I picked up Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls from Target on August 3rd, 2024.  I think it literally just came out that day or just a few days before.

I had already pre-ordered it from GameNerdz or Miniatures Market, but I was just so excited to try it out, I picked it up at Target as soon as I saw it!  I suspect the extra copy of my Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls will be a Christmas present for some family friends this year!

You’ll notice I said “…a Christmas present for some family…”; This is a light-weight cooperative game that I believe is intended for families.  It really is a mass-market game.  Chronicles of Light: Darkness  Falls is a Disney themed game with Disney princesses: Moana from Moana, Belle from Beauty and the Beast, Violet from The Incredibles, Maid Marian from Robin Hood.  It contains some lesser components, but it is still a decent price: I paid $29.99 (full MSRP) + tax.

This is a cooperative game for 1-4 players, taking 45-60 minutes, and it is good for ages 8+.  In fact, that 45-60 minutes might even be an exaggeration: I was able to play a few games in about 30 minutes!  

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing and Gameplay

Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls is a smaller box: see Coke Can above for scale.

Unpacking the box, you see that the components are pretty decent for a mass-market game.  None of the cards are linen-finished, but it’s still a nice production.

In this game, each player takes control of one of the Disney Princesses: see the four boards above.

The minis are a little formless, but the clear plastic and color scheme makes it very clear which princess is which!

This game does a very good job of noting which components belong to which princess from the color scheme! The Belle character’s pieces are all yellow! See above.

Moana‘s pieces are orange (see above).

Violet‘s pieces are red (see above)! (Should they have been violet?)

And Maid Marian’s pieces are purple! 

In fact, the game even goes the extra mile by having plastic storage bags color-coded to the princesses!

You might be wondering “Why have all these princess’s from diverse Disney properties banded together? Why are they here?”  (If you said “Money: Disney wants money”, you far too cynical to play this game, and you should probably stop reading here).  A magic crystal Portal has opened and swept all these diverse Disney princess’s together into one realm!  They need to work together to defeat the shadow creatures, close the portal, and solve their own personal quests to win!

The shadow creatures are creatures that invade the lands the princesses have been swept to!  Note that each princess has her own set of creatures (the back is labelled in her color) that followed her through the portal!  See above!  One of three winning conditions is that you need to take out all Shadows!

Each Princess also has her own quest: the game comes with 4 quests per character, and players randomly choose one!  See above as Violet has to Break The Barriers!

These quests all have slightly different flavors: pick-up and deliver, collect resources, remove resources, etc.   But, all characters must complete their quest in order to win the game!

Each player has 5 actions they can do: see above.  Each character is very different and has action tokens which describe what they can do.

There’s no set turn order in the game, as each player chooses a token to act!  These tokens allow players to do what’s needed on their turn.  Once 6 total tokens have been played, the day ends and players take their token back, starting a new day!

Since this is a co-op game, there must be Bad News cards, right?  These are called Darkness Falls cards (see above) and they form a timer to how long until a game ends.  At the start of every day, one of these is drawn and resolved.  In a 2-Player game, there are only 5 Darkness Falls cards … so the game only lasts 5 turns!  Like I said, this game is over quickly!

This game has pretty darn nice components (see above), despite it being a mass-market game.  And the color-coding of the characters is very consistent and makes it easy to discover which pieces belong to which Princess.

Rulebook

For a family game and mass-market game, this rulebook is actually pretty good.

It gets an A- on The Chair Test!  This rulebook is easy to consult if I put it on a chair next to me: it has a big font and lays open just fine.  The only reason it’s an A- is that the rulebook is actually slightly smaller than I wanted!

The components list is great for cross-referencing all the component! See above!

The Set-up is remarkably well done on just one page as well!  See above!  The only thing missing is a picture of a complete set-up: it’s a minor thing, but I like having pictures of set-up. Still, this set-up still worked pretty well.

The rulebook is also quite short: only 8 pages!  And yet it (mostly) does everything it needs!  There could be a few more pictures, but in general, it was very readable.

