cooperative games?

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TheophilusCarter

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My wife enjoys playing the occasional board game, but prefers cooperative ones. Forbidden Desert was a big success. Any other recommendations, especially ones that work well with two players?
 
That's pretty cool that you can use an app and do one player games and if you can't get groups together for whatever reason. I can definitely see that happening with Fantasy Flight's Star Wars games.
 
My wife and I have been playing Arkham Horror for years, but it's very complicated. Eldritch Horror and Elder Signs are nicely streamlined versions of it. There's even a new Arkham Horror Card Game that might be a good fit.
 
Zombicide. I've played it two-player and had a good time.

I picked up (and painted) the Ghostbusters boardgame recently, but haven't gotten around to playing it. Uses the same basic design as Zombicide.
 
The Dungeons and Dragons Adventure System games (Ravenloft, wrath of Ashardolon, legend of drizzt, and Temple of Elemental Evil) are all coop and fun with 1-4 players. They're based loosely on 4th edition rules which I feel is very appropriate for a board game.

You might also consider some of the board games that are very close to multiplayer solitaire.
The ticket to Ride series feels like that to me.
 
I actually prefer Forbidden Island to Forbidden Desert, although it's easier - I just like the theme more and find the blank entirely hidden map of Forbidden Desert to be annoying.

The grandparent of this type of game - each player has a set number of moves per turn they need to use to clear the board, and after they move they draw a card to make stuff appear, disappear, or move around on the board - is Pandemic. Which also has lots of variations that I'm mostly unfamiliar with.

If you're super ambitious, Pandemic Legacy is a ton of fun - it's a massive 12-to-24 game epic where you play Pandemic over and over, with the rules and gameboard evolving each time in response to things that happen during each game, and a storyline involving global virus outbreak that unfolds. But that might be a but much for "occasional board game".

Tabletop just spotlighted another game in this style called Fire Rescue. It looks really fun, but super tough. (Although they were using an optional rule that sounds like it increases the difficulty by a ton.)
 
A fun one I played at boardgame night was Red November... about a bunch of drunk Russian sailors trying to save their rickety submarine.

The co-op game I been wanting to play is Ghost Stories... asian horror themed. Unfortunately I keep cheaping out on buying it, knowing it will probably only rarely see play.
 
I've played Pandemic a few times, but we've never won. :smile: I think my wife would get frustrated with that.

I like Forbidden Island too; one of my friends owns it, which is the only reason I haven't bought it myself.
 
I've played Pandemic a few times, but we've never won. :smile: I think my wife would get frustrated with that.

That surprises me - I think I win more often than I lose. Are you sure you weren't mistaking a rule? I played the Cthulhu variant with a friend and we thought it was BRUTAL until we realized that we were moving a bad guy every turn instead of only when a certain card came up (or something like that).

One problem with coop games is if everybody's working together and you make a mistake in the rules, nobody notices because it affects everyone equally. In a head-to-head game everybody looks out for themselves more so if something send unbalanced the person on the losing side has an incentive to double-check their interpretation.
 
That surprises me - I think I win more often than I lose. Are you sure you weren't mistaking a rule?
Ha, no, I'm not sure! One of my friends owns it, and I assumed he was always running us through it correctly ...
 
Yeah, Arkham Horror is a blast. There's a bit of a learning curve, but it's ok once you get it. I prefer cooperative games as well, with the exception of Runebound, which is my favourite, strangely enough.
 
Another vote for Arkham Horror.

If you are a LotR fan, I do highly recommend the cooperative LotR boxed game from Reiner Knizia. FOR ME, it captured the feel of LotR better than any other game I've tried.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/823/lord-rings

The game gets quite challenging if you start Sauron on 10 instead of 15 squares away. (12 spaces is standard).
 
Tabletop just spotlighted another game in this style called Fire Rescue. It looks really fun, but super tough. (Although they were using an optional rule that sounds like it increases the difficulty by a ton.)

