Forbidden Desert

27th October 2019

Sunday at 'The Sovereigns' in Woking and our gaming continues.

The final game of the day was 'Forbidden Desert', the second game in the 'Forbidden series' of co-operative games.

'Forbidden Desert' is a co-operative game of exploration.

The players are a band of adventurers and explorers, scouring the desert (Which I guess is a forbidden?) for the remains of a legendary flying machine. But during your trip, a ferocious sand storm forces your helicopter to crash in the remains of a lost city. The only way to escape the desert is to fly back out of the desert. Your helicopter is a wreck, so your only hope of survival is to find and reconstruct the flying machine before the storm and desert spell your doom!

What's in a game?
'Forbidden Desert' comes in a natty tin box, the game's components are good quality with some nice artwork.

• City tiles: There are 24 of these tiles, except for the starting tile, they are all turned face-down at the start of the game.
• Sand tokens: There's a whole stack of these, they are used to represent the moving sands throughout the city.
• Storm track: As the game progresses, the storm will get more and more violent. This is tracked on the storm track.
• Storm cards: This deck of cards are used to dictate the sandstorm's behaviour.
• Gadget cards: Useful cards that the players acquire during the game.
• Flying machine: The flying machine is a plastic model. The 4 missing parts of it are made of plastic, metal and acrylic. They are weighty and high quality.
• Adventurer classes: There are 6 of these, each class has it's own card and meeple. Each character has their own water track and also has it's own unique ability.

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How's it play?
Setup.

• Randomly deal or choose a class for each player. Each class has it's unique ability and water track shown on the pertinent card. Each class also has its meeple.
• Shuffle the location tiles and place them face-down in a 5x5 grid. Hang on, a 5x5 grid has 25 spaces, but there are only 24 tiles? When placing the tiles into a grid, the centre space is left empty. The empty space is the 'eye of the storm'. The starting tile and 3 oasis tiles can be identified even when face-down.
• Place sand tokens on to 8 of the city tiles in a 'diamond' shape. The remaining sand tokens should be placed in a stack close to the playing area.
• Shuffle the gadget cards into a face-down deck.
• Shuffle the storm cards into a face-down deck.
• Set up the storm track, there are different tracks depending on how many players there are. Additionally, the game has several difficulty levels that determine the starting point on the track.
• One of the city tiles is double sided and represents the crashed helicopter. This is the adventurer's starting tile. Place all the meeples on to this tile.

Now, we're good to go.

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The starting setup for Forbidden Desert.

One of the six professions.

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Player actions
During the active player's turn, they have 4 actions that they can perform (in any order and repeatedly.). These are:

• Move: A player can move their character's meeple left, right, up or down to an adjacent tile, provided there is no more than 1 sand token on that tile. If there is more than 1 sand tile, then the area is blocked by a sand drift and is currently inaccessible. Furthermore if the tile the meeple is currently standing on has more than 1 sand token on it, then the meeple is trapped!
• Excavate: If a meeple is standing on a face-down tile with no sand tokens on it, then the player can excavate and turn it face-up. There are several different types of tile in the game and different actions will occur when they are revealed. Some tiles are blank, so nothing happens. There are the 3 'oasis' tiles, one is a mirage, the other 2 will provide water when excavated. There are 3 tunnel tiles, this allows characters to move between them with 1 action regardless of their locations in the game area, tunnels also provide shelter from the sun. There are 8 'clue tiles', each part of the flying machine has 2 clues associated with it. One clue shows the vertical position of the part and the other for the horizontal position. When both clues are revealed, they are cross-referenced to show the actual location of the part. Launch pad tile, nothing happens when this tile is revealed, but when the players have acquired all 4 machine parts, they must all meet on the launch pad to escape and win the game. Finally any card that displays a 'cog' in the corner allows the active player to draw a gear card.
• Remove sand: As sand tokens build up in the playing area, they will need to be removed for various reasons. For 1 action a character may remove a sand token from their tile or an adjacent tile. The sand token is returned to the sand token supply.
• Retrieve part: When a machine part has been revealed, if a character is on the same tile as the part, they can spend an action to retrieve it.

The storm
Once the active player has completed their 4 actions, the storm gets to act.
Cards are drawn from the storm deck, the number drawn depends upon how severe the storm is, this ranges from 2-6 cards. There are 3 types of storm card.

• Storm moves: This is by far the most common card in the storm deck. The empty space in the game area represents the 'storm'. When the storm moves, it shuffles a tile into the empty space and creates a new empty where the tile was previously located. Depending upon circumstances, up to 4 tiles can be moved this way. Every tile that is moved this way accumulates a sand token. Sand tokens can build up very quickly.
• ​High temperature: When this storm card is drawn, the adventurers encounter savage heat. If a character is on a tunnel tile, they are safe from the heat. Every character not in a tunnel must lose 1 water from their water track.
• Storm intensifies: When this card is drawn, move the marker 1 space further along the storm track. After moving the marker 3 or 4 spaces, the storm will reach 'the next level' and from the next turn onward an additional storm card will be drawn at the end of a player's turn.

Gear Cards
Gear cards are all beneficial for the players and can be played at any time by the owning player.

Endgame
Losing conditions:

• If at any time, a characters water track reaches the end, then the character dies and the players lose the game.
• If at any time, the storm reaches it's maximum level, the players lose the game.
• If at any time, sand tokens need to be put on a tile and there are none remaining, the players lose the game.

Winning condition:
If the players manage to retrieve all 4 missing parts of the machine, all manage to reach the launch pad at the same time and the launch pad is unblocked. Then the players win the game. As the adventurers escape in their new flying machine.

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Buried! As the sand tokens ran out.

So close to victory, we had all 4 parts.

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Overall
Forbidden Desert has essentially 2 timers running, the sand tokens pouring on to the tiles and the strength of the storm (Which also increases the rate in that sand tokens appear.).
Water is a resource that must be managed.

Players are faced with the choice of being prudent to preserve their water levels, acting to manage the sand token levels or having to work towards their objectives. Especially since the storm can move the game area about which can cause big problems or be an opportunity to exploit.
I think the key to doing well in Forbidden Desert are the characters. Each character has their own special ability. Remembering to utilise these abilities and working them into any strategy used vital in my opinion.

​Forbidden Desert is a cooperative game in which the players play against 'the game'.
Games of this type must balance strategy and randomness in order to be good games.
Too much strategy and once the players learn the game's systems, they'll learn to rinse it every time.
Too much randomness and player decisions become meaningless as their fates will be left to the whim of luck.

Forbidden Desert manages to straddle this line pretty well and is one of the better examples of this type of game.