Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: A Board Game Adventure (Game Boy Color)

Why a game like Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: A Board Game Adventure exists is a puzzling question indeed. Some elements of its creation make a degree of sense, Mario Party had released pretty close to this game’s creation after all and proved that an original virtual board game had sales potential. The license is certainly the odder part, Beauty and the Beast a seemingly random pick from Disney’s catalogue to adapt into a board game adventure. The movie was almost eight years old by the release of this Game Boy Color title which is close to the same time as some other media based on the property, but none of them seem to be spearheading a major push to reinvigorate the franchise. Belle is a Disney Princess though and has some longevity through that brand, but the pick still seems arbitrary as the game itself doesn’t seem to require this specific source material conceptually either. Perhaps the truth lies in the name of the developers, as who would be a better pick for such an out of the blue game idea than a company called Left Field Productions.

While a game seemingly out of left field, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: A Board Game Adventure does attempt to adapt some of the animated film’s plot, focusing pretty much on one key scene and stretching it out across its different board games. Well past the point where Belle has not only met the cursed prince and his castle full of animate household items but has already fallen for him, the village girl set off to help her father back in town only to find the villagers riled up by the huntsman Gaston. Believing the cursed prince to be a dangerous monster, they set off to try and slay him, Belle needing to race after Gaston and hopefully reach the Beast before he can. The process of getting to the Beast is split across a few game boards in the game’s adventure mode. All these boards are totally linear, even more so than a physical board game like Candy Land, there being no shortcuts or methods of skipping ahead. In single player you only play against Gaston, it being a pretty straightforward race to the end, but there is multiplayer available where up to four players can all race to the finish, some boards even exclusive to multiplayer but requiring extra work to unlock.

To progress on the board seems simple at first, the player rolling a die to determine how far they’ll move on their turn, but while this is an even playing field in multiplayer, Gaston is not restricted in the same way for the game’s adventure. He will always move forward a set amount, the number of spaces determined by which board you’re playing on. Naturally, smaller boards would be quicker to complete so he moves fewer spaces to give the player a chance, but by the time you reach the longest and final one, he is moving more than six spaces every turn, something that would seem impossible to outpace with your single die. However, the spaces on the board all link to some small minigame or activity based on what the symbol is, and to beat Gaston, you’ll need to perform well at the activities you land on in order to earn movement bonuses. The last board absolutely requires frequent excellent performance in the minigames to defeat Gaston, but while the minigames are mostly simple enough that even a young player can at least perform decently enough to earn some small boost to their movement, the issue with them isn’t so much their design as their frequency.

Even playing the smallest board will lead to an incredible degree of repetition. There just isn’t enough variety to be found in the space types you can land on, meaning that almost every minigame will not only be visited repeatedly in a single session of this board game adventure, but to beat the story mode will require many more visits to the same minigame designs since the boards introduce very few new spaces. Some unlockable boards restricted to multiplayer have spaces not found at all in the single player adventure, but restricting the much needed variety to boards you can only play after playing through constant repetition is not a reward at all, especially since these extra boards are still littered with the familiar spaces you encountered in the main adventure.

The tragedy of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: A Board Game Adventure is that many of the minigames are decent or even a little good. For example, one game involves you bouncing wood as it is chopped across a workshop with a trampoline, the wood flying out at different rates and in different arcs to encourage you to move with precision to bounce them all to the wood pile. It’s pretty similar to the Game & Watch game Fire and requires some decent reflexes even though it’s not all too hard, but it could have been a decent diversion if you encountered it only a few times over the course of the game. However, since the space with Belle’s father Maurice is the one that triggers it and it is constantly cropping up all throughout the game, it instead becomes incredibly dull but unfortunately reliable for winning. It’s like a job, the player completing it because they need the payment of a few extra spaces for doing well, and since the game doesn’t vary too much between plays, its welcome is worn out well before the first board is complete.