Flash Point's a great game. The base set lets you play a slightly simplified "Family" mode, where everybody has a generic firefighter, or "Expert" mode, which adds firefighter abilities and vehicles. If anything, the expert modes may be a bit easier, because the specialist firefighters generally get a few more action points a turn, and this encourages you to focus on your role in the building (Frex, if you're the CAFS firefighter, you get in there and the fire; you leave investigating PoI's to the rescue specialist or the imaging technician or even the rescue dog) rather than everyone doing a bit of everything. There are expansions with new maps and new firefighters; I have all of them, but in truth I'm not good enough to handle some of the more complicated maps. The way the PoI's work is great, because they force your team to stay on the move, you can't simply swarm the fire into submission... and there's the false reading blips, to introduce more chaos.

Other than that, I like Elder Sign, and Pandemic; I've got the regular game, Iberia (Which adds a lot of nifty complications; no eradicating the disease, and overland travel is slow until you've got a decent railway set-up) and Legacy, which I'm planning on playing with work colleagues, if we can find the time.

If you are a LotR fan, I do highly recommend the cooperative LotR boxed game from Reiner Knizia. FOR ME, it captured the feel of LotR better than any other game I've tried.

I've played that a few times. Wonderful game, and very simple to play; I also love how it "feels" like something from the 60's or 70's, in all of the art and design of the game, even if it plays like something much more modern and complex.
 
You might also consider some of the board games that are very close to multiplayer solitaire. The ticket to Ride series feels like that to me.

That is a great game. If you are playing it with someone conflict averse, you should use the No Blocking Rule: Don't buy up a line you don't need just to screw over another player.

I'm fine playing with blocking, but I also don't mind playing without. As you say, it makes it more like multiplayer solitaire, which is a perfectly fine way to spend a casual evening of gaming.
Another vote for Arkham Horror.

And another!

Playing it with your wife has the advantage of being able to break up the game. I used to play it with a girlfriend over a couple of weeknights. At some point, we would declare a cliffhanger and finish off the next evening. It was a good way to play without needing a whole Saturday for it.

If you are a LotR fan, I do highly recommend the cooperative LotR boxed game from Reiner Knizia. FOR ME, it captured the feel of LotR better than any other game I've tried.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/823/lord-rings

The game gets quite challenging if you start Sauron on 10 instead of 15 squares away. (12 spaces is standard).[/QUOTE]
A friend of mine had that. When he was explaining it, it seemed like it was going to be overly abstract for my tastes, but I really got into it. I can't remember specifics, but there are times when everyone needs to throw in cards to win a conflict, Nobody else knows what anyone else has. You go around once, playing a card or passing. If you are early in rotation, it is tempting to hold back a card and let the rest of the group cover it, assuming they actually have the cards to deal with it.

The whole game is battle between sacrifice and selfishness, so while it may be a little abstract, it gets the themes and emotions of The Lord of the Rings in a way that more concrete games don't.
 
Played Zombicide Black Plague last night with two friends. We screwed up on the rules a bit and I think it's true that coop play means fewer eyes scanning the rulebook as suggested above.

It's a good game coop or solo. But again because it doesn't have individual goals coop play tends to lean towards the best optimizer playing the game via suggestions.
 
FFG's Arkham Horror isn't that complicated once you get the hang of it and we enjoy it a lot. There's some handy flow charts of the rules flying around on the web somewhere. The expansions tend to complicate the game to the point where we would no longer consider it playable when you add more than one or two at a time.

Elder Sign is fun as well, shorter and less complicated. Also from FFG.

Flying Frog Productions' Conquest of Planet Earth can be played co-op as well.

We recently picked up Osprey Publishing's The Lost Expedition card game but haven't played it yet.

We got heavily into the Dark Souls boardgame Kickstarter with my wife being a huge fan of the video games. Maximum Apocalypse is another co-op game we backed on Kickstarter.

We've been contemplating getting Zombicide and eyeballing Massive Darkness as we would like more co-op games.

There's a Fallout boardgame in the pipeline at FFG that will be co-op that has our attention.
 
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I definitely need to check out Arkham Horror again. A friend of mine has it, and we tried it once. It took four hours, and I think we were on turn three ... After that, we stuck to simpler things, but if it's just going to be solo or coop with the missuz, then breaking it up into sessions isn't as much of a problem.
 
