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Nicole Simeone
Toy Story: Obstacles and Adventures
It was inevitable that Toy Story and all of its adventure rich characters and content would be made into a game. Woody, Buzz, and company have been on just about every video game console you can think of. Today, I’m talking about the board game that brings the fun to the kitchen table.
Toy Story: Obstacles and Adventures is a collaborative card game allowing two to five toys to join in on the grand adventures. Players can choose between Woody, Buzz, Bo Peep, and Rex to start the first adventure with Jessie joining in afterward.
Toys have their own starter deck with useful traits, items, and a friend. At the beginning of the game, players deal themselves five cards, which will all be used on their turn, but we’ll get to that in a second.
Like many games, each player must keep track of their health. Players will lose health thanks to the danger and hazard cards turned over at the start of each turn. Regaining health is accomplished through using items and friends. If a toys health track hits zero, there are consequences felt by all toys for their friend being shelved.
Toy Story doesn’t have a timer so much as a token track representing how long they have until they are discovered to be out of the toy chest. This piece advances on its path, thanks to the hazard and danger cards as well as toys being shelved. Like the health component, items and friends can assist in giving the toys more time to complete their mission by moving the token in reverse.
To complete the adventure, all of the obstacles need to be defeated. The difficulty of these obstacles increases as you work through each box. By box four, their specific conditions need to be met to put down pieces to remove the obstacles from the game. But in the first few rounds, toys only need to earn pieces during their turn to start defeating the obstacle.
Let’s get down to that gameplay. The first player begins their turn by flipping over a danger card. The player will then need to resolve that danger or hazard immediately.
Next, the player will need to look at the obstacles and do anything that those cards have in them. The number of active obstacles is based on the adventure you’re playing. This is set up for the Box One Adventure.
With the dangers and obstacles cleared up, the player can then use the cards in their hand to collect Luxos, Luxo balls, and health.
The Luxo tokens are used to defeat obstacles and danger/hazards later in gameplay.
The Luxo balls are the game’s currency. These will be used to purchase new cards as the last act of your turn.
Both the Luxos and Luxo Balls must be used on your turn unless you have played a friend that allows you to keep your treasures until the next turn. So once you’ve played all of your cards, you’ll need to play both accordingly. There is no place for a monopoly hoard here.
There are six cards flipped up and available for purchase during every turn. These will include additional traits, friends, and items that can be shuffled into your playing hand. The cost of one of these cards is displayed on the lower right-hand side of the card. The cards purchased go directly into your discard pile unless otherwise instructed.
The gameplay then moves on to the next player.
For those reading who have played Battle for Hogwarts, you might be thinking this sounds familiar. And you’d be right. The two games are very similar, which makes it easier to pick up. This structure also makes gameplay feel like an adventure.
We have plenty of game nights with a full table, but there are some nights where it’s only Adam and I. Toy Story gets bonus points from me because of the option to play the adventures with just two players. There are no enough games available with a two-player option.
The recommended age is eight plus. There is a fair amount of reading involved. Just about every card, really. Add to that the average run time for one adventure, which is somewhere between sixty and ninety minutes. And I think that’s an appropriate recommendation. I would even say if your eight-year-old doesn’t have a ton of patience, hold off on this one. Particularly as you get into the later boxes. This thirty-seven-year-old nearly lost it on trying to overcome Box Four’s last obstacle.
But if you don’t have that concern in your cast of usual game playing suspects, this is a great party game to pull out. I think that playing all competitive games in a night sometimes kills the energy at the table. The cooperative piece keeps everyone working together to defeat the sometimes crushing danger and hazards.
This game will run between forty-five and fifty dollars, which might make you cringe for a board game. Unlike some cooperative games on my game shelf, this one is easily replayable as many times as you like, which makes it a better candidate for purchase. If you’re still not sure about the game, check with your local library to see if they have a game selection to check out.
It sounds weird. Libraries are for books, right,? Not true anymore. Board games and video games have been building in a lot of library catalogs over the last ten years. So, head on down and see if yours offers any. It’s a great way to try a game before you buy it.
And with that shameless plug for libraries, that’s all I have Nerd Girls. Till next time!