Spirit island is my favorite game to play with a group. It has you trying to protect an island from colonists who damage the island with their expansions. Each player has different abilities that force you all the work together & requires a lot of teamwork to win especially some of the higher difficulties.
Here’s some great cooperative games that either have big groups working together OR have the whole groups:
Escape from the Dark Castle - a fun little dungeon crawler where you flip cards and roll against dangers as you try to overcome obstacles. Completely cooperative but mechanically simple.
Wavelength - the base way to play is technically a ‘competitive’ in that there are teams and points but it’s relatively chill and I’ve often played this at parties with large groups cooperatively cause it just makes for a great conversation starter.
Phantom Ink - two teams but the mechanics are very fun and the game overall has a great tone.
Ravine - cooperative game where you try to survive after a plane crash.
I would also maybe recommend looking into some light roleplaying games like The Zone or Fiasco. These are almost always gm-less or easy to run and focused on building a fun narrative together.
Check out !boardgames in case you’re not aware. Lots of discussion happening there.
Regarding your question, it’s hard to say since you don’t mention any mechanics, or complexity level, that you prefer. Based on the couple of examples you provide, you seem to like cooperative card games. If so, you should check out ‘The Crew’. It’s the most popular of that genre in my game club.
Yeah. It’s super easy to house-rule Carcassonne as a pure co-op game. Remove the farmers (to keep your sanity, because co-op is actually much harder), keep the rules about Castle and road occupation (where a tie gets scored for each tied player), and play to maximize the combined players score. None of the strategy is lost and trying to carefully double occupy everything is sometimes a nail biting challenge.
There’s actually a specifically cooperative expansion for Carcassonne, called Mists Over Carcassonne. It adds an element of managing a ghost population while trying to cooperatively reach a target score based on certain scenarios.
I really like Mysterium. It’s kinda cooperative, but players also work independently. The premise is that one player is a ghost, and the rest of the players are psychic detectives who have their own vision of how the murder happened. The ghost gives out clues using surreal, dream-like cards for the psychics to figure out their personal guess on what the weapon, location and murderer was. At the end the ghost gives clues to which psychic was right.
I personally like it because it isn’t just logic and strategic thinking, you have to use your creative/artistic part of your brain as well, if not moreso.
I’m sorry, but if you have this problem, it’s entirely caused by who your players are as people, not by the games itself. Even cooperative games leave people that get pissed, pissed at each other. For example, if one person wants to do something that another person finds suboptimal, and then the cooperative game is lost some time later.
I love Deep Rock Galactic, Terra Mystica, Mysterium.
Podpisuję się rękami i nogami! Radar to jest coś, co za granicą pozwoliło mi w prosty sposób znaleźć wzorowe towarzystwo i ludzi z podobnymi wartościami. Pamiętam, że mówiłem wtedy nowopoznanemu koledze, że kurde, w Niderlandach to tyle dobrych grup i wydarzeń jest a u nas w Polsce to w ogóle nic i nikogo takiego nie ma. Powiedział mi, że to nieprawda, że w Polsce też jest dużo anarchistów i grup tego typu, tylko, że wszyscy są na Facebooku, a że ja nie mam to nie mam do nich dostępu.
Nie róbmy tak, nie ograniczajmy dostępu do idei anarchistycznych i wolnościowych osobom antykapitalistycznym. Używajmy Radara :)
Mansions of Madness. It’s my wife’s new favorite game. The game has many different scenarios and they play out pretty differently each time. The game is almost all co-op, so it’s players VS. the game. I was actually against the need for an app at first but it simplifies a lot and helps keep track of a lot of the mundane stuff.
I don’t know how the game does it, but in so many sessions the last actions are so important. I have often won the game within the last possible action. Such a great feeling.
Going from “easy, everything is fine” to “everything on fire, NPCs dead, several Monsters” in two rounds. Then winning by a clever set oft actions, where several player habe to coordinate, is peak feeling oft accomplishment.
I see the app as the DM. Plus, you can tell it what expansions you own, and it includes it all when it makes the map — you can play the same scenario and get different layouts.
Ok, if you are against hard feelings, cross off anything that is directly competitive, that would be any game where players directly and willfully interact with each other in a way where one gains while another loses as part of the core gameplay. To varying degrees things like blood rage, root, monopoly/solarquest, everdell, 7 wonders, clank, carcassonne, ticket to ride, dominion, etc.
