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Some that I havent heard but love are Pandemic and Spirit island.
And as a hidden gem: Heroes of Tenefyre and sprawlopolis. Heroes is a deckbuilder dungeon crawler where the new cards in your deck are the monsters you slay. Sprawlopolis is a city builder the size of a small wallet, which you can easily take with you. There are 3 challenges out if 18 which decide how the game will play, which asks for different tactics every time.
I will always +1 spirit island.
Spirit island is amazing! So much replayability
Tenefyr is one of my favorites too, especially with the variety added by the expansion. I hope it gets a new printing soon so that more people can try it.
Yeah it is one of those games that I wouldnt play without the expansion anymore. We really like the legendary dungeons, which adds quite some difficulty and allows for multi classes, which can create some cool and strong combos.
I love co-op games. A few of my favorites (in no particular order) are:
Fallout (w/ Atomic Bonds expansion of course)
The Crew (either version)
Black Orchestra
Stars of Akarios
Forbidden Desert
Gloomhaven
Mysterium
Arkham Horror LCG
Spirit Island
Honorable mention for some semi-co-ops:
Fury of Dracula
Specter Ops
Dead of Winter
This is a great list, thanks! I can't believe I didn't know about the Fallout game since that is one of my favorite video game series. I"m going to have to find that one and get it on the table.
Just make sure you get the Atomic Bonds expansion! The base game is pretty broken and is a 'meh' game at best without it.
With the expansion it's not perfect, but has still become one of my favorites.
Yeah definitely get the Atomic Bonds expansion. The competitive basegame is ridiculously broken. For example there are quests that send your all over the map. But the silly thing is if a quests needs to be "picked up" in one location and "turned in" in another then once it is picked up ANY player can just snipe the rewards if they're close to the destination. Also many exploration options are hillariously random. This makes the competitive version little more than a crapshoot. It's frankly mindboggling how anyone actually greenlit that design.
In coop all that is still the case but instead of being frustrated when another player gets an extremely lucky pull in the exploration, you cheer each other on. Sniping different quest stages between multiple players becomes a cool strategy instead of a braindead design choice. Most of these anoyances fall away and you can revel in the setting of the game.
Do you have house rules for Fury of Dracula? It was a long time ago that we played it, but I remember that Dracula was too hard to catch and if you cornered him he disappeared into the ocean.
None that I can remember.
Him escaping via the ocean shouldn't end up being terribly difficult because everyone can tell that's where he is, how many ocean spaces he went through, and cannot backtrack. Usually you can narrow his location down to a few ports.
Mina Harker's power is absolutely critical to use whenever possible. Once you've narrowed position down to a region the game should feel much more winnable because all 4 hunters can spread out and close in.
The bigger issue we usually have with that game is the combat doesn't feel super great and bogs the game down.
Honestly, if you like the hidden movement aspect of the game, I think Specter Ops is the easier/more accessible game to play. It's not that far off from FoD, but it's not as heavy.
Spirit Island is probably our biggest mainstay at the moment. One of our group has most of the content and I'm still only about halfway through playing every spirit we have. The replayability is just amazing and the pacing is beautiful, hitting you hard in the early game and then slowly you turn the tide. Not to mention some of the spirits are just so doggamn satisfying to play.
We're also pretty big into Aeon's End. I completely hated this game in the beginning because I couldn't see how you could possibly win. Once it clicked and we began to get better, it became a lot more satisfying to play.
We also played through and enjoyed all Legends of Andor, all Pandemic Legacy, Mechs vs Minions and Gloomhaven.
I just got Spirit Island and played the intro scenario with my group and we are all itching to try again with different spirits and the full ruleset. It's a really engaging and complex puzzle with an enormous number of emergent strategies.
We are excited for a bigger challenge; the intro scenario felt very easy to us.
Easily Spirit Island. Huge replayability, a wide range of difficulties, and impossible to quarterback for mortals
Spirit Island is one of the best games ever.
I like coop campaign games, some of those I liked most are: LOTR journeys in the middle earth, descent leyends of the dark and gloomhaven. I strognly recommend Gloomhaven Jaws of the Lion. Not the best, but very good and you will get a lot of value for the price, as all these are on the expensive side. Zombiecide is good and a bit lighter. Apart from those, I'm playing marvel champions now, which is a coop card game, great for two, a bit too long with more players.
