Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Ravensburger, the German publisher known for its signature blue triangle on the box and a product offering that includes family-weight games, puzzles, and the alea line of Euro-style strategy games, has really done a number with the Disney license. Between the Villainous games and its Disney Lorcana TCG line, Ravensburger knows a thing or two about the best ways to leverage the “Mouse House.”
Ravensburger’s latest attempt to expand the Disney brand in the tabletop space is the cooperative action game Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls (Disney Edition). The hook here is interesting—besides the fact that the game is fully co-op, Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls features four female heroes from four distinctly different Disney properties as they teleport via a magical portal to a world where the heroes must defeat the Vortex, an evil being of unknown origin.
If you’ve got a family of Disney fans who are itching to chuck dice and complete quests to win a game that plays in about an hour, I think you’ll find a lot to like here. The wide mix of characters—Maid Marion (Robin Hood), Violet (The Incredibles), Belle (Beauty and the Beast) and Moana—does a nice job of representing the idea that a couple of parents are joining their kids to battle evil. (That’s because no child in my house seems excited to play as Maid Marion, while my kids are always fighting over who will play Violet or Moana!)
Modular is Good
The best thing about Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls is that it is a co-op game. While I enjoy Villainous as much as the next guy, some kids are only interested in sitting at the table if they know they can win or lose as a team.
The game’s design, by Pam Walls, does a great job of getting players to work together because of the task-based Quests and the use of a token to dictate each round’s quarterback for taking actions. The team can take up to six actions per round, with a designated leader making the final choice for actions in a round (complete with a “leader badge”). Each character has a couple special powers, as well as basic move and heal actions that could be used when health points are running low.
The game includes four different personal Quests per character, with only one of those active in each game. The Quests are standard (and, sadly, sometimes annoying) fare: pick up these three tokens in one map location, then work with teammates to deliver them to another location. Or move in a certain direction around the map, crossing over/fetching tokens along the way. When the Quests of all players are complete, they can go about finishing the game’s two other win conditions—take out the Vortex (a task we found to always be a bit too easy), as well as all other minion tokens (known as Shadows) scattered across the map. Taking out all the other Shadows was usually the hardest part of my plays.
Depending on die rolls—which are smartly built around two six-sided dice that record damage dealt as well as damage taken—Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls lands somewhere between moderately easy and marginally difficult, as players need to sweep the board before a pre-set number of rounds are over. Across six plays—the game has a solo component that essentially simulates a two-player game—I found that players must split up in order to achieve the knockout count needed to beat all the Shadows in time.
The map is built from tiles that feature named locations specific to each character currently in play…and the same goes for Shadows, specific evil characters from the movies featuring each hero currently in play. The reality is that all the tiles feel the same, and all the Shadows have anywhere from 3-6 hit points. But it’s the darkened pictures on each Shadow tile that bring them to life, as our family recognizes so many of the evil characters featured here.
The Kids Love It
While I found the game to be just-above-average fare, I found myself enjoying Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls because my kids had such a blast playing it. This was particularly true when either of them (a 10-year-old and a 7-year-old) had the leader badge, and could make all the decisions for our team on their turn.
I liked this leader badge feature quite a bit, because my wife and I typically guide the kids towards the most optimal actions during turns in other co-op games. Here, we tried as hard as we could to not even talk when the kids had the leader badge, and that led to more successful interactions as they picked the right approach for our squad. And, it’s not like we are trying to solve the world’s most intense puzzle—in general, the team has to move around the map to grab stuff and roll dice to defeat baddies.
Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls is already on borrowed time in our house. We haven’t lost yet, and we’ve already played enough times to run through all four Quests for each character. For the adults, there’s not as much replayability as there will be for my kids (one of whom would play Moana’s quests a dozen times and not get bored). Sometimes, the kids just want to beat their favorite video games on easy mode and they are completely enthralled with that experience, so it is no surprise that they are not fazed by the lack of additional mission content with Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls.
Ravensburger did great work with the production. While the minis leave a little bit to be desired—at no point does Maid Marion feel or look like Maid Marion from the movie—I love the fact that each player gets their own bag of tiles and goodies to separate during setup and the tarot-sized cards that highlight each Quest and character abilities are the right touch. My boards were already warping when I opened the box, so we are definitely not in triple-layer player board territory, but the player mats do the trick and I am sure my kids are going to spill something on these things eventually…right?
Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls is fun. It is right in the wheelhouse for my kids, which means they will play it despite a length that definitely approached an hour when three or four of us sat down to play. (I badly wish this was a 30-minute game.) For a light weekend activity featuring characters my kids love to watch on screen, Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls is a very approachable family-weight design that I expect to see on store shelves in one iteration or another for years to come.
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