Reign of Jafar – Palace Heist – Disney Lorcana

When Ravensburger announced the first cooperative Disney Lorcana set that had players fighting against Ursula, I was instantly intrigued. However, the lack of product at launch locally to me, and a price that I found a bit too high, stopped me from picking it up and giving it a go. While I still think the price for this product is expensive, the latest cooperative release, Palace Heist, is so much better than the first release. If Disney Lorcana is your passion and you enjoy a good, tough cooperative experience, this is an easy pick up in my opinion.

This time around, Ravesnburger has opted for a regular board game box to store all the stuff needed for Palace Heist. If you own one of the Disney Villainous 3 pack boxes, you’ll have an idea of what to expect here for the size. Inside are really sturdy cardboard tokens used to track a variety of things, as well as a special deck for Jafar to use against you, two decks you can use against Jafar – you can use your own deck! – a few mission cards and a central board.

I fully expected these components to mimic the stuff you get in the starter decks – paper mats and thin cardboard chits. I was really impressed that this wasn’t the case, and immediately made me realize why there was a premium price attached to this product. Not only are you getting two complete decks to use, but a ton of extras as well.

There are a number of different missions you can play, and they are all pretty tough. They range in difficulty from easy to hard, and while it’s nice that they include some decks in the box, it would take incredible card-pull luck to win the harder scenarios with those included decks.

That has, however, pushed my father-in-law and I to think about how we would build specific decks to beat Jafar. This had us scrambling back through all the cards in our collection from Chapter 1 onward, picking the ones we thought would help us the most. It was fun to build such a specific deck for a specific scenario, and before you knew it, we were hours upon hours of time dedicated to this package, yet had only played (and miserably failed) once.

I don’t want to spoil too much here, but Jafar has a lot of interesting cards and abilities that will keep you on your toes, regardless of what deck you are using. Even the “easiest” sessions are pretty tough, and require a lot of cooperation between players. That is part of the fun here, though. As you play cards, you are not only worried about what benefits you can reap from them, but what potential benefits your allies can get as well. It takes the core of Disney Lorcana and twists it into something that feels distinctly new and different. All the same card you are using, but now thinking about them in different ways.

Although I am a strong supporter of building your own decks to play against Jafar, I’d still recommend new players pick this up over a couple starter decks. The amount of content here is worth the price of entry, although mileage will vary depending on how much you enjoy cooperative games.