Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls - Disney Edition Review!
Transcript
hi everybody hello I'm Ryan I'm Bethany and we are Ryan and Bethany board game reviews and today we'll be talking about Chronicles of light Darkness Falls that was fun that was epic it was like a cinematic this is designed by Pam Wala and it is published by Ravensburger but before we talk about this we just want to remind you to subscribe and hit that notification Bell so you can see all of our content as it comes out right okay so Chronicles of light Darkness Falls this is a game that is a full Cooperative game we are all working together in order to complete each other's quests all right so first off what you're going to do is you are going to choose your characters there are four characters in the game and they are all strong female characters from the Disney Universe and what you're going to do is you are going to figure out a a quest for each one of them each character has several quests they need to fulfill you're going to pick one of them to play with each game and some of them are pick up and deliver style mechanisms where you need to take pick up one thing and take it to the the middle of the board or you need to gather things up from around the board and take them all to the middle uh but they all are also very Cooperative in nature so the game is not only Cooperative in the sense that you need to cooperate to win but also each individual Quest also needs to be uh have help from other people maybe you need to have you take up you pick up one thing but someone else needs to pick up another thing you need to meet together in order to combine them or whatever the case is each one of those quests very different uh very fun to complete so on
your turn you're going to have one person be the leader for that particular round at the beginning of the round first of all you're going to pop up the board with more and more bad guys you have to clear out all these bad guys before you can win the next thing is the leader with the help of all the other players is going to figure out what actions are best for the team that round every player has this kind of board that has different actions they can take on it maybe a little bit of movement maybe some healing maybe some special abilities that are specific to those characters then you have only six actions per round you got to figure out uh if you're playing a four-player game maybe you need two actions maybe you need three actions maybe you need one action maybe I don't need any this round whatever is going to be what's best for the entire group and if there's any discussion about that the leader ultimately has the final say in what's going to happen that round all right so then you're going to run around the board you're going to do whatever you're going to resolve those actions in whatever order you want you're going to start beating up all those bad guys you're going to start fulfilling your quests if you complete a quest for one of those characters you to unlock a new special ability that you'll be able to used for the rest of the game it's one of those action tiles and is stronger than the rest of the tiles on your board all right so the game is going to be one if you can do a couple different things you can complete all the quests for all the characters that are in play if you're able to defeat all of those bad guys and then of course finally there's a Vortex Vortex is roing on the board as well you need to beat up on that if you can beat it up while it is strong for the rest of the game it becomes weak and that is really going to do make the whole game a lot easier for you but it's also hard to do up front because you don't have your special abilities unlocked yet but then less bad guys come
out all kinds of stuff uh so you're going to lose if one of these things happens if you can there's that Darkness deck where you're revealing new things every round if you need to flip one of those over and there's no card for you the game timer has run out and you lose the game otherwise your team also has a health track you can lose if your team's Health Track goes all the way down the bottom every time any one character's Health goes down to the bottom the team Health Track goes down one so you want to make sure all you people are healthy so that way you don't ever have to go down too much on the team's health track so that's the overall kind of generalized rules of how to play it's extremely Cooperative you're going to want to work together as best as possible uh to accomplish all of your quests so you can ultimately win the entire game that's one of the things I actually really enjoyed about this you can't really if anybody's played a lot of Cooperative games you know that it it's easy for somebody to kind of just take control and tell everybody what's happening and then it's kind of not fun um just don't play with those people but if you have people like that in your life you actually can't really do that in the in this game if you want to win because everybody has those objective cards because everybody has their own individual Quest you you have to do those you can't just ignore a player or only focus on your stuff because then you'll lose as a team it doesn't matter if you've accomplished your quest if your teammates haven't accomplished their Quest because then you lose so I really like that because every player everybody who's playing has their own individual Quest you're really forced to
