A year after Disneyland opened its gates, Parker Brothers began bottling the park’s individual lands into board games — and the Walt Disney’s Adventureland Game, copyrighted 1956, is one of the most beautiful of the set. Its box art drops you straight onto the Jungle Cruise, complete with a fleet of safari animals and the unmistakable silhouette of a jungle launch.
An opening-day attraction in cardboard
Adventureland and its Jungle Cruise were there from the very beginning — July 17, 1955, Disneyland’s opening day. Imagineer Harper Goff designed the ride’s tramp-steamer boats with a heavy nod to the 1951 film The African Queen, while Disney’s own True-Life Adventures nature documentaries supplied the spirit of the trip. The game’s cover boat wears the name Congo Queen — and that’s no invention: Congo Queen is a real, long-serving vessel still in the Disneyland fleet, its name a wink at that same Bogart-and-Hepburn classic. For the shops and corners of this land that time forgot, our piece on the “Forgotten Shops of Adventureland” is essential reading.
How it plays
The gameplay is a charming photo-safari race. Each of the two-to-four players captains a boat from the dock, moving by spinner along the river. Players hold cards for the animals and landmarks they must “photograph,” and landing on a camera space lets you try to make a match. Snap all your assigned shots and return to the dock first, and you win. Components are simple — board, 24 cards, four boat pieces, and a spinner — but the lithographed artwork is the real prize.
Collect the lands
The Adventureland Game is best understood as one quarter of a set. In 1956 Parker Brothers issued companion games for Frontierland, Fantasyland, and Tomorrowland (the “Rocket to the Moon” game), each themed to its corner of the park. Serious collectors chase all four, and a complete run makes a stunning mid-century display. An original Adventureland Game even resides in the collection of The Henry Ford museum, which helps anchor its provenance — though, as ever, we’d caution that the asking prices you’ll see online (typically modest, for complete copies) aren’t the same as verified auction results.
Where it sits in the story
These land games were the start of a long Parker Brothers–Disney partnership that ran straight through the 1960 Disneyland Monorail Game and beyond. If you want the bigger picture of the park these games celebrate, start at the beginning with our account of Disneyland’s opening day, July 17, 1955.
