PLAYED FOR YOU

 

Die vergessene Stadt

Escape FROM sand and storm

 

After the Forbidden Island players now explore the Forgotten City; the helicopter crash-landed; to escape from storm and send explorers need to activate the ancient Flying machine. Again you embody an explorer with special abilities and have up to four actions in your turn: 1) move your adventurer, orthogonally on an adjacent tile with maximum one sand tile; tiles carrying two sand tiles are dunes, not to be entered 2) remove sand; 3)  excavate - you turn over a desert tile free of sand, it might yield equipment or a clue for a machine part location; and 4) salvage a machine part from an excavated desert tile with maximum one sand tile. Then you draw wind cards and move the sandstorm accordingly by shifting desert tiles; you must always add sand to a desert tile that was moved due to a wind card. Transferring equipment or machine parts to other players, if you meet on one desert tile, does not cost an action. When the adventurers manage to reach the starting ramp with four parts for the Flying Machine and the ramp is free of dunes, they escape and win. But if they run out of water or are buried by sand - indicated by a lack of sand tiles when new ones should be placed - or if the storm reaches deadly intensity, all players lose together.

Die vergessene Stadt, or Forbidden Desert, is not a 1:1 Clone of Forbidden City, but an independent game, varying a concept very nicely; especially the collecting of machine parts (former artifacts) was cleverly simplified by the uncovering of clue tiles. The different combinations of adventures you use and the random composition of the desert result in a multitude of different games.

 

Players: 2-5

Age: 10+

Time: 45+

Designer: Matt Leacock

Artist: Tyler Edin, C. B. Canga

Price: ca. 20 Euro

Publisher: Schmidt Spiele 2013

Web: www.schmidtspiele.de

Genre: Cooperative, adventure

Users: For families

Version: de

Rules: de en es fr nl

In-game text: yes

 

Comments:

Sequel game to "The Forbidden Island"

Same basic concept, partly different mechanisms

Varying difficulty due to wind indicator

Modular board and different combinations of adventurers result in lots of different games

 

Compares to:

Die verbotene Insel

 

Other editions:

Gamewright, USA; Cocktail Games, France; White Goblin Games, Netherlands; Devir, Spain.

 

 

Chance (pink): 1

Tactic (turquoise): 2

Strategy (blue): 1

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 3

Interaction (brown): 3

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0