One of my family members gifted me the board game Forbidden Jungle for the holidays. It should be no surprise to anyone that I love receiving board games as gifts. It’s a chance for me to play a new board game, and I can take it to family board game nights or a board game night with friends. I played Forbidden Jungle with my brother for the first time, and we lost. I wanted to redeem myself, so I brought it to our latest family board game night. We did win one game but lost the rest.

Forbidden Jungle is a cooperative board game where players play as a team of explorers. Their goal is to work together to locate a portal. This portal will teleport players away from the jungle, therefore winning the game. Besides locating the portal, the portal needs four crystals to power it, and those crystals must be attached to the portal. To locate both the portals and the crystals, players must reveal game tiles. As they do, aliens will populate various spaces. Threat cards are drawn to raise the stakes, often working against the players. If any of the players lose their health from the aliens, or there aren’t any more alien tokens to populate the board with, the players lose.

I like how challenging Forbidden Jungle is. As mentioned previously, I have only won this game once. It’s easy for things to slide because there’s a lot to keep track of. This includes how many aliens are populating, where the players are to the aliens, and how many crystals we still need to find. The more times I play, the more I am starting to understand the strategy. In the game that we won, we did a good job of assigning duties to the players. For example, one person in our group was solely responsible for killing the aliens while another player was shifting the crystals closer to the portal. It was rewarding to have finally won at least one game that we played.

Since Forbidden Jungle is a game involving flipping tiles, the game is different every time you play. There are at least three different tile positions, so it keeps things interesting. In our games, we randomized the role cards, which helped keep things fresh. The Chemist and Healer were probably my favorite roles in the game. The Chemist is immune to alien stings, so they can’t die. The Healer is the only role in the game that can heal other players, which is a must if players are cornered by the aliens. If I’m going to own a board game, I’d like a game where I can play it multiple times and not be bored.

Forbidden Jungle is made by Gamewright, and it looks like they have other Forbidden titles, including Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert. I’d be open to playing the others because I like how Forbidden Jungle is designed. Forbidden Jungle is a challenging, cooperative game that offers something different every time you play.