It really is easy to read: see above.

Interestingly, the rulebook ends with a description of how to win/lose, and the solo rules.

The game is simple enough that I won’t fault it for lacking an index or glossary, but it probably needs a few more elaborations of rules.  For example: Violet can take out the IncredibleCar to take out barriers, but can she double-back once she breaks a barrier?  That one rule might make a huge difference because movement is so precious in this game.  And there’s lot of places, as you play, where you just have to make a ruling.  It’s not the end of the world, because the game is so simple, but I think the game needs a few more elaborations to be a great rulebook.

Otherwise, this was a pretty darn good rulebook.

EDIT: Unfortunately, we did find out after this review that there was one major issue with the rulebook: it’s not clear, but you can’t destroy the vortex until you’ve completed all quests.  The designer spoke up in this BoardGameGeek thread and said:

Fyi, you cannot destroy the Vortex until all quests have been completed and all shadows defeated. I re-read the rules and I agree this isn’t explicitly clear. I will make a note of this to clarify if the game gets a re-print.

Solo Play

Congratulations to Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls for having a solo mode!  Thanks for following Saunders’ Law!   It’s not a true solo mode: you always need at least two princesses’ playing: see the rules above:

For Solo Players: “Take control of a dynamic duo! Set up for a 2-Player game and play as both Heroes!”

It’s real easy to get this to the table as a solo game. See above as Violet and Moana work together to take out the Barricades and collect Moana’s treasure!  Oh ya, and take out the shadows!  Oh ya, And the portal!

This system of choosing tokens to play for an action works really well! The actions (above) are notated very well on the tokens:

And there’s no “player order” or “take a turn”: you just play the tokens you need to get stuff done!

It’s very cool that each Hero has their own quest, and sometimes others can help with the quest, and sometimes they can’t! Only Violet can pilot the Incredibile (I would have called it IncredibleCar: Incredibile looks like a misspelling) to take out barricades.

It’s interesting how movement and topology really matter in this game, considering that the board is not huge! Movement is precious in this game, and part of the fun is trying to figure out the best order to “deal with” things!  Do we take out some shadows first? The portal?  Do we get a quest done ASAP to unlock a special?  The order in which players “deal with” things may depend strongly on the topology and location of items!!  Players will have to plan their actions together if they want any chance of winning!

For example, in my opening game, I lost horribly as I didn’t really take into account the shadows!  I had done my quests, but I didn’t take down the shadows OR the Portal!  My first game was a disaster … but fun.

For my second game, I rebuilt the map differently! One of the set-up steps is that you “build the map!”  The first time through, the topology of the map doesn’t seem that important, but it really is! It sets the tone for how hard it is to move around!  Like I said, movement is precious in this game!

My second game went much better as a I strategized (with myself) the best order to deal with the Portal, the shadows, and my quests!  It is very important to look at the map!

For a very different solo game, I brought in Maid Marian and Belle to see how different they would be.   What really changes the game:

1. The action tokens for all characters are all different (although all players still have a +1 and +2 move/heal token)
2. The quest: each character has 4 different quests

As a solo game, this is very easy to get the table and set-up.  The color coding makes the process that much easier.  

I had fun solo, but it’s not too hard a puzzle once you get the flow of the game.  It’s a simple game The solo game works well for teaching me the game so I can teach others.  I think the game is better cooperatively, as a group experience.

Cooperative Play

For cooperative play, I taught the game to some family friends.  See above as two girls (9 and 11) play with their parents.

With the younger audience, I ended up being more like a shepherd.  The game is pretty straight forward to teach and play, but with a lot of stuff going around, it was easier to ease the kids into the game by teaching the rules (and not playing).  I would recommend learning this game before teaching it. Not that the game is hard, but it just makes it easier to ease “attention-challenged” kids into a game if you know it well.

They ended up playing and winning their 4-Player game!  See above.  I was a little worried that the 4-Player experience would be too much, but it wasn’t … as long as I was keeping everyone involved.  Since there is no turn order, I think you have to be extra careful to keep everyone on track.  For families, I again would recommend a shepherd.