If your group must have competition, you’ll need to stick to independent competitive games, this is anything where players are primarily taking actions in their own space and are progressing largely independent from each other. Example recommendations include things like Quacks of Quedlinburg, Shifting Stones, most roll and writes (welcome to series, cartographer with a minor exception), cascadia, verdant, etc
If you can do without competing with each other, cooperative games are definitely the way to go to minimize hard feelings (it’d only come up then if someone thought another player did something suboptimal causing a loss). The variety here is actually pretty large: simple trick taking games like The Crew series Information sharing games, like Mysterium “Combat” games of all complexities (generally ascending: Lord of the rings storybook, marvel united, D&D board games, Heroquest, Stuffed fables, Atlantis Rising, legends of andor, horrified, Arkham horror, marvel champions, mansions of madness 2nd edition, spirit island, Gloomhaven) Mystery/puzzle games (Adventure Games series, Exit The Game series, Animals of Baker Street)
I’d also like to call out 2 other games specifically: Stella, while it is a 1 winner competitive game where your score depends largely on other players, the push your luck and prisoner’s dilemma aspect of how you earn points I think largely removes the feel bad aspect of competition. Kitchen Rush: pure cooperative, but it’s also a real-time game where everyone is taking simultaneous actions to run a restaurant in 4 real time minutes stretches.
I love spirit Island sooo much. I’ve played the game regularly for over 2 years now I’m I’m still not tired of it. I did get myself the expansion and it’s worth every penny.
I don’t know if I’d considered it a board game, but the Forbidden Island game (and the others like it) spring to mind. The idea is that you and the other players have to work together to gather everything you need including the treasure you came for before the island you’re on sinks into the ocean.
It’s fun working together and I always thought it did a good job of incentivising that.
Seconding Forbidden Island/Desert/Sky. Island is what I break out to introduce new folks to co-op gameplay, then switch to Desert once they get the hang of it.
Pandemic hits a lot of the same notes, and can get really hairy at the end.
I will always recommend base Catan. It’s simple enough that anyone can learn to play fairly quickly, and moves quickly enough that no one gets that mad if they lose. If anything, I find losing a game usually coincides with people understanding it better and being open to playing another round so they can demonstrate that understanding.
Zombie Kidz is quick, cooperative, and has plenty of achievements (with a sticker book to record them) as well as unlockables through gameplay. You get to use teamwork and planning, and turns occur in quick succession.
Just One was a great game for 4 people. Three people have to get the fourth person to guess a particular word. They each write down a one-word hint. If any two (or more) players write the same word hint, they don’t get to show that word to the guesser. It’s a lot of fun when you see the different ways people interpret words to come up with hints and how two (or more) words can work together to make you think of the answer.
Just One can also do a lot more than 4 players. If you add additional writing surfaces and erasable markers (or pencils or whatever) it’s pretty much unlimited.
Edit: It has enough for 7 players in the box (at least my copy does)
Waaay obscure, but one of the few board games I’ve ever really enjoyed is solarquest.
I’ve played plenty of the usual board games over the years. They just weren’t anything I ever played because I wanted to play them. It was something to do, and people seem to naturally gravitate towards card and board games.
I had a chess phase in my younger days. I still play checkers checkers from time to time. “Chinese” checkers too, along with go. But those are still things that I’ll suggest when I’m with someone and looking for something to do while bullshitting.
I hate Life, and only play monopoly with the understanding that when I’m done with it, I’m going to give everything I have to whoever is the most behind. Sorry is okay, as is parcheesi.
But solarquest, I’ll find people willing to play with me because I like it. That and heroquest, but heroquest isn’t really a board game the way I think of the term, it’s a constrained ttrpg.
Both of those, my mom got me for Christmas after I begged for them, and I’ve never once been disappointed with them. I got both of them the year they came out, so we’re talking decades of play with both.
Heroquest, I used as a board with the figures good my d&d play for a long time as well as playing it as its own game.
Heroquest is cooperative, so I can definitely recommend it for low to zero conflict play. You’re uncovering a map, finding treasure, building a character. It’s d&d lite, in the best way. Original versions are expensive, but there’s a ton of printable versions out there, and it was rereleased in 2021.
Solarquest is essentially space themed monopoly on the surface. But, beyond your pieces being rockets and the concept of buying up parts of the solar system, there’s the flight mechanics where you have to have the fuel to go from one planet to the next. It adds a layer of thought and fun to it. Plus, you’re learning some local astronomy.
There’s rules for laser fights, and special roll actions, available as optional rules. It’s just fun. There’s an updated version available with more recent astronomy, fancier supplies and such, but I haven’t bought it yet.
Both of them are games I play with other old farts, as well as kids of all ages. I genuinely can’t recommend either of them enough.
Just wanted to add, for the fully cooperative Heroquest experience, they came out with an app for the new edition (but it’s compatible with the original base game) that fully takes over the Zargon/DM role.
Betrayal at the House on the Hill has about 50 different scenarios so almost every playthrough is different. But it’s best to have at least 4 players to be more fun
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