Playing – Forbidden Jungle

I’m a big fan of two of the three other Forbidden games* ¹and I was eager to see if Forbidden Jungle was going be among the better ones. TLDR – yes, I enjoyed it as did the others at the table.

Though it can be said that there is a series with the Forbidden games, it’s more the spirit and mechanics that form the connective tissue between them than any real narrative so you need not play them in order or even back to back.

The Pitch

Forbidden Jungle takes the intrepid crew to a mysterious jungle planet, infested with spider-like creatures that sting and spin webs and lay eggs that lead to even more creatures.

The Challenge

The rocket ship that landed you here has been lost so it’s up to the crew to locate a portal to escape the quickly collapsing jungle and move four power crystals into position before someone is fatally stung, the creatures grow too numerous, or too many tiles are destroyed.

The Mechanics

It’s a co-operative game where each player has a special ability to help them overcome the challenges before it’s too late. Each of them has standard actions as well like move, explore, remove creature or web, or activate device. Swapping special equipment cards is free and can happen at any time. They also have limited hits that get reduced when an adult creature stings them. To help you out are found equipment cards like the trusty jet-pack, tunnels that allow you to shortcut across the board, and devices that can change the board.

Like Pandemic, the Forbidden series always have a phase after each player’s turn where bad things happen according to drawn cards, including increasing the difficulty by having to draw more cards in future turns. Other bad things you can expect are creatures moving and stinging, tiles being destroyed, new creatures appearing, and the dreaded increase difficulty and reshuffle the deck of bad things.

A few elements mark this as different from the other Forbidden games. The tiles have small symbols on them that determine the direction of effects like spinning webs and creatures moving. The creatures have three forms, egg, larvae, and adult – the adult is the dangerous one as it stings and spins webs. Then there are the devices that can be discovered while exploring that can be used to move the creatures, move tiles, or even destroy them.

The layout of the board is formed of tiles and there are several alternate tile set ups included. We did the most basic one. As the game progresses, the layout will change as tiles get destroyed by the bad things deck and tiles will shift when a particular device is used, making this like on of those classic sliding tile puzzles to get the four crystals to surround the escape portal.

1. Forbidden Island is an excellent gateway game, with a very simple set of mechanics and special abilities. Forbidden Desert has a bit more going on and I would call it my favorite of the series. Forbidden Skies felt like it could have used another couple of play tests before getting released to the public. The electric circuit building is novel and the rocket ship lighting up for launch is nifty, but we have yet to beat the game with all the random doom happening. It’s on the list for ones to invent some house rules to balance it out a bit better and ↩︎