Ravensburger has made it their mission to raise the bar for licensed board games, especially when it comes to their Disney license. Rather than simple cash grabs aimed at grabbing the fleeting attention spans of cartoon loving kids, they’ve aimed a bit higher at the Disney adults (parents and otherwise) with games that mix classic Disney with innovative and interesting design. Their biggest new release for Disney is Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls, a co-op adventure game starring an unusual mix of Disney Heroines: Maid Marian from Robin Hood, Belle from Beauty and The Beast, Violet from The Incredibles, and Moana from…Moana. Our reviewer Brody got a chance to check out the game ahead of its release July 21st, and you can check out his full review here, but at Gen Con I wanted to see if I could learn a bit more about the creation process behind this game. To do this, I had a chance to sit down with the game’s designer, Pam Walls, as well as Lysa Penrose, Ravensburger’s Head of New Games Marketing.
Where did the idea come from for this game? What was your starting point in thinking about the design?
Pam Walls: When Ravensburger put out the call for ideas for Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls, they gave a few things that they wanted to have: a focus on teamwork, immersion, and a group of Disney characters. I watched all the movies for the characters that they had suggested and I started pulling some things from there about what I can maybe use in the game. I really wanted to focus on the teamwork aspect and one of the major the core mechanics of the game that I came up with pretty early on was the idea of not having turns. That forces the players to really work together to decide what to do each round.
From there the was the idea of immersion and so I thought about how can I make each player really feel like the character that they’re playing. That’s when I wanted to have each player have their own quests so that they felt like they were going out on their own adventure. But really most of them rely on your friends helping you to actually complete it. So we’re not just in silos and it’s really bringing together the that teamwork aspect with the immersion.
Lysa Penrose: On the Ravensburger side, I feel like there were kind of two points which you all were very clearly communicated at the scene. So one was that our team obviously has done a lot of work with Disney villains. Mm-hm. In our board games. But we wanted to see other Disney characters, specifically heroines, Disney princesses, and get to see them in a very different sort of adventure way, getting to see everyone be different types of badass. And then the second goal was they really wanted to create a system that was like a pure cooperative game, which I think in the ways Pam just described, and a ton of other little subtle ways, cooperative in a way than other co-op games. You didn’t even realize there was another level of cooperation.
One of the challenges of co-op design and playing co-op is the “quarterbacking problem”. How did you approach that to make sure it stayed kind of equitable in the co-op and avoid one person dominating play?
Pam Walls: I did some research to see what other ways that designers have approached this issue, because it is definitely an intrinsic issue with cooperative games. One of the things I explored was limited communication, but obviously with a game about teamwork you don’t want to do that. The solution came from a playtest meetup I went to with designer Gil Hova and he was talking about one of his games where if you just have something that you can hold up, something you can point to to be like, okay I’m making the decision. It’s amazing how something as simple as that is kind of all that you need. That’s when we came up with the idea of the leader badge and especially the leader badge rotating so it’s not always the same person.
One thing that stuck out to me for sure was the character choice. How did you land on these four heroines?
Lysa: On Ravensburg’s side, we wanted to purposefully pick characters with really different personalities, really different strengths that they showcased in their media. So that you could show like this variety of skills that a bunch of different people can bring to the table, just like the players in the game.
Pam: I just love how they each bring something different. And I love how Belle has her curiosity and her love of books and her kindness and then Violet’s superpowers, such a great variety. It’s just been really amazing the response to how many people are so excited to see Maid Marian. There’s a lot of excitement for all of them.
We kind of wanted to enhance those qualities that you see in the movies already, like Belle’s curiosity, so she has an enchanted book that reduces the strength of villains. She also has her own invention in this game: she’s built a catapult. We’re building off of the stories that we already know. It was really fun to have that freedom to imagine this realm. Like what other possible things that they could do that would make sense for that character? It was really fun to play with.
Lysa: The characters in the game, they’re like the essences of these characters. It’s kind of their spirit and I love seeing the team of Pam and Shanon [Lyon, the game’s development manager] take that and figure out, okay, well, what would that mean in this realm?
Pam: Maid Marian especially with her long-range birdie, that’s been a lot of fun. That was when I went back and rewatched the movies and saw that moment with the badminton. And I thought, oh, that could be cool, maybe we can enhance that?
What’s it been like being part of a female-led design team in this industry?
Pam: It was a really special team to work with and that was the best part of the whole process for me was working so closely with Shanon, the game developer on the team, Lisa, and the art is absolutely beautiful. The whole team did such an amazing job, so it was a really wonderful thing and just knowing that we were making a game that was full of strong female characters just kind of added to the movie.
Lysa: I would say it was also somewhat organic, not like we were going to specifically pick these people to work on it. These were the people on our team who were saying “I want to see Violet in a game.” “I want to be made Marian.” I was so excited when I heard about this idea. I wanted to be part of it. And I know our art director Alex has a young daughter and was talking about like how cool it is to see her daughter inspired by the game. She is a little bit younger than the game age range but they play a version of it and just seeing that imagination and that connection to the characters has been pretty cool. At Gen Con as well, seeing who’s coming over to the booth.
Was it a goal to have this skew a little younger than the Villainous line?
Lysa: Yes. I think just the nature of the characters we thought could also appeal younger and the system we think is also approachable in that way. That it’s cooperative as well and it’s a really big part of that.
Pam: I know that Ravensburger wanted to make it as accessible as possible. We wanted for players to get into the game as quickly as possible and the fact that it’s cooperative, you can help younger players figure things out as a team. so we really focus on streamlining it enough that we absolutely wanted to make sure that eight-year-olds could play it comfortably and we’ve definitely seen that.
Lysa: I think one of my favorite things about this game is when I’ve had the opportunity to demo it, at first when you see all the different priorities on the table it can be a little bit overwhelming. But once you get a round in I’ve noticed that even folks who come to the table who have described to me that they are not gamers suddenly get it. They get the discussion. They get talking to each other about actions and it becomes more about that conversation, and then everyone places their actions together and it’s really cool being like, actually you are a gamer. You’re on the team.
You can grab Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls at Target or your FLGS at an MSRP of $29.99.
Images via Ravensburger
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