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Forbidden Desert Reviews

4.9 Rating 8 Reviews
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Forbidden Desert is a game of survival from Gamewright and game designer Matt Leacock. Forbidden Desert is a co-operative game where you and your fellow players are searching the desert to recover a legendary flying machine that is supposedly powered by the sun itself. Moments before you arrive a sandstorm strikes your helicopter forcing a crash landing. You are now stranded, and your only hope is to find the flying machine and escape.

In Forbidden Desert each player takes on the role of an adventurer each with their own special abilities, and each round each player will complete four actions then draw the sand cards to make the sand storm to move and bury the desert that you are trying to excavate.

The actions that a player can take include, moving, removing sand tokens dropped by the storm when it moves, taking a machine part or excavate, meaning you can turn one of the desert tiles over to reveal items or the direction to the locations of the parts as eight of the tiles will point you in the direction of the four flying machine parts making each game different and unique.

There is only one way to win the game, assemble the parts on the excavated landing platform. But there are three ways to lose; dying from thirst, if a player ever reaching the death symbol on their water canteen then the game is lost. Players will have to drink water each time a sun beats down storm card is drawn, being buried - when the storm moves it leaves sand behind and if you cannot place a sand token because you have run out you have all been buried alive. Finally, the game can be lost if you are all swept away, that is when the storm level reaches maximum.

Can you survive the forbidden desert and fly away with the fabled flying machine powered by the sun or will you succumb to the storm, the sand or just thirst?

Player Count: 2-5
Time: 45 Minutes
Age: 10+

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Played Forbidden Island previously and wanted a more challenging game. This is certainly it but not too much so that younger family members wouldn’t enjoy it. It’s great when you build the craft and sad when you die, but all in all a great game.
Helpful Report
Posted 4 years ago
Bought this game to play two-player. My wife and I took about an hour in the pub to learn it and haven't turned back since. It's a great way to play a co-op game in an inventive and creative way. Really enjoying it and have only won about 50% of the time but it means we really want to come back and play it. Would like to try it for four players - I'm sure that would be good too
Helpful Report
Posted 4 years ago
I love this game and you get so much for its cheap price. I think anyone who has never played a co-op game before should start here or start with forbidden island.
Helpful Report
Posted 5 years ago
Forbidden Desert is an easily-explained cooperative game, ideal for younger players or as an introductory game for people with little experience of designer games. The family likeness with Forbidden Island is clear; although Forbidden Desert is the younger sibling of Forbidden Island, it is still the more accomplished and rather more grownup of the pair. It has all of the strengths of its sibling, and much of the same flavour, though it is a better game and more than a simple reskin. It shares a similar device with it and with its parent, Pandemic, in that the probability that an area will be afflicted - by sand, this time - is raised if it was afflicted earlier. It is a little more thematic than its older sibling, and a little more challenging. Players have to collect items whose location is determined as the play unfolds, which is a nice touch.
Helpful Report
Posted 6 years ago