Cooperative board card games

Get your copy of Gloomhaven. Year: re-released in Players: The cases are tough and memorable and they do a great job of making everyone feel like real detectives. Read our Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective review. Get your copy of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective.

Ghost Stories is still one of the toughest cooperative board games out there. The artwork is excellent , the game plays smoothly once you know the rules, and the random village layout and the ghost cards help to make each game feel different. If you like difficult co-ops, I highly recommend getting Ghost Stories. Also worth checking out is Last Bastion , a fantasy version of Ghost Stories released in late Read our Ghost Stories review.

Get your copy of Ghost Stories. It has a great spell-casting mechanism, the variable turn order adds in extra tension, and it plays at a nice pace. After every win or loss mostly losses , my group spends some time talking about how the story played out because the game does such a great job pulling you onto the island and not letting you go until you either succeed or fail.

Even if it only came with the first scenario in the box — the newest version has seven scenarios — Robinson Crusoe would probably still sit in this top spot. Read our Robinson Crusoe review. Get your copy of Robinson Crusoe. Skip to content. The Grizzled review Buy a Copy Castle Panic review Buy a Copy Forbidden Desert review Buy a Copy Quirky Circuits review Buy a Copy Hanabi review Buy a Copy Resident Evil 2 review Buy a Copy One Deck Dungeon review Buy a Copy Maximum Apocalypse review Buy a Copy Dragonfire review Buy a Copy Mage Knight review Buy a Copy Castle Ravenloft review Buy a Copy Mysterium review Buy a Copy Black Orchestra review Buy a Copy Shadowrift review Buy a Copy Chronicles of Crime review Buy a Copy Codenames Duet review Buy a Copy Legendary Encounters: Alien review Buy a Copy V-Commandos review Buy a Copy Marvel Champions review Buy a Copy Spirit Island review Buy a Copy Pandemic review Buy a Copy More Co-op Content:.

Police Precinct Board Game Review. Pavlov's House Review. Atlantis Rising Second Edition Review. Oldest Newest Most Voted. Inline Feedbacks. Two problems get in the way of a simple escape. First, players can't talk.

And second, players don't control individual wizards; they control individual movements. For example, I might be able to make any wizard "turn left" and my wife might be able to make any wizard "walk forward. Players do have a form of communication, though. They can pass around a single pawn, though its meaning is fluid. It could mean a player needs to pay attention to a wizard one moment, or perhaps he or she needs to stop moving so someone else can take over.

This cooperative board game has a clever dynamic that'll stop your family from talking for 30 minutes, only to have them discussing the family game night's cooperative victory for hours afterward. Spirit Island twists colonizing games on their head.

You play the role of magic spirits and your job is to work with the native population to fend off the colonizers who'd inevitably destroy the land. This fresh take on an old theme aside, Spirit Island does a good job of building tension well as your powers grow and the colonizers move across the land. In this cooperative board game, you need to work together with other players because you have only so much energy to spend each turn.

Spirit Island includes a few different scenarios, with variable enemy behaviors and increasing difficulty, to keep the game feeling fresh. Plus, the different spirits have distinct abilities and play styles, so you can continually find a new way to play with teammates. The learning curve on Spirit Island is a little steep, but once you're familiar, most of the rules are intuitive and you can focus on unleashing the full power of your spirit on those dastardly invaders.

In Letter Jam, players receive a series of cards with letters on them, but they can't see which letters. Instead, everyone sets up a stand facing away from them, so their teammates can see what they have.

Then, over the course of the game, players take turn spelling words with the letters they can see, forcing other players to guess their own letters through a clever game of deduction. For word lovers, this is a great game with endless replay value. And you get to show off your impressive vocabulary to boot. Mansions of Madness was one of the first board games I truly fell in love with.

While growing up, I always gravitated toward Clue, and then I found this complex, narrative-driven, Lovecraft-inspired mystery game that came with a booklet of varied narratives to play out.

The problem was, the first edition of Mansions of Madness required intense setup, and one player had to be "the keeper," a sort of dungeon master playing against everyone else. Now, however, with the game's second edition, players can cooperate in every mission with an app filling the role of the keeper. Whether you're investigating a disappearance in an old mansion or interrogating townspeople to find the one who's secretly attempting to summon an ancient evil, Mansions of Madness remains one of the best mystery games ever released -- and yes, I think it tops Clue.

The best zombie movies have one thing in common: The biggest threat comes from the other humans, and zombies just serve to bring that distrust to the forefront. Dead of Winter is a collaborative game that nails this dynamic. It's a zombie game in which you work together to head out into town, gather supplies and defend your colony against the growing hordes of undead looking for a snack.

You're constantly faced with tough decisions about how best to use your resources. Not required, but helps Requirements? One player must have paid to have a board game arena account. That person can invite others to play. Chat Necessary? Similarly, the person with the physical copy will have to do all the maintenance of the game over the stream while the others tell him what to do.

Just One How To Play? Required Requirements? See below Chat? Can be Essential: depends on how you play. There are two ways to play. The players then think of Just One word as an answer. From here, how you play changes:. If you want to be very clever, you could play this only via texting, where you text clues and answers exclusively over your phones. Yggdrasil How To Play? Helpful, not required if you have audio. This game works up to 6 players: we have played 4 in chat and it worked extremely well.

Burgle Brothers How To Play? How To Play? Very, very nice to have, you strictly only need audio Requirements? A glass of water: there will be a lot of reading! Can be very useful for sharing info, but not required. This is an adventure game with a lot of text! You will get sick of hearing the same person read the books over and over, but multiple copies of the game can help alleviate that. Like Legacy of Dragonholt, this is an adventure game with lots of text, but much simpler.

This is a fun, silly choose your own adventure game. Required to see the board Requirements?