Forbidden Jungle
- Board's Eye View
- Sep 5, 2025
- 3 min read
Designer Matt Leacock is best known for his successful Pandemic series of games but he has used the core mechanics of Pandemic in other designs, including Thunderbirds (Modiphius) and the Forbidden series of games: Forbidden Island (Gamewright), Forbidden Desert (Devir), Forbidden Sky (Schmidt Spiele), and the fourth in the Forbidden... series - this game Forbidden Jungle. Art is by C B Canga.
Like the previous games in the series, Forbidden Jungle is a cooperative game where the 2-5 players are exploring a modular map made up of tiles placed out face down at random. Each player takes a character with a special ability and on your turn you get to take four actions chosen from Move, Explore, Remove or Operate Machine. Move means to an orthogonally adjacent tile and Explore means flip a face-down tile to its face-up side. Some tiles will have menacing aliens on them: adults, hatchlings or eggs, and more will be placed out in response to the Threat cards drawn each turn. There may be webs placed out between tiles that inhibit movement. Each Remove action lets you take one adult, hatchling, egg or web off the board. When tiles are Explored some will show a machine, and it's by operating these machines that you win. You need to find the Portal and position illuminated crystal tiles so that they abut the Portal on all four sides, and you need to have all the player pawns and no aliens on the portal.
The Configurator lets you slide a tile, moving any player pawns or aliens that are on it. You'll certainly need to make liberal use of this machine in order to achieve the tile positioning required for a win. The Compeller moves any adult aliens or hatchlings to an adjacent tile; particularly useful if the adjacent tile is an Electrifier that immediately destroys them. Finally, the Destruct Switch eliminates any tile from the board along with all the alien and webs that are on it.
Tho' there's only one way to win, there are several ways in which players can lose this cooperative game. If you are overrun by aliens to the extent that you're instructed to place out an adult, hatchling, egg or web and there are none left in the supply, then you lose. If the Threat level reaches the burst symbol at the top of its track, you lose. If any character loses all their health or if they are unable to escape from a tile that collapses, you lose. And obviously you lose if the Portal and crystal tiles are removed from play.
If you've played any of the previous games in the series, there'll be much you'll recognise in Forbidden Jungle. It's a step up in difficulty in comparison, for example, with Forbidden Desert, tho' you can vary the difficulty level by starting with a higher or lower Threat level and/or by changing the shape of the set up tile grid. Often tho' success or failure depends on where the tiles happen to turn up: if you find the random set up favours you with an early discovered portal and nearby crystals you'll probably secure an easy win but if your Explorations don't reveal the tiles you need until late in the game then you'll struggle to avoid defeat...
