CANVASHOLIDAYS

Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls is a collaborative experience that charmed one board game grump

When I was little, all I wanted was for the Disney princesses to team up and save the day. That didn’t happen in any movie, but it didn’t stop me from pretending to do so with my friends.

Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls, the new board game from Disney Villainous and Disney Lorcana publisher Ravensburger, finally lets me fulfill my childhood dream of a big Disney princess team-up.

Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls is all about Disney heroines coming together to save the day. Players pick from four characters: Belle (Beauty and the Beast), Moana (Moana), Maid Marian (Robin Hood), and Violet Parr (The Incredibles). The generic fantasy title hints at the threat itself: a nebulous darkness is coming, and it will destroy the game’s setting, the Realm of Light. But the big bad evil being a blank slate isn’t necessarily a bad thing, considering how customizable the game becomes when you start playing.

The setup process is a huge part of the fun. Depending on how many players there are and which characters you pick, different map tiles become available. You get to put these together however you want, so long as the paths connect. And the end goals of the game depend on which quest cards you select. Each character comes with four quest cards, and each has different endgame conditions. Quests usually involve traveling around the map and delivering various items to specific locations — but the more you travel, the more chances you have of running into Shadow Villains, who must be defeated via simple dice-roll battles. The villains on the board all take the form of the main foes of whatever characters the players picked. So for Belle, that’s Gaston and LeFou; for Maid Marian, it’s Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham, among others.

Each character has four unique actions, and they’re all pretty varied. The first combination I played with was Marian and Moana, who both had pretty solid healing and movement buffs but didn’t have an edge in combat. The Belle and Violet combination, meanwhile, made combat much easier but my husband and I had to waste valuable movement actions to heal instead. We had to take time to go over our prospective moves, discuss our abilities, and try to align our goals. Once we paused and deliberated, instead of just individually blazing forward, the game became easier — and a lot more enjoyable.

There are a lot of moving pieces (literally and figuratively) in Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls, but they are all relatively easy to understand, written in a clear and concise manner. It’s a bit daunting to go through the rulebook and all the conditions, but everything is actually very straightforward and easy enough for children ages 8 and up to get a handle on. It helps that all the necessary information is clearly bullet-pointed out on the accompanying cards, and also in the rulebook. It’s relatively easy to find what you need — every time I had a question about some technicality, it was very simple to find the answer.

For my first playthrough, I opted for the recommended (and easiest) quest card combinations. After all, I was playing the game with my husband, who is notoriously not a board game person, so I didn’t want to torture him too much. But by the end of two playthroughs, he was still pretty excited. It helps that the game is relatively speedy, done in a fixed number of rounds. But the collaborative gameplay also makes it very enjoyable, since we’re discussing our next moves and working together instead of against one another.

The promotion for Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls emphasizes the light role-playing elements, but there are no gameplay mechanics to solidify that. Still, the opportunity to play pretend is there, and if I was 10 years old and playing Violet Parr, I would absolutely take the opportunity to immerse myself and get into character. The collaboration aspect invites talking out loud and strategizing, and for anyone who does want to take it to the next level, that can certainly be done in character.

But I wasn’t about to force my husband to put on an English accent and pretend to be an anthropomorphic fox. And the gameplay did not suffer at all just because we were discussing the next moves as ourselves and not as Disney characters (in fact, that’s probably the preferred option for some players). We had to fight our initial urges to blaze ahead and do our solo missions in turns, as we quickly learned this was a journey we couldn’t make on our own.

It was a little tricky playing with two people, since not having all the characters in play means losing out on some good abilities. Our Belle and Violet round, for instance, had us rack up more damage than our previous playthrough — but we also did a lot more damage. It balanced out and was definitely still winnable, but it did involve more strategy than we anticipated. That’s not a bad thing, especially since collaboration and discussion is a key component of the game. I imagine playing with the full roster would invite a different kind of discussion about how to best distribute limited action spaces amongst four players, since there would be way more to get done.

The gameplay mechanics of Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls are pretty simple and straightforward when you get down to it: You move across the board, you bring items to places, and you roll dice in combat. But there are tons of combinations of players, quests, and maps to discover. It’s a game I would be begging my friends to play with me as a kid, one that I would get way too into and make everyone do voices and dress up for. It’s a game of possibilities — and even though I’m probably older than the target audience, it’s one that I really want to replay.

Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls is available for pre-order on the Target website for $29.99, and it will hit Target and hobby stores on July 21.