Forbidden Jungle Review – Rediscovering the Joy of a Good Crash Landing

After Forbidden Sky, I thought Matt Leacock and Gamewright Games finally ran out of places to crash-land a ship. Yet, here we are with Forbidden Jungle, the fourth cooperative instalment in the Forbidden series. And if the rulebook is anything to go by, it won’t be the last.

Forbidden Jungle follows the same patterns of play established within the rest of the series. You take turns performing four actions before the jungle, and its inhabitants, come alive and try to prematurely end your adventure.

Using these four actions, you’ll move around the map, exploring tiles, finding machines, and operating them for different effects. Winning the game requires you to find an escape route, which in this game takes the form of futuristic-looking portals. However, unlike the other machines you find, these portals start unpowered. You must surround and energize it with four crystal tiles before you can use it to warp away to safety… Or wherever mysterious jungle portals take you.

While you’re exploring, using machines, and sliding map tiles around, you’ll find no shortage of predatory aliens on the loose. After each player’s turn, you draw several threat cards to see where they move, spin webs, or if more appear out of the jungle.

These aliens come in three forms: eggs, hatchlings, and adults. Harmless by themselves, eggs and hatchlings will turn into adults if they’re left alone long enough. When they do, you better watch out. As adults sting any adventurers in their way. Causing them to lose health and hope, as they move one step closer to dying in the unfamiliar wilderness.

Therefore, to survive this jungle and see the next instalment of the Forbidden series you need to balance your portal powering, bug bashing and sting side-stepping.

Where does it rank in the series?

After a very mediocre Forbidden Sky, Forbidden Jungle is a triumphant return to form within the Forbidden universe. From the mechanisms of gameplay to how it feels to play, this new addition is more in line with Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert than its immediate predecessor.

From the outside, Forbidden Jungle revives its glorious, and hard-to-store, tin box. Meanwhile, inside the game, the glorious feeling of adventure has returned. Whereas Forbidden Sky felt sterile because it focused too heavily on the core puzzle. Forbidden Jungle sweeps you up in its theme of a humid alien environment, causing you to sometimes forget what you’re doing and just do your best to survive.

That’s not to diminish the thought required to connect four crystal tiles to a portal, which is the most complex puzzle in the series to date. However, with all the moving parts within the jungle, the different types of aliens, machines you can operate, exit criteria, and powerful new items, the game just feels alive.

These moving parts do add some extra bookkeeping between turns, but nothing too arduous. And the added complexity allows you to spread your creative wings and come up with some wonderfully unique solutions to tough scenarios.

Specifically, the machines you find that allow for all sorts of crazy maneuvers. For instance, the Configurator lets you slide tiles around the map. Now while you mostly use it to line up the crystal tiles to portals, you can also use it to displace enemies, or clear webs in hard-to-reach places.

Another favourite machine is the Destruct Switch, which destroys a tile and everything on it when used. Incredibly powerful, but be mindful of not blowing up your escape path. Something we did an embarrassing number of times.

Watch out for aliens, they bite!

The other big, interesting feature of Forbidden Jungle is the aliens. Although veterans of the other Forbidden games are familiar with losing by running out of components. Usually, there’s only one or two components you need to worry about. But since aliens go through a full lifecycle, there are now four: eggs, hatchlings, adults, and webs.

As a result, you’ll be looking back and forth between the creature supply and the board like it’s a tennis match. But the bigger concern arises from the poisonous sting of the adults.

When there are a lot of adults on the board, you can go from healthy to dead in the blink of an eye. Especially when adventurers have typically 2-3 health. This is a big difference from previous titles where the threat of dying usually grows throughout the game. Here, it’s ever-present. So there’s a need for extra caution as you move around in Forbidden Jungle.

The serious and imminent danger posed by these adults, and the lack thereof with hatchlings and eggs, creates great moments of panic throughout the game. You almost don’t mind the board filling up with harmless eggs or hatchlings, but left too long and you’ll be overwhelmed by adults. We had turns where the board went from no adults to four or five spawning at once. Changing the adventure from a fun frolic through the foliage to a nail-biting couple of rounds.

As a result, this lifecycle gives Forbidden Jungle a unique rhythm. Where the threat of losing doesn’t increase linearly over time, but ebbs and flows with the cycle of these aliens. Providing a distinctive feel to the game when compared to other cooperatives.

Overall, Forbidden Jungle is a stunning return to form for Matt Leacock and Gamewright Games. It brings fresh ideas and gameplay to a familiar formula. Although more complicated than the other games in the series, and therefore not the best entry point, it’s only a small jump coming from any other Forbidden titles… and it’s a jump worth making!