Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls Review

boardgamequest.com:

Over its history, Disney has made a lot of hit animated films with some beloved characters.
Much like Wreck-it-Ralph 2 and the Princess line, Chronicles of Light, brings four Disney heroines from four different decades of animated films together as crystalized forms of light to battle darkness in this cooperative adventure game for one to four players aged eight and up by Pam Walls and published by Ravensburger.

Upfront disclaimers: I work for the Walt Disney Company in a role unrelated to gaming and Ravensburger provided this copy for review. I have a positive bias towards the IP but, as always, will provide my honest impressions of the game.

The goal of the game is to defeat all the shadow tokens on the board and then the Vortex which moves around the board. Players lose when the team health track reaches zero or at the start of a round when there are no more darkness cards to draw.

Once the map is randomly assembled and populated with quest tokens the first darkness card is drawn, spawning shadow tokens, and then heroes take actions by using one of their initial four action tiles.

The team can use six actions on their turns and the players can discuss and plan out their moves (although this is not a programming game). The player with the leader token gets to make final decisions for the team.

All heroes have an identical move 1 or heal 1 and move 2 or heal 2 action tiles. The other actions are unique to each heroine. Several are variants for moving (while taking another character with them) while others are combat-related skills making shadows easier to defeat or the ability to block incoming damage.

Each heroine unlocks a fifth ability when they complete one of four randomly selected personal quests unique to each character.

When a character enters a space with a shadow token they can battle it. Battling has each hero in the space that wants to contribute roll their dice. If the sum of the stars on the dice (1-3 successes per die) equals the shadow’s strength,