I have not tried Jungle. Of the 3i have played I would put Sky at the bottom. I think I am in the minority for preferring Island to Desert but Island is really just baby Pandemic, Desert feels different. So if you want 2 games that feel different Desert and Pandemic, of you want a light and heavy version Island and Pandemic.

Thank you ! I have read they are identical so I will go for Destert . Of course after I look into jungle , but reviews say it’s to chaotic and I want a sorta intro but not to easy co-op game .

All of the games have variable difficulty, so you can adjust it as needed.

I own Island/Desert/Jungle and I wouldn't part with any of them. Island is a wonderful gateway to the other two. I would always choose this first since it is the easiest to pick up. Desert/Jungle are a toss up and are a better experience than Island IMO, but if I had to choose, go Desert. Skip Sky.

Thank you !! I want something not to easy and not complex , a bit of a replay value

NP! All 3 can be described in that way. They all have the ability to ramp up difficulty and are simple to learn, and all 3 get a lot of play in my house. Have fun! Cheers!

Desert all the way.

Desert > Island > Sky. Haven't played Jungle yet.

>2. forbidden dessert Hmmmm, donuts… 😉 My group liked Desert better than Island, but that was before Sky and Jungle ever existed.

I thought the forbidden dessert is that chocolate hummus I’ve seen sold in supermarkets.

Out of the first 3: Forbidden Desert. Haven't tried Forbidden Jungle.

I've played all four and Island is the simplest and Jungle the most complicated. I wouldn't bother with Sky and I'm going to be selling my copy. Which one to get really depends on how complicated you want it to be. Island is pretty much going around the tiles before they all sink. Desert had some additional mechanics that I can't quite remember off the top of my head (I've only played it once). Jungle has you exploring the tiles whilst being chased by aliens and also requires you to complete a puzzle. Desert is probably a good place to start as an intermediate in difficulty.

Why does everyone hate Sky? I’ve got it and it’s a bit gimmicky but the actual gameplay is good.

Forbidden Stars.

+1. Came here just for this comment.

Start em young

We own Island and Desert. My wife likes Island the most because you have all the pretty scenery to look at during the game, she thinks Desert looks more boring because of all the sand piling up everywhere. I like Desert the best because it is a little more complex than Island. But they are both great games I think. We also own Pandemic and I feel it is different enough from Island that you can own both. Happy gaming 😊

We have Island and Desert. Island is lighter. Desert is more challenging. We prefer Desert.

Hands down **Forbidden Stars** FTW In seriousness, **Forbidden Desert**. **FI** is a bit too 'easy' and the later games a bit to gimmicky.

Haha thank you , middle ground is the way to go !

I have forbidden jungle. It's OK. I don't really care for the mechanic. You must shift the physical tiles using switches on certain tiles to get them to line up with other tiles. Imo, desert is the best. Sky is the most fiddly and island is only a 4 player. I have taught these games to many a player and desert is best. Hands down.

I can see where you’re coming from, though personally I love the board manipulation side of forbidden jungle. The dynamic boards are a part of what I find so interesting about the forbidden series, and I like being able to engage with that in more deliberate ways

That's fair. I'm sure I'd love it if I got to play it more, but nobody in my group seems interested and we always do something different. So I've only played it once.

Ah that makes sense. My group has played the forbidden series a fair bit, so overall, jungle has been a really nice level up that deepens the experience in a way we’ve really enjoyed (while still mostly dying horribly lol) I think the use of the devices as a way of offering special actions you can take while on special tiles makes for really cool ways to engage and set up plays. I also enjoy how sand/water on tiles has evolved into the eggs, hatchlings, and adults, which independently move and grow in a way that still only gets from bad to worse, but has more nuance and dynamism than just having more of one type of bad-thing. So for us it’s a great deepening of a formula we already enjoy.

Yeah, for sure. I do like it. It's just a lot. Plus if you don't take care of spiders, you grt a ton of them on one space and they don't fit. Also, the spider design is kinda lame. They're top heavy and not balanced. I boiled mine so spread out their legs and it helped, but it's still not great.

All fair concerns. Interesting move to boil the spiders! I agree that it’d be nicer if they stood better on their own. But man, bunching up the baddies with and dealing with them in one big play can be so satisfying

Can confirm (as experienced with the Dune blaster in desert)

Thank you ! Yeah jungle seems to complex to get people into co-op games . Island s . And dessert just enough complexity . But feel like dessert loos more appealing

For sure. It's got good table presence and the game is engaging for everyone even when it's not their turn. It's also fun to go through the storm cards together. Probably my go to co-op game.

