I would be curious about your favorite coop games. I often find them a big lacking, often being a bit unbalanced. An example is Battle for Hogwarts, where one game can be a walk in the park and another absolutely impossible and rarely is there a balanced match.
Spirit Island is really good as you can adjust the difficulty and it’s always different Stars of Akarios if you want a Gloomhaven Light Experience with some 7th Continent sprinkled in.
Seconding Spirit Island. It’s quite possibly one of my favorite board games of all time (and a huge favorite in my regular play-group)!
Even in the base game, the amount of diversity in play styles between the spirits is incredible. It’s absolutely a game that I could keep playing indefinitely and continue to discover new things.
Spirit Island is one of our favorite games of all time as well. It is for sure the most played game when it’s just my partner and me. I agree it feels endlessly replayable with all of the variety.
We have also been playing through a homebrewed legacy system for Spirit Island that I found on reddit. Definitely imperfect but still super fun!
Second this. It’s our most frequently played coop. So much variability and things to tweak
- Regicide is very impressive in its weight class and considering that all you need is a standard deck of cards. No reason not to try it
- In the pandemic-family my favorites are Pandemic: The Cure which turns Pandemic into a dice rolling romp and Pandemic: Fall of Rome, has cool cube movement and dice based combat rules. One step up is The LOOP which is somewhere between Pandemic and Spirit Island, uses card driven actions and has a push-pull mechanic
- Aeon’s End and Heroes of Tenefyr for deckbuilding. The latter is kinda like a multiplayer co-op Friday, fun push-your-luck decisions
- Shipwreck Arcana for co-op deduction.
Honorable mentions: Mantis Falls for 2p semi-coop. You have to work together to get to the end of the road but there is a 50% chance that your partner is an assassin biding his time.
Shipwreck Arcana is fantastic, I love that game. It is kinda hard for me to find people with the right mindset for this logic+deduction style game but when you find the right people this game shines bright. So simple yet so much fun.
I tend to like competitive games, but I like my coop games to:
- be difficult, or have a difficult mode. To me, there’s no fun in winning on the first try
- to foster table talk OR a different kind of fun player interaction. That’s why The Lost Expedition didn’t click for me, it felt like just throwing some cards on the table.
That said, I enjoy Pandemic (a classic), Hanabi, Just One, and Magic Maze. I haven’t really tried heavier ones but I’d love to play Spirit Island some day.
And for very young kids, My First Orchard is great!
I’m a big fan of the Forbidden series (in before the Forbidden Stars joke).
Forbidden Island is really accessible and a blast to play when you use alternate map layouts, they add a nice twist and lots of replayability to the game.
Forbidden Desert is a step up in difficulty and also a real blast to play.
Forbidden Sky is a but finicky but still fun to play.
Forbidden Jungle has not been released yet, but I’m sure I’ll have to get it to complete the collection!
I see a few of my favorites have been mentioned already (Aeon’s End, Spirit Island, The Crew, Pandemic Legacy) but here’s a few more:
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Gloomhaven: There’s a reason this game was at the Boardgamegeek #1 spot for years. Absolutely an epic game, with so much strategy and variety involved. For those who are intimidated by the complexity, size or price of the game, there is also Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, which is essentially a light version of the game. An excellent starting point, and not any less fun than it’s big sibling.
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Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood: Another big campaign game with very interesting mechanics. The game is quite hard and punishing, but you have lots of difficulty levels you can play on. The story is set in a land overrun by the Deepwood, a forest filled with huge monsters. You play a band of mercenaries who defend people from those monsters.
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Sprawlopolis: A game consisting of 18 cards, that contain city blocks and roads, and each player places a card down to add to the city. Each card has a different scoring system on its back, and you draw a few for each game, so every game feels entirely different. Quick to play, and fits in your pocket so you can bring it anywhere.
