Board games aren’t all about throwing dice at someone’s head or setting fire to the board to stop anyone else winning. Nope. Some games are about working together. You know, team work. The big C.
Co-operation.
So if you’re looking for games to play with your friends who are sore losers and bad winners, why not try one of these?
Pandemic (and Pandemic Legacy)
Time to play: 45 mins | Complexity: Moderate | Players: 2–4
Let’s start with Pandemic: the OG of co-operative gaming. We’ve written about how much we love the series before and how the Legacy variant created a whole new genre of excellence. In Pandemic you are a group of scientists working together to save the world from spreading diseases. That means you have to work together to stop the worlds impending doom.
It’s a really simple game to learn but you’ll be finding yourself game after game discovering new tactics and strategies. You’ll soon be recognizing how to optimize your plays and work better together. The biggest complaint you’ll ever hear about Pandemic is the issue of “quarterbacking” — when one player tells everyone else what to do.
We have the perfect solution to this problem Just don’t play with dickheads.
Support Best Play and treat yourself to Pandemic by getting it from Amazon here.
Burgle Bros
Time to play: 60+ mins | Complexity: Moderate | Players: 1–4
This is not quite a noble pursuit about saving the world. This is about robbing loot and making a getaway. If you love a heist movie as much as I do you’ll find this is the perfect embodiment of it.
You’ll find yourself concocting grand plans of distracting a guard to slip past into the safe room — only to find you accidentally set of an alarm and all hell breaks loose. It’s like Oceans Eleven meets Metal Gear Solid with a dash of Police Academy. You can even ratchet up the difficulty if you find it too easy (you wont).
Buy it here and support indie developers
Escape: Curse of the Temple
Time to play: 60 mins | Complexity: Moderate | Players: 1–5
This game is both frantic and adrenaline-fueled, and amazingly lasts exactly 10 minutes. You might not think that sounds like a board game, but trust us: it is.
You are a group of explorers trying to grab as many ancient gems as you can before escaping. The trick is that this game is happening in real-time, as in the time you are using up reading this right now (please keep reading). Once the time is up, well, you’ve either escaped or been trapped.
To move around you’re rolling dice as quickly as you can and combining them with your friends. If you roll black skulls, that means you can’t roll that dice anymore until someone helps unlock it. Basically, don’t leave your friends behind.
A Tale of Pirates
Time to play: 30 mins | Complexity: Moderate | Players: 2–4
This game is part Pandemic Legacy, part Escape: Curse of the temple and part…well a game about Pirates. Each game is a new mission of pirating, like finding treasure or racing across the seas.
New ideas, rules and pieces are always being added but the game never feels overwhelming. It does always feel chaotic though, as you all try to keep the ship going in the right direction in real time.
Oh and all this is taking place on a real 3D pirate ship. It’s one of those board games that screams ‘fun’ as soon as you open the box. It’s crammed full of ideas yet it moves at quite a pace. Yarrrrr.
Support Best Play and treat yourself to A Tale of Pirates by getting it from Amazon here.
Unlock/Escape
Time to play: 60–90 mins | Complexity: Moderate | Style: Co-operative
‘Escape the Rooms ‘are brilliant, but why bother going out into the cold night air when you can stay inside?
Unlock and Exit are both brilliant escape the room games in their own right and we think are the best of the genre. You and your mates are solving puzzles over a few drinks trying to “escape” your cardboard confines (that’s a metaphor, don’t put your head in the box).
Each game has its own twists and brilliant conundrums that require you to really think outside the box (sorry bad pun, also don’t put your head in the box).
On the downside when they’re done, they’re done. You can’t replay these. Unless you want to “show off” how good your memory is. Still they certainly offer a unique experience and that means an awful lot when it comes to board games.
Buy Exit here on Amazon and support Best Play
Buy Unlock here on Amazon and support Best Play
There you go our 5 favourite co-op games. There are still plenty others that we love like Mechs vs Minions, Arkham Horror LCG and Forbidden Island and many more we still have to play. Let us know what your favourite co-op games are and which games we were “idiots” for missing on our list.
