Disney’s Aladdin Chess Adventures is a strategy game aimed at young kids to teach them the basics of chess set the the world of Disney’s Aladdin. DACA was announced in 2004 at the E3. It was going to be devoped by Fluent Entertainment and distributed Vivendi Universal set for a release to

in October 2004 to coincide with the DVD release of the Platinum Edition Ten Year Anniversary Aladdin animated feature film.

Websites of the publisher and developer still showed October that was later changed to TBA. Then DACA got a spring 2005 release. Things got quiet, both Fluent Entertainment and Vivendi Universal withdrew from the game Disney Interactive needed to find both a developer and publisher.

Finally, mid 2005, Strategy First picked up the game and took it to Red Mile Entertainment. And so the game rolled out in Europe in 2006. After almost 2 years since it was announced missing the DVD release and the wave of Aladdin’s popularly thanks to the platinum release altogether. And a large part of their revenue I’m afraid.

The Game

Aladdin characters as chess pieces
Aladdin = Knight
Jasmine = Queen
Jafar = Bishop
Knight = Rajah
Tower = Carpet
Pawn = Abu
Now let’s look at the game itself. The opening screen gives the choices of “Play Adventure”, “Quick Game against the computer”
The game revolves around the adventure as the player goes through worlds by playing mini-games and quizzes. The pieces and moves are ex pained in theory and later locations test the player what they learned. Each world has a merchant location where the player spends their earned gold and buy pieces and artifacts that help you defeats the opponent. Some of the artifacts include a dagger that removes the opponents piece, a hour-glass that undo the last move and others.

The Opponents

You can it up against opponent with varying skills from easy to very hard the top player can choose between characters like Razoul, Merchant, Prince Achmed, Cave of Wonders and new characters like Gameli the camel, Pan Do the panda, Hermit the firebreather and others. The bottom player can choose all the heroes minus Genie but plus Aladdin and a kid dressed up as Aladdin.

The Worlds

World 1: Agrabah
Abu is the under spell of an evil magician and it’s up to you to help the monkey and defeat the evil magician. You visit the familiars areas like Aladdin’s hovel, the garden, Jasmine’s room and the throne room.

World 2: The city of Bagra
The lighthouse that guides ships to Bagra’s port is out. Light it by finding the missing gems. This level is designed of the game.

World 3: Cave of Wonders
Go down the stairs and play through areas to find the mysterious City in a Bottle. I’m stuck at this level. I can’t figure out The Lamp Room and what they mean by Place the maxim un number of Rooks on the board so that they cannot capture each other.

The box says there are a total of 8 worlds each with 12 different locations.

DACA has beautiful graphics and artwork, the backgrounds are detailed and very rich in color the music has the familiar tunes from the movie that appeared in other Aladdin games as well.