I’m interested in hearing what cooperative games people are playing, old or new. My group has had Bloc by Bloc out on the table a few times. That is pretty fun for us, but I’m wanting to add some more cooperative titles to the library.
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...
This is the game that grabbed me when I started looking at hobbyist board games! It’s fairly light and doesn’t get much (if any) play now, but it holds a special place in my heart!
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.
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 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 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.
I think it’s the transition from a broad search pattern to a focused get-ahead-of-Dracula formation that’s the trickiest step to learn for me on the Hunter side. It always feels like there’s just a bit too many options open for me to surge forward and box him in.
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