JUMANJI: The Curse Returns

My first impression was that Marmalade had actually threaded the needle here: a digital board game built around a fictional board game that never physically existed, with room to invent something genuinely clever. What landed instead is functional, occasionally tense, and mostly forgettable. JUMANJI: The Curse Returns is a four-player co-op title where you roll dice to advance tokens around the iconic board, and each space triggers a timed card-battle against the jungle creatures and plants trying to overrun the town of Brantford. Green attack cards, blue assist cards, time-extending cards, and team-up points all layer on top of the base dice roll, and for the first couple of rounds, the combination gives off a real pulse of urgency. Thirty seconds to clear a wave of crocodiles or rhinos, with Van Pelt the hunter actively interfering and blocking your team-up meter with no way to fight back. That tension is real. The problem is that it stays at exactly that level. Roll, fight, repeat. Coins earned from battles let you expand your deck before the next round, but the card options are not varied enough to create meaningfully different strategies. Attack with green, heal with blue, add time when desperate. Reviewers across the board flagged the same ceiling: the mechanics are there, but nothing builds on them. A single session runs anywhere from twenty minutes to under an hour depending on how badly the jungle punishes your team, which is either a feature (quick family game) or a flaw (zero long-term pull). The visuals lean cartoony and read clearly as a mobile port, which the game technically is. Character models are vague likenesses of the 1995 film cast, Judy, Peter, Alan, and Sarah, alongside four additional original characters, but none of them look particularly sharp on a PC monitor. The carved wooden tokens sliding across the Jumanji board are the visual highlight, which says something about where the budget landed. Sound and atmosphere fare better: the drumbeat soundtrack builds genuine dread in the way a Jumanji game probably should. Two maps are available, the town of Brantford and a winter resort, each with five locations to defend, though the map choice has no mechanical impact on how the game plays out. Multiplayer is where this finds its best footing. Online co-op with friends, local shared-controller play, or cross-play with the mobile version all keep it accessible for family gatherings. Solo play against AI teammates is where it falls flat. The AI companions are not reliable enough to compensate for the difficulty on harder settings, and playing a co-op board game with bots is a lonely experience. It is also worth noting that support for the game has since ended, planned expansions were cancelled, and the title was delisted from storefronts in late 2024. If you are buying through a third-party key seller, you are getting the final state of the game with no future updates coming. If you loved the 1995 film and want a breezy co-op night with family or younger players who can handle the timed pressure, this scratches the itch for one or two evenings. Expect diminishing returns fast, and do not expect it to compete with deeper digital board game offerings.

Alex · Scout Team

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