Toy Story: Game Overview

- Mom, what are you doing? - Oh you know, I'm just writing the name on the bottom of my favorite plushie. - Mom, that is our cat. - Oh. Oops. Toy Story Obstacles and Adventures is a cooperative board game for two to five players, in which players take on the role of one of their favorite Toy Story characters and they'll work together with their friends to overcome a series of dangerous, and sometimes scary, hazards.

The game is designed to be played over a series of six games, but they're challenging enough that you'll probably end up playing more than six times before your team of rag tag heroes are able to overcome every challenge that's thrown at them. At the start of the game, each player takes their unique character card and their deck of cards.

Then, they'll draw five cards from it. These cards will have unique actions that can be taken on them, as well as Imagination tokens, which look like this, and Insight tokens, which look like this. The board will have an adventure track, which determines the game length; a danger stack, which will present the players with problems they'll be facing, and a hazard stack as well as an active hazard, which will be the feat that the players must face and overcome in order to win the game; and finally, the adventure stack, as well as the available cards in the market.

At the start of each player's turn, they'll flip over the top card of the danger stack and resolve the card. This can cause a number of actions to be taken. The token may move up on the adventure track, that player might lose health, or the players might have to discard cards, and one of the cards might even stop the players from drawing additional cards on their turn.

On their turn, each player will be playing cards from their hand to receive the icons listed on them and then they'll spend their turn deciding how to use them. The Insight can be placed on the various active hazards in an effort to work together and defeat them, while the imagination will be used to get new cards from the marketplace.

The player's goal is to overcome every card in the hazard stack before the token makes its way to the End Game Over space. In a race against the clock, the players will need to be careful about what they play and when, especially when it comes to adding new cards to their deck.

Now I won't spoil the other expansion boxes, but if you are looking to play a five player game, you'll need to open boxes one and two, that way you have Jesse. This game is a spiritual successor to the Harry Potter deck-building game, but it's definitely aimed toward a slightly younger audience but that doesn't mean that it's easy to win.

The first two times that we played, the first scenario, we lost and had to try again. So, even the first scenario's a little bit difficult, which is honestly fantastic. We had a lot of fun playing it and on the third try, we won. The game does a great job of balancing difficulty with simplicity and that makes it really easy to play, teach, and explain.