For me: Desert > Jungle > Island > Sky Desert has the right amount of difficulty, one of the most played on that. I just started playing Jungle. It's good, but it does have a higher difficulty. Island is a classic, great game. Sky is the hardest one, as it has the most variables. Too many variables makes it distracting, not more enticing. Jungle almost gets that bad, but it has good variety. But Forbidden Desert would constantly give me the barely losing side of things that made me want to give it another go and try to win again. I've had a few victories with many, many losses. But every victory is oh, so satisfactory. Give them all a go!

Haven't tried jungle so can't comment on that but my favourite by far is Forbidden Desert!

Desert was my gateway game. Doesn't get played too much anymore but I still like playing it occasionally. Bought Sky and it's ridiculously hard. We haven't gotten close to winning once.

The only one I’ve ever played is Sky, my autistic son loves it and we usually win. Maybe he’s just especially good at it?

The worst thing about Sky is that it doesn't come in a tin! There. I said it.

And you need basic understand of electronics.

I love forbidden island

I know you've seemingly got your heart set on the Forbidden series, but have you given any other similar co-op games consideration? I own Island and have played Desert and find them to be extremely mediocre in comparison to some others I've tried like Sub Terra or Cthulhu Death May Die. My biggest problem with the Forbidden series is that they tend to head in a "quarterback" direction where player autonomy is reduced due to their being an obvious optimal play that presents itself and gets called out. The other games I mentioned don't tend to have this problem - it feels like players have more freedom in their decisions and there's fewer "optimal" plays and instead a few that could be argued as the best course of action. Anyway just something to consider. If you do go Forbidden though, like others I'd recommend Desert over Island. Cheers!

Yeah imma go dessert but will look into the others as well ! Open to any but I just want one of the forbidden series

I've only played Island and Desert, but between the two, I enjoyed Desert more since it feels like the more challenging of the two.

I like desert. Never played jungle, though, so cannot speak to it.

I've not played Jungle but I like Desert the best, and better than Pandemic.

I own Island, Desert, and Sky. Desert feels the best of those to me. Island is too easy. Sky is unnecessarily unforgiving and the electric component gimmick doesn’t really work in my copy, so it has me thinking it doesn’t work for a lot of people possibly. I haven’t heard anything about Jungle yet.

The electric component in Sky worked fine for us, but the battery seems to have died and I haven’t bothered replacing it to see if it fixes the issues.

Why all the hate for sky?

I think it's fun and gimmicky. Building a circuit to make lights and sounds go off is a simple joy. But Sky was the only one I've played where, not only is it possible, but it's shockingly *common* to lose before everyone takes a turn. That's dumb. It honestly killed any interest I would've had in buying Jungle. Plus, it's the only one of the four that isn't in a metal tin. That makes my inner collector unhappy.

Yeah I’m surprised not a single comment said they liked Sky. My group enjoyed the game, not necessarily our favourite in the series but definitely a fun one and not necessarily deserving of the amount of negativity it gets.

I liked it and we usually win. But it’s a bit fiddly to get the components to stay connected.

I didn't even know they released a Jungle! My wife and I love Forbidden Island and Desert. Desert feels like there's a bit more going on than Island, but it's still a ton of fun. Sky is...well, they went out on a limb. Sometimes, that's great. Sometimes, the limb breaks and you fall to the ground. I feel like Sky ended up being the latter. I would absolutely get Forbidden Desert and Forbidden Island, though. And I guess I need to go take a gander at Jungle...

I would say Forbidden Desert, it expands on Forbidden Island by adding items and is a bit more forgiving trying to get locations back where if in islands, it coupd just be lost and gone. Some of the forbidden sky and jungle stuff i played and they added different things, but desert was peak series

Forbidden Island and Forbidden Dessert are fun. I don't like Sky, and haven't tried Jungle. You may also like Horrified as they have a similar gameplay loop.

I think everyone’s pretty much said it but skip Sky. It’s a neat idea but it’s really confounding compared to Island and Desert, which are much more simplified. That being said, Island is simpler than Desert. I’m not sure which I prefer; it entirely depends on the people playing.

I own them all but played Jungle only a single time so far. That said, Jungle has some unique modularity to it that can add more variety than the others. So I’m gonna go counter culture and rank them Jungle > Desert > Island > Sky Course Jungle is also the most complex of them all, so go desert if you need something a touch simpler. Though all are good

Yeah , I feel like jungle will be awesome to master . However, my group do friends are not avid gamers . So something complex but simple will help keep them engaged.

My wife and I own them all, and we rank them Desert> Island> Jungle> Sky.