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I like Ghost Stories, quite imbalanced but fun to play (/lose)
Coop games where you fight a system often feel unsatisfying to me. However, I think coop games are an excellent way to bring new gamers on board. My favorite coop games:
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Menara: a coop dexterity game. Game is always tense and I find the difficult adjustments to be nicely balanced. This is a very underrated game, in my opinion
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The Crew: in Portugal we used to be big on trick taking games. Every family owns a deck of cards! The crew retains the feel of the classic trick taking games and slap a very nice cooperative gameplay. Really clever, really fun. If you really like trick taking games this is a no brainer. Still haven’t tried the second one, can’t wait to try it.
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Aeon’s End: I like to play this one as a 2 player game, don’t like it with more players. I really enjoy deck building games, this one nails it. I love how you don’t shuffle your deck, really improves the strategy and reduces RNG.
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My wife and I had a blast playing through Pandemic Legacy S1
Darn it! :) Came in to recommend the OG pandemics game, and might wind up looking to get legacy thanks to seeing it a bunch in this thread! :) This instance might be expensive!
It was an awesome experience! We played it every night (sometimes twice a night) for the time it took to complete the campaign. Definitely some frustrating moments, but also some really memorable ones.
Did you play season 2 or 0? We loved season 1 but didn’t like the others. Felt that season 2 changed to much by inverting the core game and season 0 introduced to many concepts. A little over halfway through season 0 we stopped because we’d rather play a game we knew than learn yet another set of rules for that months objectives.
Haven’t played either or the other yet, though we want to. I’ve heard a lot of the issues with the other two but still willing to give them a chance.
Hanabi, for sure. Avoids quarterbacking through hidden info, lots of levels of difficulty, and genuinely beautiful (E: in the deluxe edition, at least)
I’m loving Eldritch Horror, but it also can swing both ways due to chance. If you get the base game, I highly suggest getting the “Forbidden Lore” expansion as well, since it makes the base game more complete.
Aeon’s End is probably my favorite coop game, although I’m still not very good at it. It’s a deckbuilder, which is a genre I really like.
The Crew is a cooperative trick-taking game which is an absolute blast and fairly light. Both the original space one and the deep sea version are great.
On the grittier side, I think This War of Mine is worth playing at least once for the experience.
My partner and I really enjoy mini rogue.
It can be brutal at times but often you can track your downfall back to a risky decision earlier.
It’s a one or two player dungeon crawl. Some light rpg mechanics, dice based combat and events, some traders and items to find.
To me it captures games like deep dungeons of doom and legends of grimrock very nicely.
Single player rules also feature a campaign mode, the old gods expansion adds a couple cool events and new bosses.
Sounds interesting, I kinda like dungeon crawlers. Its probably a remnant of playing diablo2 when I was younger. I will have to check it out. Do you prefer 1 player or 2?
I basically only play it with my SO so can’t comment on single player.
From scanning the rules, the campaign sets certain events and “layouts” for certain levels and consecutive runs. It also adds a little bit of meta progression to give your character’s two abilities a bit of variety.
Ah another thing: it’s very portable!
portable mashes well with our lifestyle, we are very much on the move. At most places we have already stashed some games but often bring 1/2 with us as well
Yep played it a few times in a bar :)
This might be controversial but I really love Kingdom Death: Monster. It’s an amazing work of insanity that no reasonable group would ever publish. Spirit Island gets an honorable mention.
I can recommend the new Deep Rock Galactic board game. Great time. It looks like it should be a complex game with all of its minis but each session is less than 1.5 hours from my experience. Also, the minis are fantastic, definitely worth the price and space :).
Second this one. I’m a fan of the video game so admittedly a bit biased, but I really enjoy the board game. Rules are a bit intricate being a dungeon crawler-ish game, but on the lighter side for that genre.
I recently went to a convention and picked up Clear the Decks which is an old timey naval combat game where 1to 4 players work together to sink an enemy ship. It has a variety of difficulties that scale from trivial to dang near impossible to beat.
If you like the theme I think it’s worth checking out.
