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.
My absolute favorite is Betrayal at the House on the Hill.
It’s just designed so well. The pre-haunt phase allows new players to learn the basic rules of the game by playing. Like, we were playing this, and a somewhat seasoned member of the boardgame crew was late and she missed the base rules. We just shoved her a character, she was confused how no one explained her stuff, but after 1-2 turns of other people, she understood 90% of the base rules without explanation. That’s really impressive from a design standpoint.
And then, the game flips into the post-haunt phase, and some antagonist scenario happens. This is when things go nuts. One game, one player turned into Doctor Frankenstein, and Frankensteins Monster was placed on the board. And we as the normal players had to scramble to kill it. In another game, I turned into a giant snake god to kill everyone - but a bad cellar layout saved the players.
In other cases, there is a hidden, randomly chosen antagonist and things go nuts. People steal items from each other, because of good ideas and things go nuts.
I love this game. It starts out as a really approachable coop-game if you know action-point-based games. You bumble around in a haunted mansion, Bob usually almost dies because of bad luck (and we make fun of him), and then the haunt hits and it becomes everyone against Bob, except Bob is a horrible monster now.
No matter if you win or lose, you will have a funny story to tell how Bob is a jerk, or we were heroic.
wow, interesting concept, so it starts out as a coop game but later is a 1vsAll kinda deal?
Maybe. There is 120 different engame scenarios depending on the board state.
Most of them have the haunt-triggering player turn into an obvious monster - Frankensteins Monster, a Hydra, a Mummy. Then it’s a fight.
Other scenarios mean that whomever has all the artifact pieces (scattered across the board) wins. So now it’s a free for all and it turns into a very messy brawl.
Even other scenarios mean that one secretly chosen player wins, if they have a specific set of items. This one is especially gnarly, because this is the one that causes the words “Alright. I fire the shotgun at Jane as my first action.” and everyone is like “Oh my god! wat!”
that sounds like a lot of fun! Is the game with a lot of reading about things that happen?
IMO, no.
Assuming one bloke knows the rules, the game flows fairly smoothly. In the pre-haunt phase, you:
- Generally move through an unknown door to a new room
- Draw a room card on the right floor, repeat as necessary
- Draw an event card based on your room card and execute the event card.
- Roll if haunt happens.
Once the group knows these base rules, the pre-haunt game goes very quickly, because you mostly move 2-3 squares (depending on your move points), draw a room, place a room, draw a card, resolve the card and pass on. If the group knows the game, this goes very quickly.
Once the haunt triggers, you have a builtin bio-break. Both the survivors and the evil guy have a bunch of new rules to read and understand. For my main crew, this usually takes 5 - 10 minutes to read and discuss strategies, and we usually combine this with bio-breaks, drink refills, snacks and such.
Comparing this with games like Arkam Horror, Eldritch Horror, or even worse, actual P&P games like DND, It is very smoooth and low-rule-lawyers to play.
Thank you for the description, I will check it out for sure :)
I’ve played a lot of Betrayal. I play tested it at AvalonCon back while I was in high school.
It’s very random, and has the potential for some really great games and some real duds. I know in the later editions there have been efforts made to tighten up the scenario balance, do maybe things are better. But From my experience, maybe 1 in 3 games has been ‘good’, 1 just meh, and the last a steamroller for one side. So many of the scenarios depend on thr size of the house, with too large or too small of a house making it unbalanced. Or specific items being useless or over powered. And many of the scenarios have pretty loose rules.
As long as you understand that, it’s a fairly light game that can have a decently large group working together.
I’ve enjoyed my copy, but there was a stretch where it was OOP and going for big money. It wasn’t worth that, but for a regular in-print price, it’s fine.
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 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!
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)
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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I like Ghost Stories, quite imbalanced but fun to play (/lose)
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!
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.
- Arkham Horror
- Legends of Andor
- Escape Room games
I think Andor suffers from overanalysis. Precalculating the entire AI turn is complicated but absolutely necessary. This slows the game down and at least personally I don’t find it fun.
I love Arkham Horror, sadly my gf is not that much into the whole story telling part. I am still holding onto my copy even though we have not touched the game in 2 years.
I have not tried Escape Room games, but I am not that much enticed by Escape Rooms in general. Most feel more like a money grab at this point.
The Exit series in particular is soooooo bad. I made the mistake of playing a Portuguese version of the pharaoh one and it was awful. The translation errors made the puzzles unsolvable. Literally unsolvable.
We have a friend in our group who loves the Exit series and buys most of them and they’re all terrible.
He has another escape room series called Unlock! which I find more enjoyable and it’s 100% replayable. Replayable as in you don’t destroy the components but once you know the solution there’s no point in playing again.
There are re-usable escape rooms you can give to dhe next on and on.
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.
Roll camera is Co-op and really fun. The theme is that you are making a movie. During the game you have to balance budget and time while trying to shoot all the scenes of the movie, and while problems are continuously happening. It may be balanced to the easy side generally, but you can tweak the difficulty by starting with different budgets and amounts of time.
Hanabi and The Crew, both card games — and both limited-information games. Hanabi is basically Klondike Solitaire distributed over a team of players who can’t see their own cards (and have a limited number of pieces of information they can tell each other); The Crew is a trick-taking game with variable goals and scalable difficulty.
I love the crew, probably my fav coop game! Will have to check out Hanabi, sounds interesting :)
That’s an interesting description of Hanabi but I think I see it!