Disney Animated

Disney Disney Everywhere…

There has been no shortage of Disney-themed board games over the years from the good old ‘slap an intellectual property (IP) on Monopoly’ days through to the brilliantly designed and super popular Disney Villainous. And let’s not dare forget the newest mammoth on the scene, the TCG (trading card game), Disney Lorcana. But with the world celebrating one hundred years since Walt created that iconic mouse-led brand, it was inevitable that there would be a whole load more to come. One of the newest to hit the hobby is from Funko Games, the publisher already behind some of the biggest board games based on IPs. Already with dozens of Disney-themed games, and their biggest success, Funko-Verse, which sees characters from all sorts of properties fight it out via their cute little Funko Pop figures, Funko Games has already earned its corner of the market. This time they teamed up with the designing group, Prospero Hall for Disney Animated. Prospero Hall has a strong portfolio of IP games such as the pre-mentioned Disney Villainous, the recent Jurassic Park Legacy and Back to the Future: Back in Time, to name but a few. But does this newest mouse-eared outing, Disney Animated, make the cut?

When You Wish Upon A Star Vehicle

Taking the Disney brand and injecting it with a new take is no small order but it is the theme of this game that really grabbed my attention. First of all, this is a fully cooperative experience. As animators in the golden age of the studio you are working together to create some of the most iconic films in the canon. You will be drawing backgrounds, inking characters and adding the sound in order to complete the films before the deadline arrives. However, the villains of these films know their fate and so are out to stop you from getting it completed in time. This theme alone is exciting. We are all so used to playing the characters from our beloved stories but to shine a light onto the talent who created them in the first place is just ingenious. But how does it play?

Each player of Disney Animated will have one of five films. In this ‘Volume One’ box you have the choice of Aladdin, 101 Dalmatians, Fantasia, Alice in Wonderland and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Each film, consisting of a player board, a villain board and a selection of cards and wooden tokens presented in a neat little tuck box. There are four main actions in the game. The first, Animation, allows you to draw cards. These cards are spent in a multitude of ways from banishing villains to using character powers and so a varied hand is always important. The second is Ink and Paint. This allows you to take tokens from a central supply. These tokens are what you will need to ink your characters and lock in your villain. The third, Background allows you to place background tiles onto your board and finally Sound gives you special wooden tokens that will give different abilities to the group. There is also Magic which works as a wild card and you choose any other action to do but it will cost you a magic token (and these aren’t easy to get). What makes this action selection interesting is it uses a flow system that means that actions will get more powerful as they move up a central track. Numbered 1 – 5, there are slots on the central board that will house the action tiles. Wherever you take that action tile from will tell you how many action points you have to spend and once used, it will move down to 1 and the rest will be bumped up. So do you wait for an action to get more powerful or a time pressure is going to mean you have to take a level 1 action instead? This isn’t a new system but is painfully underutilised in modern board-gaming, especially in the lighter side of the spectrum.

At the end of your turn in Disney Animated you can do a couple of extra things. The first is to play a character. Printed beautifully on acetate, each player has three characters that can be played onto a completed background section by spending certain ink colours. Once placed it will give you access to that character’s specific power which you can use once per turn by spending a matching animation card. You are going to want to think long and hard about which character you want to get out first as some of the powers get less and less useful as the game goes on. And the final thing you can do is ‘banish calamity’.

Where There’s A Villain There’s A Way…

Calamity is your villain’s way of slowing you down and speeding up the game. Depending on player count and chosen difficulty you will place a certain number of calamity cards each round and each villain will use these cards to perform horrible actions that will not only escalate the deadline track but also could lose you precious resources. This makes it imperative to banish these calamities. There are three types of calamities in the film decks. The first you can banish simply by spending a matching card, the second, a matching ink token and the final by playing a specific number when choosing your action tile that turn. Dealing with these can often slow down your progress by having to take actions you don’t need or spending cards that you do and so evenly distributing the responsibility is going to be really important. Once you have completed your background and placed all three of your characters then you can spend the designated resources on your villain board and trap your villain into the film! Once everyone does this, the game is instantly over.

Disney Animated is a gorgeous game. The production quality is fantastic and it has a really striking table presence. The gameplay is quite simple but relies on communication and organisation like all good co-op games and so works well as a family game. The box comes with five different films but playing each one is not dramatically different. The character powers aren’t incredibly varied but it is with the sound abilities where each film really differs. This is the kind of game that calls out for expansions with so many more iconic films to draw from. However, I hope that with these new films come more variability in the asymmetric powers. Overall, if you enjoy the world of Disney then this is a no-brainer, a strong, well designed game which offers a really interesting new insight into the world behind the curtain.