actually work together to win the game instead of just one person being like well I'm going to do what I need to do over here I like how much variety there is in this game it's got a ton of replayability uh so starting with the missions themselves the missions are all about uh different things each time you play with let's say Belle Belle has four different missions four different quests and they're all a little different so you're going to have different it when you set up different components that you use each quest of hers uh and so you can play Bell over and over again each time it's different or you play different character who has new and different quests right but then even still if say you've played the game a whole bunch and oh I have to use the same Quest over again no even still it's different because the board itself is modular so every time you play this game you can do a setup run at the very very beginning where you kind of get all the tiles in place based off of their placement rules and then now you have what was once over here is now way over here and what was over here is now over here or whatever the case is so you have all these different setups you have all these different quests you can go on it's so replayable and on top of that it's just the dice also mix things up uh it's it's just an extremely replayable Cooperative game I also think that it scales really well so every character that you play with has two boards as part of the module board and if you're playing two-player there's an extra board that comes in there so if you're playing two-player you know your map is only like you know this big but if you're playing four player you're map is a lot bigger so I just felt like it scaled a lot well the difficulty kind of made sense with who you were playing with
with how many people you were playing with and how much you had to move around the board based on how many players you had so I thought when Ryan and I were just playing it it played really well when we were playing with our girls when we were playing the full complement of it it also played really well so I I felt like I was playing the same game regardless of the player count this is a tough Cooperative game I mean it is tough I think we've we played it a whole bunch and I can only think of once that we won yeah oh my gosh it's a very tough game but there's also we we like Co tough Cooperative games that's not a bad thing we like when there's a a big challenge that makes the when you finally do get a win feel that much sweeter that's our philosophy at least but if you do not share that same philosophy there is ways to modify the difficulty you can make the darkness deck a little bit bigger if you want to play an extra round or if you can make it if you want to make it even tougher if you're crazy person or you're just really really in sync with your team you actually make it a little bit smaller too so you had scale difficulty but the default setting is pretty darn tough on its own but we like that um I was presently surprised with this game we play a lot of Cooperative games and I feel like even though I like them and I enjoy them it's not it's not so much that they're all the same but they're just all really similar right you just pick one or another one but I I felt like this game was actually different for a Cooperative game yes you're moving around the board but because you have those quests that you're trying to do it kind of just shifted it a little bit for me so um I it it reminded more me more
of like a Dungeon Crawl than an actual straight up Cooperative game but I was pleasantly surprised I really enjoyed it I feel like there's definitely room for expansions if you wanted to but I also don't feel like you need it like I felt like the game was a complete Game by itself it's not like I need those expansions because I felt like it was a full game I totally agree well you don't need expansions oh I would like to see them I want to see more characters doing more crazy stuff you also mentioned Dungeon Crawl has this kind of little bit of a Dungeon Crawl feel from those of us who actually know what that is I don't think our kids would have picked up on that but I was actually able to watch the uh design diary from Pam walls and she mentioned that as part of her research she was kind of playing when want figuring out D and D stuff so that way what is so captivating about that that makes that game people come back to over and over again and so she tried to inject a few of those elements into this game so it worked I mean it was phenomenal all right so also um this is a game that is just so sweet to play with our daughters I love showing them these strong female characters just running around the board kicking butt and having fun and working together uh it is it just warms my heart every time we play this and there is a moment the first time we played this with them where like our seven-year-old for instance when the first time that her sister got to play with with three tiles of hers but only one of hers she was like that's not fair but uh I didn't like that I I wanted to do more stuff this turn but then the next round made
more sense for the cooperation of the game that she had three and then I had one or whatever the case was and she was like I get it now it's about the team it's not about me and that was just a cool learning moment and they've played Cooperative games they've played a ton this is the first time that they've seen like a literal quantity of actions being being dived out different like that and uh that's kind of that second round when she got to benefit from it and it's like it it really was what's best for the team so as far as a family Cooperative game goes oh my gosh this is as good as it gets everybody thank you so much for watching don't forget to subscribe so you can see our videos as they come out until then you can find us in all of these places guys thanks for watching and we will see you next time by bye you guys thanks so much for watching uh this game was provided to us by a publisher for exchange for a fair and honest review and if you want to see more stuff check out over here to see something we think you might like and over here we think that YouTube has picked out a great video for you you're going to love thanks guys see you next time bye