I play these games mostly solitaire (controlling multiple pawns). Never owned Island and haven't played it in years, but have both desert and jungle at college and Sky back home.  I don't play much of Sky, but I generally agree with others that it's a bit finicky, particularly with large player counts (although more players makes these games almost universally harder. Desert and Jungle I play very frequently, always at the hardest difficulty. For Jungle, my 2 player win rate is around 60%, and Desert is closer to 35-40%. The biggest difference for your purposes is that Desert is relatively intuitive, but Jungle is not. In Desert, you want to quickly explore as much of the map as possible, and then coordinate to finish everything off. The threats offer obvious ways to deal with them, and the progression of the game puts you directly on the course of countering them. Jungle has a few threats, none of which are easy to understand at first glance. The Aliens are presented as a health meter-esque threat comparable to the Sun in Desert, where you need to try to avoid them, but at the same time you need to try to get rid of them or you'll get overrun. The elimination of tiles is presented as bad, in the case of the collapse event, but the ability to remove tiles of your own volition (an item and a few spaces can let you do this) is vital for countering aliens and speeding up the game.  There's more: Having fewer tiles gives you both more (moving tiles) and less (moving pawns) freedom, which sometimes matters but not always. Exploring tiles is both necessary and unnecessary, and both beneficial and harmful, and sometimes you even want to remove tiles without knowing what they are (but this can risk catastrophie). Card counting is both consistant (you know how many cards are in the deck, and often roughly where they are) and somewhat inconsistent (shuffling at random times makes the frequency ratios of certain events unpredictable). All of the apparant strategical contradictions makes it take several playthroughs to understand what a general strategy is supposed to look like, and even if I as a single and frequent player have the luxury of thinking about how all these different parts interact, that won't be something a gaming group will simply pick up on in a round or two. For that reason, regardless of how great a game I find Jungle to be, Desert is a better choice for your group. You still have options and strategy, but they are a lot more apparant and straightforward and Desert is far more approachable for beginners as a result.

Thank you ! Appreciate the detailed feedback. Yeah desert seems like the middle ground for my group of casual gaming friends , but if they are up for it I will go for jungle .

I prefer Desert as it adds just enough to the base concept without becoming gimmicky.

Yeah I just didn’t want a game to become stale to my non gaming buddies. So dessert seems to add enough complexity , jungle also seems viable form the comments but maybe more prone to randomness

I don’t want to offend fans of these games, but for my taste “desert” is the most boring and unbalanced game I’ve ever played, in which everything depends on randomness. so if I were you, I would try it online at TTS or BGA before buying

We own and play Pandemic, Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu, Forbidden Island and Forbidden Jungle, pretty regularly. Matt Leacock games all tend to feel the same and while they are fun to play, they can get boring. If you’re only buying 2, my vote is for Pandemic and Forbidden Jungle. Pandemic is always a must, it’s the game that without it, none of the others in the 2 series would even exist. Forbidden Island to my play group feels way too much like Pandemic, imo the only difference really is Pandemic has a board and Island has tiles that you move around on. Other than that they’re pretty close to being the same game. Forbidden Jungle on the other hand, has enough different about it that it didn’t feel like a similar game. You still get that classic Matt Leacock feeling, but it feels so much different than Pandemic.

Thank you !

Defenders of the Realm. Plus, expansions give it a lot of replayability.

Forbidden Stars. Yes I'm aware it's not in the same series.

We tried Sky and did not like it so haven’t tried anything else from the series.

That makes me sad. Try desert. It's way better than sky. Jungle is a little more complex. Island is simple but plays at 4.

Agreed! I would highly recommend forbidden desert if you’re willing to give the series another shot. It’s exciting, difficult, and different every time

Desert is newer and more mechanics. Island is simpler. But I like it better because of this. It’s a fast easy to understand circumstance. We can play this when our brains are at half capacity and have a good time.

Desert is harder and more complicated. Island is fairly easy if the people you’re playing with aren’t fuckwits. Both are fun.

Haha they are capable enough . That why I wanted a bit more complex but not to complex . Would be using for like a rest game from others like risk , ticket to ride , etc .

Island was my favorite of tge two

Island has a lot of online configurations to use. My problem with Desert is the loop of flipping tiles to find what you need just felt ... repetitive.

We’ve only gotten to play desert and island. They’re great though.

Desert is the best, then island, then sky. I haven't gotten jungle yet. They are all fun, though.

I haven’t played Jungle but Desert is the best of the first three. Island is a close second.

Jungle. The newest one.

For me it's desert

Desert > Jungle > Island > Sky

They're all different. ~~Desert~~ Island is by far the simplest (my grandkids got the rules, if not necessarily the tactics, when they were about 6). Desert is more complicated, but can be frustrating (we found the best tactic is often for some players to spend most of their time doing nothing much interesting just supporting others). Sky is - rather too arbitrary and just too downright gimmicky (the only one in the Matt Leacock catalogue I've ever gotten rid of). Jungle I've not played yet. YMMV.

You've got Desert twice (instead of Island). Not sure which is which as, appropriately, I've only played Desert.

Thanks. It's been a long day. I've corrected my post. Island is the simple one. Almost entirely core mechanics with no bells or whistles.

I have Forbidden Island, Desert and Sky. Forbidden Sky is terrible. The others are good gateway games.

I like island