Forbidden Jungle is the fourth cooperative game in its series from the master of the genre, Matt Leacock, who also designed Pandemic and the just-delivered Daybreak, and his first Forbidden game since 2018’s Forbidden Sky, which I thought was the worst of his games to date. It looked great on the table, but the play was a little fiddly with extra rules that didn’t make the game more fun; the fact that to win the game you complete a circuit that made rocket noises was its best selling point.
Forbidden Jungle is an improvement, and I think it’s the hardest game of the series, which I would have previously awarded to Forbidden Desert (even over the original Pandemic). It’s pretty thematically tight, as the preceding game was, and introduces a new spatial awareness aspect that gives it something fresh compared to all three other Forbidden titles. (The first is Forbidden Island, which is a great intro to cooperative games, although if you have players under 7 I’d suggest his kids’ game Mole Rats in Space.)
In Forbidden Jungle, two to four players take on unique roles as explorers who’ve crash-landed on a rather nasty jungle (jungular?) planet and are trying to find and power a portal so they can escape. Of course, there are baddies, giant Cthulhu-ish creates that sting, and that lay eggs to make more of themselves as the game progresses. When play begins, all player tokens are at one end of the board, while all of the aliens, hatchlings, and eggs are at the other end, with all tiles but the start one face-down. On your turn, you get four actions, as in his prior games, and may move your meeple to another tile, explore a tile by flipping it, remove one bad anything token from your tile, use the power of certain tiles, or move a tile into an open space. The threat deck will make the bad things move around, lay more eggs, cast webs that prevent movement between tiles, and even destroy tiles starting from the lowest numbered tile that’s been explored.
The basic gist here is the same as his other games – you must balance your quest for the solution against the need to contain whatever is trying to kill you. The latter part here is straightforward, and if you run out of pieces for any of the four bad things (egg, hatchling, adult, web), you lose. You can also lose if your player gets bitten too many times. The former part is what’s been very difficult in our plays: You have to find the four working crystal tiles (some are defunct), then arrange them in the four orthogonal spaces around any of the portal tiles. When the game begins, you only know where all of the crystal tiles are, regardless of their status, and none of the portals. There’s also just a single open space in the tile grid, so you can only move one of the four tiles adjacent to that space. As tiles get destroyed – and you can destroy some tiles too, which also eradicates anything on those tiles – you do have more space to move around, but that only makes the challenge marginally easier.
Forbidden Jungle might have more luck/randomness in the game play, as it’s really easy for the cards to fall the wrong way and take you out early in the game. I’d also add that deciphering the cards required a little more rulebook reading than in any of his previous games. The flip side to that is that you will probably do a ton of talking at the table, regardless of player count, because the optimal move is generally not that obvious. In Forbidden Island, one person could easily take over and direct all of the action, and Pandemic has some of that as well. I’m not sure that’s as easy or desirable in Forbidden Jungle because the possibilities, with tiles disappearing and the enemy moving in unpredictable ways, are more numerous. That’s not better or worse than the preceding Forbidden Games, just a different experience to bring something new to your table. I haven’t cracked into Daybreak yet, and I’d still rank this below Pandemic and Forbidden Desert, but it’s ahead of Forbidden Sky and I recommend it if you liked any of his other games and want something similar with more twists.