Forbidden Desert Review – Stumbling to Victory in a Sentient Sandstorm

In Forbidden Desert, you take on the role of a heroic but dim-witted adventurer trapped in a desert. Without a pilot, engineer, or a backup plan, your only chance is to piece together parts of an ancient vehicle and fly away to safety.

Forbidden Desert is the next evolution of Forbidden Island and Pandemic. Using the same blueprint where a player takes a turn, has four actions, and then the bad stuff happens.

Like these other games, there’s one way to win, but many ways to lose.

Played on a 5×5 square grid of tiles, the center square is left empty. This represents a raging desert storm that moves around the board, ruining your plans, your day, your marriage, and whatever else it touches.

As this storm moves, it leaves an aftermath of sand tokens. Too many of these tokens on the board mean you’re no longer able to find your way through the desert. And that’s bad news. But this storm isn’t the only desert threat.

There is also your water supply. If even one player reaches for an empty canteen, that’s also game over.

Therefore, you’ll need to use your four actions to move around, remove sand tokens, and hide from the beating sun to save water. That’s just to survive.

You’ll also need to excavate tiles in this grid by flipping them to escape. Some of these will be items for use, others are oases for you to refill your water, or tunnels to transport you across large distances.

But the real prize is the four pieces of the ancient flying machine. Finding all of these before returning to the launch pad is your only hope of survival.

A real sense of you stumbling through this adventure

There are so many well-thought-out ideas in Forbidden Desert it’s hard to know where to begin. For example, the sliding picture puzzle that’s the storm is genius. It creates unpredictability. Especially, combined with the rule that says no more sand is placed if the storm goes off the grid. This creates organically forming moments of sheer panic, as well as moments of relief.

However, you can’t spend too long worrying about the storm, as there’s so much more you need to concentrate on. Like the Sun Beats Down cards, finding ship pieces, removing sand from the board, and looking after your water supplies.

This makes it easy to find a good move that will help your team. But nearly impossible to find the optimal move. So there’s a real sense of you stumbling through this adventure. Contrasting to Pandemic which feels sterile in its analytical approach to gameplay.

Forbidden Desert is incredibly fun and exciting because it allows you to explore, make mistakes and still make to narrow victory, or a crushingly close defeat.

But what makes it stand out from other board games is its approach to tactility and table presence. There are no stationary components within Forbidden Desert. The map, the water and storm tracks, the player pawns, everything moves.

Board games often forget that they’re in a 3D space, Forbidden Desert, on the other hand, brings this to the forefront. For example, the sand tiles that build, and build throughout the game create a physical manifestation of the struggles you face. Meanwhile, the extremely fancy plastic ship and the towering storm counter give this game height and tactility not often seen.

Is that gold?

One of the most interesting mechanics in Forbidden Desert is the mirage. At the start of the game, you’ll notice a few tiles have an icon indicating they’re an oasis. One of these tiles, however, is an imposter – a mirage.

While the rest of these tiles will give everyone some water when overturned, the mirage gives you nothing. This created some hilarious, yet heartbreaking moments while playing. Where we spent important turns and changed our strategy to organise around the oasis. Only for it to be dust.

As they say, not all that glitters is gold.

Sometimes it’s just sand.

This applies to the unpredictability of the sandstorm as well. While most of the time it creates this wonderful unknown that you’re fighting against. Sometimes it creates turns where you don’t feel like you have an impact on the game.

You must spend all four of your actions removing sand from the board. Only for it to be immediately replaced by the storm. If this happens to you, you will begin to question the meaning of your existence.

You’ll also question your life if you play Forbidden Desert with five players. At that point, there are too many storm cards drawn between your turns. You can go from full to no water without a chance to do anything. This is not fun or interactive, and I encourage you to play something else.

Save yourself, you have the tools

Another large tick for Forbidden Desert is its quick setup time and turns that progress so smoothly and quickly that you’re never far from your next set of actions. It’s easy to slip into a rhythm, with the only interruption being whenever you need to reshuffle the storm deck.

But the biggest plus of them all is that it’s fun. Excavating a tile is so rewarding as it either moves you closer to victory or gives you an item. These items are so powerful that when used correctly you feel like a superhero.

Forbidden Desert is so fun because you’re always in control. Despite the storm, victory or defeat feels manageable, with your problem-solving and teamwork the determining factor between success and failure. Like Pandemic, the difficulty of this cataclysmic weather is finely tuned, so the game always ends in a crescendo where it’s never clear if you’ll make it or not.

That’s incredibly exciting, and the reason the design of Forbidden Desert is nothing short of phenomenal. As a huge fan of cooperative games, Forbidden Desert might just top the list.