complete fluidity in how you split your coins and wheels when taking actions
- any time someone gets an Interpol card all players suspicion cubes are reset to zero.
Final Thoughts
The Great Art Robbery is a free-flowing game with little jeopardy to availing yourself of some of Europe’s greatest paintings even if you don’t know your Art from your Botticelli!
It looks ripe to add some asymmetry to the starting teams with some specialist buffs for the different teams say +1 Coin for the High Class or +1 Wheel for the Street gang once per turn for example, but I’ll leave that to you.
Be lucky!
