Comments on: Forbidden Sky delivers cooperative science

By: Trent

Trent — Sun, 10 Mar 2019 20:17:24 +0000

In reply to Summer. Summer - the Surveyor gives tiles from their hand of tiles. The Surveyor also starts with 2 tiles and can hold up to 4 tiles in their hand. Thus, they'll can have more to choose from when giving tiles away.

By: Summer

Summer — Sun, 10 Mar 2019 16:51:45 +0000

I just bought/played Sky last night. It was definitely more challenging than the previous games but also more rewarding. I love it!
However, the rules weren’t specific enough for us about the Surveyor’s special skill (just two of us and we were Surveyor and Electrician). When that character has the opportunity to provide another player with free tiles, do the tiles come from their hand or the deck? Since the number of tiles we can have in our hand at any given time is so limited, we assumed the deck.

By: theokester

theokester — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 23:12:00 +0000

In reply to Trent. That makes sense (both the holding multi-tiles and size of the platform). Probably few cases of turns where there's not an optimal placement or you feel like you have to spend multiple turns moving all the way across the table to place the tile. Thanks Trent. :)

By: Trent

Trent — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 23:04:30 +0000

In reply to Chris.

Chris – The good thing about placing the right tiles is that usually everyone has 2 or 3 tiles in front of them so everyone can explore the options and hold of on placing certain tiles in valuable locations because another player can place a better one on their turn. So we find a lot of discussion around who should move where to place certain tiles. (Then we get blown around and have to adjust.) The circuits are very easy to follow to determine who gets hit since the total size of the platform remains relatively small. And you can only get zapped once per lightning card.
Maybe I’ll have to bring it to SaltCon…

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 21:39:58 +0000

Thanks for the review. I was super excited when I saw the initial announcement for Forbidden Sky many months ago. We enjoy a bit of Forbidden family fun at my house from time to time. I’m not sure if the increased difficulty would be off-putting to family members or not. The concept of building up the platform during play is intriguing but I worry family members might get frustrated if they lost time and again because they couldn’t get the right tiles placed. While this is similar to the idea of needing to draw the right cards in the earlier version, I’d be concerned that this might be too much frustration.

Still, I’m super interested to try it out and see how everything works together. I love the thematic idea of the lightning and the rope. Very cool. With regards to the lightning, were your circuits ever so convoluted that it felt onerous to try and track the lightning from the lightning rods to identify which players might get hit? (And on a related note, can a player lose more than one health point if they happen to be on a tile that could be zapped by multiple lightning bolts?)

I was a little bummed by the price tag (I liked the lower price point of the other Forbidden games). While the rocket sounds cool, it seems like the electrical wow-factor is the main reason for the increased price (I could be wrong).

I want to try this out but I suspect I may end up with a similar ranking of the Forbidden games…putting this one at the end. I could be wrong. We shall see.