I definitely need to check out Arkham Horror again. A friend of mine has it, and we tried it once. It took four hours, and I think we were on turn three ... After that, we stuck to simpler things, but if it's just going to be solo or coop with the missuz, then breaking it up into sessions isn't as much of a problem.

You might want to try the newer Eldritch Horror, which is about visiting cities around the globe instead of buildings around Arkham and apparently drops some of the fiddlier subsystems.

There's also a game from a different company I played once called A Touch of Evil that I quite enjoyed, which felt very much like Arkham Horror Light - you draw a random Big Bad (only here it's public domain monster icons like Dracula - I think we drew the Headless Horseman) and then travel around the countryside having random encounters trying to draw the cards you need to defeat it and it's minions.
 
FFG's Arkham Horror isn't that complicated once you get the hang of it and we enjoy it a lot.
I don't think Arkham Horror is really complicated by the standards of RPG gaming. The two barriers to playing are the setup time and the length of play.
 
There's also a game from a different company I played once called A Touch of Evil that I quite enjoyed, which felt very much like Arkham Horror Light - you draw a random Big Bad (only here it's public domain monster icons like Dracula - I think we drew the Headless Horseman) and then travel around the countryside having random encounters trying to draw the cards you need to defeat it and it's minions.

That sounds very cool. Tell us more!
 
I don't think Arkham Horror is really complicated by the standards of RPG gaming. The two barriers to playing are the setup time and the length of play.
The problem is the rulebook not the rules. We've gotten familiar enough with the game that even set-up and playing time aren't a problem anymore. Playing time is still a couple of hours, though. If you're looking for something short Arkham Horror isn't a good choice.
 
The problem is the rulebook not the rules. We've gotten familiar enough with the game that even set-up and playing time aren't a problem anymore. Playing time is still a couple of hours, though. If you're looking for something short Arkham Horror isn't a good choice.
That's probably fair. I have played the game since the original edition in the '80s, so I may have looked past issues in the rulebook.
 
Speaking of the Alpha gamer problem. There's one coop game I Know of that's done an excellent job of solving it, Mysterium. It's a game that looks like it's one vs many but the only way everyone wins is is you deduce who committed a murder as I recall. It's been over a year since I last played it but essentially one player is handing out cards with pictures to the other players who need to guess who that picture indicates is the suspect. The piece which keeps it immune to optimization is the fact the cards the dealer is given are random. He might have to give a few throw away cards to increase the odds the others guess correctly.
The game is played over rounds so the same player is unlikely to keep getting throw away cards.

Anyway so far it's the best coop game I've seen.
 
That's probably fair. I have played the game since the original edition in the '80s, so I may have looked past issues in the rulebook.
It's mainly about how it's organized. The rules are all there and if you consistently stick to them the game works fine IME. It's just that some small but important details are hidden in places where they're easily overlooked and difficult to find when referring to the booklet. The flowchart we managed to find online has been very helpful. It can probably be found through BoardGameGeek.

That said, I believe a new edition was released since we bought the game and things may have been improved.
 
Sentinels of the Multiverse is a coop card game that two players can play (although one or both of you would have to play two heroes). It's a superhero game that uses cards - but not a deck building game nor a collectible card game. Every hero, villain, and environment has its own deck and each deck works at least somewhat by its own rules (as written on the cards).

It plays fairly quickly and the rules are straightforward.
 
Sentinels of the Multiverse ...

I was eyeing that on Amazon the other day. That might be a good one to start with.

Interesting that folks brought up the "alpha player" issue. I didn't realize it was a common issue, but I've definitely seen it in some of the games I've played with my friends. One owns NY CHASE, and tends to take over, so it's pretty much reduced to a two-player game, and the rest of us just watch ...
 
I was eyeing that on Amazon the other day. That might be a good one to start with.

Interesting that folks brought up the "alpha player" issue. I didn't realize it was a common issue, but I've definitely seen it in some of the games I've played with my friends. One owns NY CHASE, and tends to take over, so it's pretty much reduced to a two-player game, and the rest of us just watch ...

