Caltrops - Overboard! - Forbidden Desert

Forum Overview :: Overboard!

by Mischief Maker 02/15/2025, 8:22pm PST

I really wanted a co-op game in the style of Pandemic, but nobody had any interest in the theme after Covid-19 lockdown. Fortunately the Pandemic designer also made the "Forbidden" series, and this was the one that had the most positive reviews overall.

The premise is you're an archeological survey that flew to the site of an ancient buried city to find a long-lost airship, but their helicopter got caught in a gigantic sandstorm and crashed. Now you MUST find and assemble the lost airship to escape before you die of thirst or get buried in sand by the never-ending storm.

The game takes place on a 5X5 array of location cards with a hole in the center representing the storm. Each player has 4 action point every turn that can be used to move between squares, clean up one sand tile, excavate a tile to reveal the hidden city under the desert, or collect a piece of the airship, once its location has been revealed by two clue cards. After each player's turn, a number of storm cards are drawn which do bad things, mostly by moving the storm around and rearranging the map, leaving sand tiles in its wake that cost precious action points to dig up before the tiles can be excavated.

It's such a great little game. It has the "fire-fighting" gameplay of something like Pandemic with an added exploration mechanic. We have a house rule that in 2-player games we each control two party members, so nobody gets stuck with just a useful-but-relatively boring support class all game long.

About the only complaint I have, and it's incredibly minor, is that the airship model itself is pretty derpy in design.

Fun fun fun!