Forbidden Jungle – Matt Leacock's Alien Planet Escape
Crash-landed on a hostile jungle planet, your crew must power up a portal home before venomous creatures and a collapsing outpost seal your fate — the newest entry in the beloved "Forbidden" cooperative series.
📋 Game Details
Forbidden Jungle is the latest cooperative survival game from Matt Leacock, the designer behind Pandemic, Forbidden Island, and Forbidden Desert. Published by Gamewright in 2023, it drops your crew onto a hostile alien jungle planet after a crash landing, tasking the team with restoring power to an ancient portal tile before an escalating swarm of venomous creatures — and the collapsing outpost itself — brings the mission to an end.
Like its predecessors, Forbidden Jungle uses a grid of face-down tiles that reveal the map as players explore, all housed in the series' signature collectible metal tin. What sets this entry apart is its added complexity: almost every tile has its own activatable ability, turning the familiar Forbidden formula into a more inventive, puzzle-like sandbox where players must combine tile powers creatively to survive.
Roll to Review's ranking of the entire Forbidden series called Forbidden Jungle "a fantastic return to form" after the previous entry, praising how nearly every tile's activatable ability "encourages players to come up with inventive solutions to the game's escalating challenges" — while noting this added depth comes with a genuinely steeper learning curve than earlier games in the series.
What's in the Box
What Makes It Stand Out
Activatable Tile Powers
Nearly every uncovered tile grants a special ability, rewarding creative combinations far beyond earlier Forbidden games.
Growing Alien Threat
Creatures begin as harmless eggs but age into venomous adults — ignore them too long and the whole team pays for it.
Portal Power-Up
Gathering crystals to charge the escape portal gives every session a clear, tense countdown to victory.
Iconic Collector's Tin
Returns to the series' beloved metal tin packaging after Forbidden Sky's departure from it — a small but well-loved touch.
How Does It Play?
Each turn, a player has three actions to spend on Moving across the tile grid, Removing threat tokens from their location, Exploring to flip new tiles face-up, or Operating a machine tile to trigger its special ability. After actions are spent, a Threat card is drawn — this is where the tension escalates, hatching alien eggs into creatures, aging existing creatures into more dangerous forms, or collapsing tiles outright as the unstable outpost falls apart around the team.
Meeple University's rules breakdown highlights how central "Operate Machine" becomes to winning — most tiles hide a unique power that only becomes useful once you understand how it interacts with the rest of the board, and figuring out those combinations together is where the game's real strategic depth lives. The team wins once the portal is fully charged and every player has escaped through it — but let the threat meter max out, or lose all your explorers to collapsing tiles, and everyone loses together.
Compared to Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert, reviewers consistently note that Forbidden Jungle sits at a noticeably higher complexity tier — the sheer number of unique tile abilities means new groups will want an extra session or two before everything clicks. Once it does, though, the added depth is widely seen as the series' strongest evolution yet, giving veteran players of the earlier games a genuinely fresh challenge rather than more of the same.
Rating Breakdown
Pros & Cons
✅ What We Love
- Widely praised as the best entry in the Forbidden series since the originals
- Unique tile powers make every game feel genuinely inventive
- Escalating egg-to-creature threat creates real, mounting tension
- Returns to the series' beloved metal collector's tin
- Fully standalone — no need to own earlier Forbidden games
- Excellent component quality and thematic alien-planet artwork
❌ What Could Be Better
- Noticeably steeper learning curve than Forbidden Island or Desert
- Tracking every tile's unique ability takes a session or two to master
- Like the rest of the series, difficulty leans heavily on the draw pile
- Not the best entry point for absolute newcomers to cooperative games
Who Is This Game For?
🎯 Perfect For:
- Fans of Forbidden Island or Forbidden Desert wanting a fresh challenge
- Groups who enjoy puzzle-driven cooperative games with real depth
- Sci-fi fans looking for an alien-planet survival theme
- Families and casual groups comfortable with a moderate learning curve
❌ Not Ideal For:
- Complete newcomers to cooperative board games — start with Forbidden Island
- Groups wanting a quick, no-rules-overhead filler game
- Players who dislike tracking multiple interacting special abilities
🌴 Final Verdict
Forbidden Jungle proves Matt Leacock's cooperative formula still has fresh ideas left in the tank. Its web of activatable tile powers turns the familiar "explore, gather, escape" structure into a genuinely inventive puzzle, and the escalating alien threat keeps every session tense right up to the final portal charge. It asks a bit more of new players than Forbidden Island or Forbidden Desert did, but for anyone already sold on the series — or looking for a smart, thematic cooperative game with real depth — Forbidden Jungle is an easy recommendation.
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