Best Cooperative Board Games for 2023 – CNET
Best Cooperative Board Games for 2023 - CNET
If you’ve ever attended family game night, you’ve seen how quickly it can turn from friendly competition to rivalry. When it comes to competitive board games, anyone who’s ever played Monopoly knows just how strained things can get. Luckily, there are plenty of games that won’t end with hard feelings or flipped game boards. These games are purely cooperative and have the players uniting to face a common threat, enemy or other challenge — whether that’s a time limit in Magic Maze or a dragon in Gloomhaven.
If you’re looking for ways to keep things friendly, here are some of the best cooperative board games.
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7th Continent has a fantastic concept at its heart: Players explore a mysterious continent by flipping one “terrain” card at a time, slowly revealing craggy islands, dangerous landscapes and mystical wonders. The goal of each game is a sort of mystery: You and your teammates have been cursed, and you need to find a way to lift the curse before it kills you. What follows is a cooperative game of survival and exploration unlike almost any other you’ll find.
Part of what makes 7th Continent so appealing is its accessibility. You can set up a game in a matter of minutes, “save” midway through, pack up quickly and resume later. What’s more, the pacing keeps at a quick clip, thanks to clever card mechanics and impressive game design organization. That means you can find one of the unique cards out of the literally hundreds that come in the box in mere seconds.
If you’re looking for a fun exploration game with elements of roleplaying — something that splits the difference between a Mansions of Madness-type board game and a Gloomhaven-type lite RPG (which can take over 100 hours to complete), 7th Continent might be perfect for you.
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Forbidden Island is a classic co-op game from award-winning games designer Matt Leacock. The game is part of a series of Forbidden games that have you and your team trying to escape from some issue. This one has an entire island sinking around you as you try to collect treasures.
It’s a lot of fun and a game I use to draw friends into board game nights when they may be unsure of how they feel. Working together to solve a problem is a lot of fun and doing it while the game literally sinks adds a layer of urgency that elevates everybody.
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Magic Maze is about four wizards shoplifting from a mall while trying to avoid being caught. Two problems get in the way of a simple escape. First, players can’t talk. And second, players don’t control individual wizards; they control individual movements. For example, I might be able to make any wizard “turn left” and my wife might be able to make any wizard “walk forward.” But if I’m not paying attention to a wizard facing the wrong direction, the whole caper can go awry.
Players do have a form of communication, though. They can pass around a single pawn, though its meaning is fluid. It could mean a player needs to pay attention to a wizard one moment, or perhaps he or she needs to stop moving so someone else can take over. This cooperative board game has a clever dynamic that’ll stop your family from talking for 30 minutes, only to have them discussing the family game night’s cooperative victory for hours afterward.
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Spirit Island twists colonizing games on their head. You play the role of magic spirits and your job is to work with the native population to fend off the colonizers who’d inevitably destroy the land. This fresh take on an old theme aside, Spirit Island does a good job of building tension well as your powers grow and the colonizers move across the land. In this cooperative board game, you need to work together with other players because you have only so much energy to spend each turn.
Spirit Island includes a few different scenarios, with variable enemy behaviors and increasing difficulty, to keep the game feeling fresh. Plus, the different spirits have distinct abilities and play styles, so you can continually find a new way to play with teammates. The learning curve on Spirit Island is a little steep, but once you’re familiar, most of the rules are intuitive and you can focus on unleashing the full power of your spirit on those dastardly invaders.
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In Letter Jam, players receive a series of cards with letters on them, but they can’t see which letters. Instead, everyone sets up a stand facing away from them, so their teammates can see what they have. Then, over the course of the game, players take turn spelling words with the letters they can see, forcing other players to guess their own letters through a clever game of deduction.
For word lovers, this is a great game with endless replay value. And you get to show off your impressive vocabulary to boot.
