You’ve survived the sea, you’ve survived the sand, but can you stand when the sky itself is against you?
Welcome, dear readers, as you disembark from your hastily made aircraft. Please deposit all of the sand that you are carrying off the edge of this skyport. And remember to keep your rope tied off! We wouldn’t want anyone falling to their doom, now would we?
Forbidden Sky is the third in ‘Forbidden’ series by Gamewright and Matt Leacock. The first two are Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert. Next is clearly going to be Forbidden Moon or Forbidden Space, but only time will tell. The game plays 2-5 players and will take about 30-45 minutes to play through a game.
There’s a lot of mechanics and play styles that carry over from previous installations in the series: each character has a special ability, characters have health trackers, you get a set number of actions each turn, there’s a deck of cards trying to kill you, and you draw more of those cards as time goes on. Game play proceeds with one player using their actions and then drawing a certain number of storm cards. Play proceeds until either the escape plan is built or one of the players reaches the end of a health tracker or the storm grows too large.
But there are some new twists to this old formula! First off, there are two forces of nature that might end the game! Players are at risk from lightning and being blown off the skyport by high winds! Players have separate health trackers to track their status against each hazard.
There are protections from both these events in both the tiles and gear cards, as well as healer roles for each track. We’ll get to how they actually effect players in a bit.
The second twist is that instead of exploring tiles that are already laid down, players can have a max of three tiles in their hand at any one time and place those tiles to expand the board as part of their turn. When placed, these tiles must be placed on open skyport edges and must connect at least one wire to the original tile. These tiles can have wind shields, Faraday cages, teleport circles (that let you move to any tile with a teleport circle), or one of the four types of structures that you need to place on the board: lightning rods, small launchpads, medium launchpads, and the large launchpad. The lightning rods exist entirely on one tile but the launchpads need at least two tiles to complete.
Now back to those maluses! When a lightning strikes card is drawn, every player who is on a tile with a lightning rod or on a tile that has a wire connected to a lightning rod, takes a point of damage. The wind is set up to blow in a direction and when the high winds card is drawn, every player is then pushed in that direction. If the player is pushed into clouds (off the edge) or into an unexplored part of the board, they will lose a point of rope. There are also two change in winds cards that will rotate which direction the wind is blowing clockwise or counter-clockwise.
The third twist in Forbidden Sky is how the difficulty level can be increased. While the start location on the storm counter depends on the number of players, the true difficulty to determined by how many of each structure you need to put down. As an example, at the easiest difficulty you would need to put down and connect three small launchpads, three lightning rods, one medium launchpad, and the large launchpad. Harder difficulties increase the number of everything but the large launchpad.
“‘Connect’ you say? What do you mean by connect?” Ah yes, faithful reader, I clearly can’t get anything past you! Indeed, there is a fourth twist! One of your actions is to wire a structure on your tile to another structure in range. Indeed, as well, I have told the slightest of lies. A bit of misinformation. A small amount of slight of tongue.
You see, the difficulty does not determine the number of structures that you must put down on the board to win! The difficulty determines the number of structures you need to connect in a completed circuit to win!
Each structure has metal on the top side of the base and each end of the wire contains a magnet. The large launchpad is slightly different, in that the metal is divided. Once a complete circuit is made and all players have made it back to the large launchpad, everyone wins! To celebrate, place your spaceship down on the launchpad and enjoy as it flashes and plays some launch noises.
If you couldn’t tell, I enjoyed several of the mechanics in Forbidden Sky. I also enjoyed it the most out of all of three Forbidden games so far. The game play is tight; between the two hazards, the need to build the map, and the players’ ability to choose which tiles to place, you’ll find yourself needing to make interesting choices. Deciding when to take a risk and when to try to hide away. But as the map grows, more places become effected by lightning. As well the Change in the Wind card can always come right before a High Winds card, making it so the pawns you thought were safe are now being pushed off the board. All of that said, one major concern with any co-op game is someone at the table quarterbacking the game. Unfortunately, Forbidden Sky doesn’t have any protections in place to prevent or guide players away from doing that. If your game group doesn’t have this issue or can take that in hand by itself, then by all means, the sky isn’t going to be your limit.
Hello, dear reader!
I’m not sure what you intended to find when you clicked through to my writer profile, but welcome none the less! I’ve been a fan of games since I was a child and, somewhere along the way, I picked up an interest in the design of games: how the mechanics are interacting and presented to the players. Sometime since then, I managed to acquire some _opinions_, wretched things that they are, and I can do naught but share them with all of you!
In my reviews, I want to give you a sense of what the game plays like. That way you can make a decision for yourself on whether this would be a game that you would like. I will also call out if I find something interesting and clever or whether it falls flat, of course.
Happy reading! -Chris Galecki
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