LogFAQs > #966879415

25. Forbidden Desert

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/136063/forbidden-desert

Category: Cooperative
Key mechanics: Hand management, set collection, point-to-point movement, action point allocation
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 40-60 minutes
First played: 2015
Experience: 15-25 plays with 2-5 players

A research team's plane crashes in the titular forbidden desert, and you need to excavate the pieces of your plane and escape the desert before the dunes get too dangerous, or the sun cooks you to death. On a player's turn, they can move around the 5x5 square grid, or remove sand from a square, or look for/collect plane pieces. After the player's turn, the game acts - blowing the tiles around, adding sand, and sometimes hitting you with a sun flare. You need to randomly unearth two locator tiles to collect each plane piece.

Forbidden Desert is the spiritual sequel to Forbidden Island, which in turn is the spiritual sequel to Pandemic. In the past I've ranked all three of these games together. Each of these games features players taking a set number of actions, including movement and threat mitigation, followed by the game doing a predictable-but-increasing amount of damage. They feature essentially perfect information and are all fantastic gateway games, especially since they're co-op, which I love.

In 2021, I only played Desert. In some ways, it is the best of the three. Flipping over locator tiles is a fun mechanic to get the pieces you need for the ship, compared to simply drawing cards automatically in Pandemic and Forbidden Island. The water management and sun-beats-down system adds a mostly pleasant layer of complexity to manage, with the layout of the tunnels being another fun subsystem added for minimal rules overhead. And most importantly, Forbidden Desert has the moving board, which I find ingenious - the cards you unearth show you the direction that the wind blows; your 5x5 grid actually only contains 24 tiles, so one is empty, and the tiles in the row/column containing that empty tile will move accordingly to fill in the gap, accumulating sand. Oh, and you get to assemble a literal little plane, complete with spinning propellor, which is awesome.

In exchange, you get almost certainly the least interesting possible game-over condition: running out of sand tiles. Pandemic also has an endgame condition of running out of disease cubes, but in that game, you're also concerned about breakouts, which are way more likely to happen than cubes running out. However, if you correctly manage your hydration in FD, the most likely endgame condition is simply that "too much sand has piled up." But to me, it's not clear why that should be such a game-ending condition; after all, your crew should theoretically still be able to remove it. I understand the principle of it, and the practicality of it; however, it feels pretty dang anticlimactic. It especially pales in comparison to the endgame of the sinking island in Forbidden Island. The scaling of this game also feels particularly punishing at higher player counts, especially with five, due to how many turns the game gets between your turns.

I am pointing out clear negatives here, but I really do love the overall formula of this whole series of games. Because the rules overhead is so low, you're just immediately pitted against the game - human versus nature. It's easy to grasp the board state, so you can collaborate (or if your group sucks, alpha-game) to brainstorm what players should do. And it plays in a delectable amount of time. Historically one of my favorite game series; FD has mainly slipped on this list because I no longer feel that much desire/have that much niche in which to play it. It's still in my mind a go-to for a light co-op.