Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Over the last two years, I have had the pleasure of working with the team at Ravensburger to cover a somewhat new-to-me category: trading card games.
I say “somewhat” because games like Pokémon and Magic the Gathering have been popular with a small percentage of the gamers in my Chicago-area circles. I’m familiar with the games and how they play—particularly Pokémon, because my two kids love collecting those cards—but when anyone tries to talk about their passion for the category, my eyes have a tendency to glaze over.
Two of the players in my strategy group have gone hard into competitive/”serious” TCG play thanks to the 2019 release Flesh and Blood, which has a larger convention presence every year. Others are big fans of Marvel Champions, and Star Wars: Unlimited appears set for a bright future based purely on its IP.
That’s a lot of competition, and that’s before new players like Altered enter the scene on an annual basis. Disney Lorcana, Ravensburger’s entry into the space, has been a fit at my house thanks to the love my kids have for many of Disney’s movie and TV properties. Lorcana has never been more exciting for the kids than their Pokémon collection, which sit in large binders scattered around the house, so Lorcana has always had a hard time breaking through.
For each of the three previous drops I have covered—The First Chapter, Into the Inklands, and Azurite Sea—it was easy to get one or both kids to join me for plays. “Ooh, more cards!” is usually the response from my eight-year-old when a new Lorcana box hits the doorstep. The 11-year-old is harder to sway, but because games are always close, I can usually get them to join me for a couple hands.
When the latest box arrived—this time, the title is Reign of Jafar, and features characters from a host of Disney properties ranging from Pinocchio and Captain Hook to the entire family from the film Encanto—there was a noticeable lack of excitement from the crew at home.
And that’s what Reign of Jafar represents at my house: quite possibly the end of their love affair with the Lorcana property. This isn’t because the game isn’t good or the cards aren’t interesting or the art isn’t beautiful.
I think this is because my kids are aging out of the original Disney properties.
Shiny, Dual-Ink Cards
Reign of Jafar is the 11th Lorcana release, and of the three previous sets I’ve tried, Reign of Jafar featured the fewest changes. In fact, there were no in-game play changes with this set at all. (For those of you who are new to how Lorcana plays, feel free to check out the links above.)
The only minor change that I noticed with this set features “dual-ink” cards, allowing players additional flexibility when building Lorcana decks. I haven’t dabbled in building decks as much as other players, in part because I have enjoyed the balance provided by the single-player decks. But for more competitive players—and it’s clear that the Lorcana universe will get a big boost now that Lorcana has just finished crowning its first world champion—the flexibility provided by some of the Reign of Jafar cards will become important.
As a game, Lorcana is still fun for us as a family because we get to talk about the characters, locations, and quotes from the movies. But it took a lot longer than normal for me to get anyone at the house to agree to play it. Finally, two weeks after the game arrived (a lifetime in my household when it comes to playing games with the kids), my son broke and agreed to try it out.
Also, this set featured a few characters that I couldn’t place, to the point where we spent some time online researching a few of the cards. (Normally, there are one or two cards where I don’t recognize a character at all; Reign of Jafar had more moments like that than before.) Amongst the discoveries: the title character from Raya and the Last Dragon, a 2021 film that somehow slipped by me, plus Bobby, one of the minor pigeon characters from the 2008 movie Bolt. Some of these characters are crazy niche!!
Reign of Jafar still has songs, items, and action cards; there are no new location cards in this set, but some of the card abilities here take advantage of the ability to challenge locations from other sets. Lorcana has always been a race to get 20 points, known in the game as Lore, and Reign of Jafar doesn’t disturb the meta of racing to get 20 Lore through using readied characters to take the Quest action to score points.
More, More, More!
Yes, Disney Lorcana is a trading card game, but for our family, it is more of a collectibles game. We don’t play it as much as play through it, using the game as an exercise to sit around the table and enjoy the cards. I only got my 8-year-old to play Reign of Jafar once; in the past, we have always used the two single-player decks to play each side once over the course of about an hour or so, then we get additional plays in when I can coerce the kids to get back to the table.
The eight-year-old was having none of that this time. In fact, I basically had to bribe him for the one play, with the agreement that I would have to play Battleship (another of his old-school favorites) if I got him to play Reign of Jafar.
I think that means my time with the Lorcana property is almost up. If Disney and Ravensburger pump out cards from Star Wars movies, Marvel TV shows, or Pixar properties, there’s a chance my kids will re-engage. But for a family aggressively moving out of the younger child Disney IP, Lorcana has been a tougher sell. (That Bolt reference, earlier? My kids have never seen Bolt, have no desire to see Bolt, and now typically want to see movies that are rated PG-13 more than the ones with a G rating.)
One thing hasn’t changed across my plays of the four sets I have at the house—the cards are gorgeous. I used this review mainly to highlight some of my favorites, but the reality is that there are about 200 different cards in this set and it’s hard to go wrong with any of the images. As a collectible, Lorcana is something else.
Disney Lorcana: Reign of Jafar details
- Designer: Ryan Miller, Steve Warner
- Artists: N/A
- Publishers: Ravensburger
- Release Date: 2025
- Player count : 2
- Age range : 8+
- Mechanism(s): Multi-Use Cards
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.34222 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
- More articles about Disney Lorcana: Reign of Jafar.
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