A worthy continuation of the Forbidden series

Finally home! 😁It took us quite a long time, thanks to the chaos at the Birmingham Airport, but here we are! On the bright side, we almost managed to play our whole UKGE haul 😍

Have you played any of the ‘Forbidden…’ series? Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert are very close to our hearts as they partly started our board gaming journey. Unfortunately Forbidden Skies wasn't too good, yet I was very excited when I heard about Forbidden Jungle a year ago. We finally played a demo of it at UKGE, then proceeded to take the game home with us. 🥰

It's of course a similar concept to the previous games of the series: 👉 take 4 actions, then draw cards from the Threat deck, which triggers all kinds of bad things. To win you need to find a Portal, 4 Crystals, then position the Crystals around the Portal to power it. This introduces a sliding-puzzle type of mechanic, as special locations allow you to shift things around. As always with these co-op games there are multiple loss conditions, so you will definitely lose more games than you win. 😅

You will be moving around exploring and activating tiles, finding and playing item cards and dealing with the denizens of this mysterious jungle: adult alien creatures and their hatchlings, eggs and webs. Threat cards keep causing these to move, appear or evolve to the next level. Whenever a type runs out you lose, so you have to keep their numbers in check. Adults can also sting, and whenever someone runs out of health, you also lose.

💭 The jungle-y color palette and illustrations on tiles are amazing, and so are the plastic tokens for the aliens. It's an amazing table presence and the central puzzle is very compelling too. It definitely has that same feeling as other Forbidden games, but it's slightly more complex with more moving parts, making this (for me) the best in the series.