The second game from my day at Flamingo Con was Forbidden Sky, a cooperative game where players are sent to a platform hanging in the stormy sky and tasked with building up a rocket ship. I didn't have a reference point despite the fact that it's the latest iteration of the Forbidden series (5 games in total); my whole experience in coops at the time was Pandemic but this game promised to have you literally power your ship up... talk about bells and whistles!
2-5
60mn
10+
Setup: The setup starts with 2 important decisions:
- Pick the game difficulty. That means selecting a blueprint card of increasing complexity which tells you what circuit to build to win the game (if you do it right, you'll be rewarded with your rocket lighting up with a beeping sequence, yay!)
- Pick your specialist, such as the electrician or the mountaineer, each with their own ability and statistic gauges (2 stats really, rope and life, which function as 2 distinct life bars).
Gameplay: Essentially, it's a game action economy, with a strong emphasis on situational awareness. Each turn you'll get 4 actions consisting of any of:
- Scout (ie, draw tiles)
- Explore (ie, place tiles)
- Move
- Wire (ie, build the rocket circuitry)
Then, you will draw an increasing number of storm cards, which may cause the wind to blow you off a platform (your rope gauge goes down), or the lightning to strike which may hurt you (your life gauge goes down). If either stat reaches 0 for any player, you lose as a team.
The actions are fairly straightforward, but you need to do some serious planning, especially given how quickly the difficulty ramps up. You need to lay out the tiles in a way that the circuitry can connect or you might fail without even getting a chance to compete. And you always need to be aware of how exposed to the elements you are, especially if one or both of your stats are low; that effectively means that you'll often have to spend some move actions to stay out of harm's way. All in all, the game does a good job of conveying the direness of the challenge and forcing players to interact. But all the constraints add up to feeling your actions are very scripted, which I suspect makes the game much less fun to replay.
Theme: The mechanics broadly align with the setting, from the lightning strikes and risk of electrocution, mitigated by the elusive faraday cages, to the shifting winds that may cause you to fall despite all your planning. I'm not familiar with the Forbidden series but this one game feels internally consistent, which helps assimilating the rules. But while it's very functional, the overall feel is one that lacks a bit of polish. The card art is ok. The board is mostly forgettable, which is unfortunate given the heavy focus on tiles. The components give a science fair kind of vibe, which could have been the goal in terms of aesthetics and age appeal (it didn't bother me per se), but building up the circuit drives most of the tile placement and it's very fiddly which can get a bit frustrating. Get it wrong and it can spoil a game that already has a knack for stacking odds against you, creating the kind of experience that could lead less dedicated players to put down the game for good.
Impression: the game really felt reminiscent of Pandemic, and as it turns out, Forbidden Sky is from the same designer, Matt Leacock. This made my transition to the game much easier, but also the comparison harder to escape. I had a great time, but I feel that was more function of the group of players rather than the game itself, which felt a little too scripted and fiddly. I also think its unforgiving nature may encourage more experienced players to just take the game over, more than is typical of cooperative games.
TLDR: If you liked Pandemic or other games in the Forbidden series, you should enjoy this one as well, but it may not be the best cooperative game to start with.
Score: 5/10
Cheers,
Ady
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