We featured Ravensburger's Lord of the Rings Adventure Book Game last year on Board's Eye View. The Wizard of Oz Adventure Book Game is part of the same series. It's designed by Ryan Miller, with art by George Caltsoudas and Tom Moore. Tho' it doesn't use art from the 1939 MGM film, the game feels as much inspired by the movie as by L Frank Baum's 1900 children's novel.
The format is essentially the same as in Ravensburger's other Adventure Books: each double page opens up to form a heavy card playing board for an individual fully cooperative game where the 1-4 players are moving Dorothy and various other plastic miniatures, depending on the scenario, as well as a number of cardboard pieces. You need to meet several scenario objectives and pay in the requisite matching story cards to complete the scenario before its 'timer' runs out: for example, in the opening game set in Kansas, before the Twister reaches the end of its track. The six individual games are labelled as 'chapters' and, played in order, they follow the story of the book and film. It effectively forms a campaign game because rewards (special cards) you earn in a chapter remain in your deck and carry forward to the next. And tho' the core movement and card play mechanics are a constant through all the chapters, there's enough different about each one to make it feel fresh in relation to what's gone before.
The games include a puzzle element because you have to optimise and make the most economic use of your actions but Wizard of Oz feels notably easier than the Lord of the Rings Adventure Book Game. It makes it very suitable for children to play, or indeed one to play with them at bedtime to substitute for or supplement a bedtime story. For sure, the Wicked Witch unleashes her Flying Monkeys in one of the later 'chapters', but tho' there are sequences in the movie that some younger children may find frightening that isn't a worry in this game: we don't think there's anything here that will trigger nightmares.
As with the other games in the series, adults may treat the six games here as done with once they've played them through but children will enjoy revisiting them time and again.