Did my family friends like this game?  I asked them: “Would you like Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls for Christmas?”  I got a very excited “YES!” from the girls, so I think this was a hit.

What I Liked

1. The system for Player Selected Turn Order (PSTO):coarse-grained (see PSTO here) works really well here!  One of the harder things to notate in PSTO is “who has gone and who hasn’t”.  By having the tokens to notate when you have played them (on the team board above), that solves that problem!  See the player board above!!! In fact, these tokens also solve the problem of “what can I do on my turn”: the tokens are very well notated, so it’s very clear all the things a player can do on their turn!  We always love PSTO, as it usually adds an extra level of cooperation to a game as players work out the order in which they act: PSTO “makes” players talk and interact that much more!

   The fact that PSTO is in a mass-market game makes this game all the more impressive!  Sure, we have seen PSTO in gamery games like The Reckoners, Set A Watch, and X-Men: Heroes Resistance, to name a few.  But to see PSTO here in this mass market game is great! 
   

2. The color-coding of the characters is very strong and makes the game easy to set-up and tear-down!  It’s very clear which things belong to which Princess!  This just makes the game “feel” easier to play, even if it’s just an optical illusion. See above.
   
3. For a mass-market game, the components are really pretty nice!  I’ve tried to show lots of pictures in this review to demonstrate that.   See above.
   
4. I appreciate, in general, how good the rulebook is.  See above.
   
5. Variability: the fact that each princess has one of four different quests gives this game some variability!  Even if you play Violet a couple of times in a row, so can have a different quest each time, which gives the game some variability to extend the life of the game. See above.
   
6. The fact that each Princess has her own 5 action tokens adds to the variability of point 5.

What I Didn’t Like

1.  I have played a number of games now, and unfortunately, to win, the game arc will be the same.  You almost HAVE to take the Portal out in the first turn to have any chance of winning.  The Portal spits out Shadows every turn … and you have to kill all Shadows (as one of the winning conditions) in order to win!  My first game was a disaster because I let the Portal run wild.  It’s very clear: in order to win, you must take out the Portal first, then proceed to the rest of the game.  That makes the game arc a little “samey” each time.  EDIT: See rulebook discussion above, as we found after this review came out.  The designer spoke up in this thread on BoardGameGeek and said:

Fyi, you cannot destroy the Vortex until all quests have been completed and all shadows defeated. I re-read the rules and I agree this isn’t explicitly clear. I will make a note of this to clarify if the game gets a re-print.

2. Although I really like that the actions are well-labelled on the tokens, and that the tokens are different, they aren’t THAT different. Everyone has a +1, +2 move/heal. A lot of heroes have “something” that helps them move fast (move to another hero, move 3 over water, move 3 with a car), and then maybe one or two special. Don’t get me wrong: this is very cool, but the tokens aren’t THAT different. I almost wish each Princess had a special power not connected to their action tokens to make them more distinct.

3. At the end of the day, this is still a dice game.  They are some player actions to mitigate the dice, but it’s still easy to be overwhelmed by bad rolls.

4. My boards were a little warped.  It wasn’t a big deal, the game was still playable, but it was noticeable. See pictures above of the player boards and the maps boards.

Conclusion

I like Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls. It’s a light cooperative game that’s fun for families, or for the end of the night when you want something “less thinky”. Many heavier gamers will probably balk at the lightness of this game. I tend to like solo games for their puzzly nature, and although the solo puzzle presented here isn’t that challenging, I could see this being a really good gateway solo game!!

The niceness of the components, color-scheme, and gameplay can’t be overemphasized for a mass-market game. I am personally very glad to see a cooperative mass-market game with Player Selected Turn Order (coarse-grained); that mechanism really tends to elevate cooperative games for me. These are some minor issues with the game (see previous section: “What I Don’t Like“), but in general I found Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls to be a bright, fun, world to inhabit for about 45 minutes: 7/10.

Most importantly, my friends want it for Christmas!