Work together to escape the desert, before sand buries you or your supplies run dry!
Forbidden Desert is a cooperative Adventure Board Game where the players assume the role of brave adventurers who must survive both blistering heat and blustering sand long enough to recover the parts of a legendary flying machine so they can escape. The game was published by Gamewright.
Compare Forbidden Island, Forbidden Sky, Forbidden Jungle and Pandemic, similar co-op games by the same designer.
Tropes found in the game include:
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Character cards are color coded, with matching character tokens of the same colors.
- Co-Op Multiplayer: You lose pretty fast if you don't coordinate your actions with others. Each character individually has the same amount control over the game state, and has a different special ability. Since the game information is open, the game could also be played by a single player controlling multiple characters.
- Deadly Dust Storm: At the end of every turn, cards are drawn to determine the progress of the storm.
- Difficulty Levels: Depending on the player experience, you can play different difficulty levels ranging from Novice to Legendary.
- Disaster Relief Game: The characters must survive being stranded in the desert.
- Everyone Has a Special Move: The 6 characters come with different abilities and different vulnerability to dehydration.
- Hollywood Mirage: Three tiles appear to have water. Two of them do, but the third is a mirage.
- Jet Pack: A single-use item that allows moving directly to any tile (without using an action), and allow another player in the same starting tile to follow the trip.
- Let's Split Up, Gang!: A common approach as players try to explore the face-down board tiles efficiently.
- Numerical Hard: The difficulty level affects the starting position of the storm severity.
- Race Against the Clock: The storm severity keeps increasing, requiring extra cards drawn as time progresses. When the severity reaches the top of the scale, you lose.
- Randomly Generated Levels: The tiles that form the desert are arranged randomly at the beginning of the game. Furthermore, as the storm moves around the grid of tiles, it randomly rearranges the tiles.
- Scavenger Hunt: The parts of the flying machine are scattered randomly in the desert, and the clues to the locations of the parts are also scattered randomly. The players must first find the clues, and then retrieve the parts.
- Schrödinger's Gun: Until the second clue for any given part of the flying machine is revealed, the part's location is not only unknown, but also unfixed. Each turn, the storm moves tiles randomly, including both revealed clues and unrevealed clues. Only when the second clue is finally revealed is the part's location is determined. In the event it appears in the empty space representing the storm, the first tile that moves into the empty space picks up the part.
- Sliding Scale of Cooperation vs. Competition: The game is an example of "Enforced Cooperation", as there are no competitive elements and the players are required to coordinate their moves closely, especially on higher difficulties.
- Thirsty Desert: One of the ways to lose is for any of the players to die of dehydration. If there is no water carrier,
- Turn-Based Combat: Players takes turns spending their action points.
