What are some good cooperative board games?
A good starter coop game is Forbidden Island. It’s pretty fast-paced and easy for younger players. Pandemic is also very good, as is Ghost Stories. Here is a post from our blog about coop games that you may find interesting: http://growingupgamers.blogspot.com/2010/12/cooperative-board-games.html
- Pandemic (while it is better with 3 players, you can play with 2 people. Try to save the world from a set of diseases!!)
- Dead Men tell No Tales (you are looting a burning pirate ghost ship…)
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Yggdrasil (you play a Norse God and are attempting to save Asgard from invaders/destruction)
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Forbidden Island or Forbidden Desert (dry to achive a goal of collecting artifacts before the island sinks/is buried by sand. Good fun. Best with 2 – 3 players. 4 makes it more difficult).
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Flash Point (you are running into a burning building to try to save survivors)
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Battlestar Galactica (this is a TRAITOR game, so it is generally cooperative, with 1 person trying to sabotage everything. Based on the populat TV show)
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Arkham Horror (this is a complex, large, board game. Kind of fidly, but amazing with the right mix of people)
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Shadows over Camelot
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Betrayal at the House on the Hill (again, this is a TRAITOR game. Everyone is exploring a haunted house, and at some point 1 player turns into the “bad guy”)
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Castle Panic. (this is basically a tower defense game made into a cooperative board game)
Arkham Horror is a great co-op board game, although it takes between 20 minutes to an hour to set up depending on how you packed it away and several hours to play – basically if you don’t have more than 4 hours or so then don’t play it. It’s one of those games that will take forever the first time you play unless you have an experienced player or 2 because there are a lot of rules but as you get more used to it you’ll find it fairly straightforward despite the number of rules and complexity.
