Cooperative games are great for kids, and this one is the most recent in the very popular FORBIDDEN GAMES series by Gamewright. There’s a lot going on, some really cool electrical components, weather challenges and lots of collaboration, teamwork, and fun!
The premise of the game is this: Your team is landing on a top secret power platform up in the sky where a rocket is docked. If you can power the rocket, you’ll finally be off on your search for a lost civilization, but the electrical components of the rocket have been disabled and there’s a storm a brewin’. Your team has to locate and wire together capacitors, lightning rods, and the launch pad to create a functional circuit.
Will your team successfully power the rocket and blastoff or be defeated by the storm and be blown off the platform?!?
To begin, set up The Storm meter by placing the red clip next to the number of players.
On each turn, players take up to 4 actions:
- Move your pawn to an adjacent tile (1 action per move).
- Scout: draw a tile and add it to your hand (hold up to 3 at a time).
- Explore: place a tile adjacent to the tile your pawn is on. One printed copper wire on the new tile must connect to a wire on the current tile.
- Wire: add a wire to a circuit attached to your. (Circuits are placed when 2 tiles create a complete circle shape on the board)
After taking up to 4 actions, players draw Storm cards equal to the Storm Intensity from the Storm meter. Storm cards include:
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- Lightning Strikes!
- Winds change
- Storm Intensifies
Storm cards blow pawns around the board, cause players to lose health, or move the Storm Meter up a notch, forcing players to draw even MORE storm cards on the next turn.
It takes a focused group effort to strategically build the board, creating spaces for the circuit components to go, connecting wires, and building the rocket launch pad, all while being blown around the board and losing health.
IF all players can get to the launch pad BEFORE the final wire completes the electrical circuit, and IF no players have died by losing all their health points, YOU WIN the game! If any players get blown off, lose all their health points, or are not on one of the launch pad tiles before the circuit is completed, you lose.
The electrical components in this game are SO COOL and make an excellent STEM game/lesson. This game encourages cooperative, team work, strategic thinking, visual planning and mapping, and quite a bit of reading. It’s an excellent science game that gameschooling families will love!
Check out the other two Forbidden Games in the series, Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert. Thanks to Gamewright for sharing!
