Take it from someone who recently circumnavigated the globe: it’s never been easier to travel around the world. And now Ravensburger makes it even easier with Disney Around the World, a family-friendly board game for ages 4 and up. Ravensburger was kind enough to share an advance copy with us, and we took it with us on the Disney Parks Around the World trip. While we were a little too busy to play it on the trip, now that it’s actually available, we had a lot of fun simulating our experience through the worlds of Disney.
Each player is given a hot air balloon (red, yellow, green, or blue) as their pawn, using it to navigate through lands inspired by Disney’s Aladdin, Alice in Wonderland, Frozen, and Moana, plus Pixar’s Cars and Toy Story. Your hot air balloon comes with a passport and the goal is to be the first to collect a stamp from four regions.
Winning is made challenging by limiting how many stamp tokens can be on the board at a time. They are placed in a, included bag, shaken around, and only a handful of stamps get placed on the board to start with (6 for a 1-2 player game, 7 for 3-4 players). Each token corresponds to a space in that region, and a player can only take it by landing on that space and having an opening in their passport from that region.
Players can begin the game in any region on that realm’s start space. A die determines how many spaces you can move, and you can go in any direction you choose. There are two symbols on the die, a sun and a cloud. The sun allows the player to flip over the top sun card in the center of the board. If it reveals a realm, they have the option of moving to that realm’s start space. If it’s a wild card, they can choose to go to any realm, so long as the cloud pawn isn’t there.
Among the sun cards are wind cards, which changes the direction of the wind. This only matters when someone rolls the die and lands on the wind symbol, which means the wind blows in the direction the cloud pawn is facing. This pushes players one realm over in that direction, and also moves the cloud pawn to a new realm.
That’s the game in a nutshell. Players keep taking turns and collecting stamps, pulling a new one from the bag and adding it to the board each time one is collected. The first player to four stamps wins, but if you wanted to keep the fun going longer, you could try playing until your passport is full with a stamp from all six regions.
Speaking of the regions, the artwork on Disney Around the World is very appealing, and Disney fans will love examining each slice closely. The board also assembles like a puzzle, with each slice representing its own piece. Take a clooser look at the worlds of Aladdin…
… Alice in Wonderland…
,,, Cars…
… Frozen…
,.. Moana…
… and Toy Story.
The board is also double-sided, with a sepia version of each region on the reverse side without the spaces.
When playtime is over, everything stores nicely back in the box, with a handy guide that demonstrates how the slices of the board fit.
Getting to travel around the world with Disney was an unforgettable once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But with a game like Disney Around the World from Ravensburger, we can experience the fun of traveling through themed, uniquely Disney lands without having to miss the comforts of home. Easy to play and fun for little ones, the game can also be used to help teach kids about traveling before they take their first trip.
Disney Around the World is now available from Ravensburger wherever games are sold.
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