It is a good one to start with. Picking up the core set gives you 10 heroes, four villains, and four environments, and a pretty solid start on the game. Once you get that into your system there's a healthy line of expansion packs (with the final pack coming out in a couple/few months).

And yeah, alpha players can be frustrating.
 
If you want to get an idea of how it plays there's a demo of the electronic version on Steam. It has four heroes, one villain, and one environment.
 
Sentinels of the Multiverse is a coop card game that two players can play (although one or both of you would have to play two heroes). It's a superhero game that uses cards - but not a deck building game nor a collectible card game. Every hero, villain, and environment has its own deck and each deck works at least somewhat by its own rules (as written on the cards).

It plays fairly quickly and the rules are straightforward.

I forgot all about that! That's a great suggestion. I love how the different card selections for each hero make them feel like their comic-book archetypes while making use of fairly simple mechanics. (The speedster character is all about drawing and discarding cards, cycling through their deck really fast; the Iron Man type switches between drawing equipment cards to build up their arsenal and then unloading with them; the Superman-lite type just starts with decent abilities and then draws cards that let them use variations of them.)

There's an Android version, too.
 
Hmm, the Android app is only $6.99. And there's a free app just to learn the rules. Interesting!
 
The season passes cost a bit more. The first one adds loads of decks. The second one adds a new mode of play (two new modes of play when Oblivaeon is out) as well as more environments and heroes.
 
My friends and I have played Zombicide and have had a lot of fun playing it. Some of the missions weren't long, so that was cool.
 
Let's see, what hasn't been mentioned...

(as an aside, I was a bit let down by Ghostbusters. It's simpler than Zombicide, and IMO so much so that the fun and replayability has been lost. I honestly can't see playing it again once we've exhausted the existing campaigns. We've had a great deal of fun with the Ghost Rangers supplement for Fear & Faith, though)

Descent: Journeys in the Dark is dungeon crawling as a board game, but it requires a GM player. Mice & Mystics is Descent a la Mouse Guard or Redwall that doesn't require a dedicated GM player. It's loads of fun and very thematic, but we found it got a bit repetitive and grindy about halfway through the canned campaign. There's enough bits to make the game supremely hackable to fix that, though. You could play with two people, but you'd likely want to play two mice apiece.

Many of the Flying Frog games can be played co-op. Fortune & Glory is the best for co-op, but it's bigger and more complex than Arkham Horror. Still, racing the Indiana Jones Nazis to the Mask of the Ancients while your compatriot fights their way on to the War Zeppelin to steal their gold....this game is awesome.

Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island is *hard*, and takes a long time to set up and play. But you feel like you've earned it when you win a scenario.

Gears of War is out of print but still obtainable at sane prices. A good mix of scenarios, hard, and very much a co-op game in that if you don't cover each other and plan together you will get stomped.
 
Let's see, what hasn't been mentioned...

(as an aside, I was a bit let down by Ghostbusters. It's simpler than Zombicide, and IMO so much so that the fun and replayability has been lost. I honestly can't see playing it again once we've exhausted the existing campaigns. We've had a great deal of fun with the Ghost Rangers supplement for Fear & Faith, though)

Descent: Journeys in the Dark is dungeon crawling as a board game, but it requires a GM player. Mice & Mystics is Descent a la Mouse Guard or Redwall that doesn't require a dedicated GM player. It's loads of fun and very thematic, but we found it got a bit repetitive and grindy about halfway through the canned campaign. There's enough bits to make the game supremely hackable to fix that, though. You could play with two people, but you'd likely want to play two mice apiece.

Many of the Flying Frog games can be played co-op. Fortune & Glory is the best for co-op, but it's bigger and more complex than Arkham Horror. Still, racing the Indiana Jones Nazis to the Mask of the Ancients while your compatriot fights their way on to the War Zeppelin to steal their gold....this game is awesome.

Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island is *hard*, and takes a long time to set up and play. But you feel like you've earned it when you win a scenario.

Gears of War is out of print but still obtainable at sane prices. A good mix of scenarios, hard, and very much a co-op game in that if you don't cover each other and plan together you will get stomped.

Descent 2nd edition can be played fully co-op if you use the mobile app.
 
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