Dungeon Fighter is a very silly coop game that might appeal to people that don't like board games normally. You're a group of adventurers and have to move through a dungeon. You roll the dice on a big bullseye board. The twist is that all abilities or traps etc. are in the form of modifying how you roll your dice. So you might have to roll the dice from below the table, or while jumping etc.
Here's a fun one I haven't seen mentioned: Castle Panic. You have to work together to save your castle from rampaging orcs and goblins
That sounds fun! Thanks
I found Castle Panic boring due to each turn having an obvious best course of action. No real sense of agency, just sort of on the rails.
Love, love, love Burgle Bros 1 and 2.
We have also been playing lots of Hanabi lately and having a blast (pun intended)
I used to play Hanabi with a large group. We would have like 3 games going at once. Great game. We started getting extremely meta with it and how we hinted.
I love Burgle Bros! I really like Tim Fowers games in general, Paperback is really good!
Same here. I've got a whole shelf just of his games. He's got so many interesting ideas.
I don't have Paperback, but I did get the solo deck builder Paperback Adventures and think it's awesome.
The Captain Is Dead is underrated in my opinion - the theme is essentially the end of an episode of Star Trek or any other sci-fi show really but the main characters have unexpectedly died and it's down to you to scramble and try and fix everything before it all ends badly...
It's hard to win but a lot of fun to play!
I don't see it mentioned, so: 2p Onirim is an interesting low cognitive game you can play with your partner before going to bed. You are in a common dream and both need to beat the game without talking, simply by giving hints. Playing with a low light is cool.
I wouldn't say it's my favorite co-op game, but still, it's easy to pick.
The crew 1 and 2 (fast paced card game)
Magic maze (real time mess, very funny, play with the extension only (the base game is super repeatitive after 3 plays))
Hanabi (logic and memory card game)
Gloomhaven (heavy rpg)
for sure I love flash point. I think it might be one of the most commonly played games I have.
I need more expansions for it though I've only got 2nd story
lightweight:
medium weight:
heavy weight:
Great list. Flashpoint semi replaced Pandemic for our group for a short period of time. I love the theme of that one. Some really excellent expansions for that one too. Who doesn't want to be a fire fighting dog?
Shared 1st place:
Magic Maze
Pandemic: Fall of Rome
Shared 3rd place:
So Clover!
The Shipwreck Arcana
Top Ten
I love Gloomhaven. It's cooperative, but still offers some competitive gameplay elements.
Absolutely love to play Dorfromantik with my kid, it even has campaign mechanics.
Zombicide is one of my favorites. It's an rpg, cooperative board game that puts you against zombies while trying to complete missions. The various base games cover different time periods from midieval to present to scifi future. Each one tweaks the rules slightly to work better with the characters and environment
Co-op zombie sci-fi. Right on. I'll have to check this out sounds fun!
How is it even possible that no-one has mentioned the best coop/semi-coop in existence yet? NEMESIS.
Frosthaven/Gloomhaven. They're co-op, but all of the hidden information stuff stop other players from influencing your turns too much.
Absolutely wonderful games!
I've heard good things about Glomhaven and I think one of our group has that on the shelf. We'll have to give that a try!
It's pretty rough in terms of rules and setup takes a while, but it's so worth it.
I play frosthaven on a weekly basis and sacrifice most of my boardgame time to playing it.
I completely agree. Both of the problems you mention are solved in Jaws of the Lion, so I would recommend any newbie to start with that.
Never played JOTL. to be fair, I think frosthaven went overboard on mission complexity and overhead.
I'm buying GH2, so that should scratch the itch in 2024 when we're done with FH. I only played about 10 scenarios of GH1.
EDIT: my submission is now the deep rock galactic board game. Heaps of fun and faithfully adapts the video game!
There's a portal 2 board game?
Im so stupid! i thought this was for video games!
My husband and I really like Wonderbook. It's a campaign game with several chapters. The theming is a bit childlike sometimes but the mechanics are fun.