Some minigames are so simple they are almost welcome when they crop up. A game of Memory with faces of Beauty and the Beast characters is bearable for its simplicity and speed, and the quiz game where the clock character Cogsworth asks you a question about movie trivia is at least fast, although even a fan might find answering correctly a coin flip. They are multiple choice questions, but while you might sometimes get something easy or at least possible to guess correctly, other times it will ask for a very specific quantity or obscure bit of information perhaps just to mess players hoping for a gimme up. Some minigames aren’t hard but do last a while like a shooting gallery where the target layout doesn’t seem to change, but the games with the candlestick Lumiere and the teapot Mrs. Potts are exciting when first encountered. Lumiere needs to risk his flames to catch dripping water, the game ending if you don’t balance the dying flames properly and snuff one out before it has time to grow back to a healthy light. Mrs. Potts has almost the inverse for her game, needing to pour water on fire before it burns through too much of the kitchen’s stores. The need to refill and move around quickly to manage the flame make it another game that feels fun in a Game & Watch sort of style, and it’s certainly one of the better games to have to repeat from an enjoyment standpoint rather than ease. There are games like the Beast defending himself from wolves though where you need to punch at the right elevation to repel them, the warning of which angle they’re coming from easy to misread since you need to react quickly.

Even one minigame going too poorly can practically doom a run as you are not only dependent on the luck of the roll but on your performance in the minigames you land on. If you do luck out and land on the easy ones over and over it becomes incredibly boring and rote, but if you land on one of the harder or more annoying games, your progress hinges too heavily on your success to enjoy the minigame design, provided it also hasn’t worn out its welcome yet. There is another system in play where some minigames will offer rare chances to get stars, any time you collect enough sending you to a minigame where you have a chance to earn an extra turn. There is a star space that gives you this extra turn chance for free as well, but this is an underfed system that only has a chance of turning things around. The rarity of getting enough stars to even attempt the minigame means that extra turns don’t often have the chance to make a meaningful impact on your race against Gaston unfortunately.

Despite the main game already wearing down its minigames to the point you might not want to ever see them again, some of the unlockable multiplayer boards require you to play the minigames through the main menu on different difficulty levels. Even though the main game is technically short, so much of it is spent grinding these minigames into dust that it’s unlikely anyone will have the motivation to engage with this section of the game, especially since your reward for doing so will be repetition of minigames not really designed to be repeated over and over to unlock new boards where you’ll be seeing those same games once more. Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: A Board Game Adventure is a flagrant case of a game stretching its content so thin it’s practically ready to snap. If only it had the self control to retire some spaces on new boards it could have at least given the boards unique identities in which minigames only rarely must be repeated, but you’ll be bouncing wooden logs all throughout this boring game adventure.

THE VERDICT: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: A Board Game Adventure has some minigames that are decent or even downright good, but you’ll soon come to dread even the best of them as the awful game boards force them all to be constantly repeated. Too slow to roll out new minigame designs and with straightforward boards that are too rigid to bypass incessant replays of simplistic games, the board game structure ensures that you’ll grow sick of the elements that could have worked and having lucky rolls be such a factor in success only guarantees an even more tedious time if you have to restart thanks to the die working against you. While the adventure mode is thankfully short, it is still somehow able to feel obnoxiously long thanks to the rehashed and quickly staled content.

And so, I give Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: A Board Game Adventure for Game Boy Color…

A TERRIBLE rating. While this game could have justified its strange existence if it played well or felt inspired, this board game adventure is made all the more baffling by how cheap and strained its design is. Some of the minigames do at least seem directly inspired by the movie like Lumiere’s design being perfect for the drop catching game, but the fact some are as basic as Memory make the game feel padded even though it hardly has any minigames at all. It constantly thrusts the same few activities in your face that don’t have the substance or variety built in to make their repeated showings anything more than a chore, one necessary to outpace Gaston’s unfair advantage. It almost has the simplicity of Candy Land where you can just speed through the board game even though its shallow, but this Beauty and the Beast game decided to incorporate some skill challenges as well but has too few to make the straightforward design any more exciting, actually hurting it instead. I am sure this game was blindly recommended for children due to the low standards we set for young people’s entertainment, but it’s hard to imagine them enjoying the repeated visits to minigames with so little substance, and they’ll likely find Gaston far more frustrating since they won’t have the reliable reflexes to make the more interesting games work for them.

Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: A Board Game Adventure is a weird end to the brief look at games based on a hit animated film, but it seems to continue the trend of poorly adapting the motion picture into the video game medium. While I couldn’t play every adaptation, it is funny that Magical Ballroom came out the best of the ones looked at, its unambitious design perhaps saving it from the pitfalls many of these Beauty and the Beast games faced. Here, an attempt to make a digital board game went awry when it seems the development team had very few ideas that could tie to the concept or the brand being used, leaving with us an unfortunate sendoff to what could have been a celebration of one of Disney’s finest animated movies.