Category: Video Games

Sometimes it’s fun to match wits in a board game with other players in competitive matches. But many of the best board games go the other way and embrace the spirit of cooperation. Co-op board games come in a wide variety of themes, with varying levels of complexity so you can find one for players of all ages. Below, we’ve selected our favorites on the market. For more game night ideas, check out our other roundups, including the best board games for kids and the best two-player board games.

TLDR: Best Co-op Board Games

Have no time to read blurbs? The links above lead directly to retailer pages where you can buy the games in question.

Nemesis: Lockdown

Lots of board games have tried to replicate the success of the Alien franchise, but it took this unlicensed homage to perfect it. Players must work together to survive a terrifying incursion of hostile life-forms into a Martian base. You’re on a constant high-wire between staying slow and quiet or getting things done fast but attracting alien attention. It’s full of detailed mechanics that can spin the game out in crazy directions, from literal firefighting to a gung-ho battle against the extraterrestrial foe. The challenge is tough, the narrative detailed and the tension always escalating. But the real kicker is that it’s possible for your friends not to be friends at all thanks to hidden goal cards that could be supportive or could be murderous, or the corporate military wing could be coming to take you all out to ensure your silence.

Sleeping Gods

Narrative-heavy board games have always faced a content problem: there’s only so much variety you can achieve with boards and cards. Sleeping Gods belongs to a family of adventure games that bypassed this problem by putting everything into a huge flip-book, featuring a mix of maps for different quests. Sleeping Gods stands head and shoulders above its peers thanks to two things. First, it’s outstandingly rich storytelling, as you run through a rich mixture of encounters, characters and side-quests as you attempt to guide the lost ship, The Manticore, and her crew home from the strange dimension in which it finds itself. Second, is the detail with which the ship is brought to life, both in terms of strategic resource management to keep her going and her presence in the game world. Such is the wealth of content available that you can easily see a whole different story on a second play through, and such is the fun of doing so that you’ll surely want to try.

Marvel Champions: The Card Game

This is a “Living Card Game”, which means it’s kind of collectable, like Magic: The Gathering, but there’s no random element. You just buy sets and expansions knowing what cards are in each. And unlike a lot of LCG’s, deck building is easy because it’s modular, seeing players pick fixed sets of cards to create decks for their hero and the villain you’re all working against. The meat of play features some classic concepts like dual-use cards alongside novel ideas like each player being able to flip from their hero to their alter-ego, with different abilities and hand sizes. This sets up some really interesting combo-based play where you pull off cinematic moves as you work together to thwart the villain’s schemes and save the day.

Frosthaven / Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion

To call Gloomhaven a fantasy adventure game is technically accurate, but a bit reductive. It tells the story of mercenaries chasing different goals in a changing world, and the legacy they leave behind. Gloomhaven takes the legacy system from Pandemic Legacy and weaves it into an epic fantasy campaign that takes place over generations. Each hero comes with a personal goal that, when completed, sends the hero into retirement and unlocks new classes and story elements. Upon retiring a hero, you will take control of another, which results in an impressive sense of time progression. The game includes several sealed boxes that are only opened upon reaching certain milestones, which makes Gloomhaven a game with a grand scale that is unmatched in the board game medium.

This epic game now has a sequel, Frosthaven, with an all-new narrative and fresh subsystems which see you expending and guarding the titular town. And if the price and length of either of the big-box titles turns you off, the excellent prequel Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion has most of the gameplay value at a fraction of the price.

Exit: The Game (Series)

An escape room in a box, the Exit series of games does a surprisingly good job of simulating the real thing. Players work together to find clues and solve riddles in real time in an effort to complete the scenario. Each scenario tells you to bring some pens and a pair of scissors because you’ll be permanently modifying your game throughout the session, making these games a one-and-done experience.

There are many different scenarios available for purchase, with titles like The Secret Lab, The Abandoned Cabin, The Sinister Mansion, The Forgotten Island, The Mysterious Museum, and a lot more. Priced at around $15 each (and usually cheaper on Amazon), the Exit series is an ideal replacement for a night at the movies and one of the best escape room board games.

Paleo

At first glance, this game of stone-age survival doesn’t look anything special. You create a deck of cards for the scenario you want to play and distribute them between the players. Then you take it in turns to flip a card from your pile and face the challenges thereon with the skills and stone tools available to your tiny tribe. The magic happens when tribes come together, pooling their resources to overcome one tough encounter, but doing so loses them the chance to interact with the other tribe’s card. All at once, this mirrors a real slice of stone-age life, agonizing over passing up opportunities in order to secure an important prize, while giving players real emergent cooperation in how much they choose to aid each other. The survival narrative and variety of scenarios are just the icing on the rock cake.

Pandemic Legacy

Pandemic put cooperative games on the map, and for good reason. Much of the genre’s hallmark mechanics originated here, from action point allocation to player roles with unique abilities. It also spawned a bevy of expansions and spinoffs, but Pandemic Legacy is the best and more revolutionary take on the virus-eradicating co-op game.

It takes the core rules of Pandemic and stretches them into a campaign-length adventure played out over several sessions as you race to cure disease and prevent epidemics. This version introduces permanence as a mechanic, as the rules force you to rip up cards, sticker the board and alter the physical components in other ways as things (inevitably) don’t go your way. The only potential drawback is that you must play with the same players each session, but because the game is so good everyone will be eager to jump back in.

Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island

Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island is a daunting and dark game, but players willing to wade through the sea of iconography, hefty rulebook and stifling theme will be rewarded with a satisfying survival simulation that rewards communication and teamwork. Based on the 1719 novel, players take on the role of survivors of a shipwreck that are must work together to gather food, build shelters, stave off attacks and explore the island. The combination of different scenarios and player characters ensure good replayability, while the survival mechanics do a fantastic job of selling the theme.

Just One

A lot of games on this list are, to a greater or lesser extent, strategy affairs. But cooperation is a great mechanic to use in party games too, and Just One tops the list. All the players bar one get to see a clue, and they have to write down a word related to that clue. Then all the clues get revealed to the remaining player who has to guess the original word. Sounds too simple, except the catch is that if any of the clues are the same they get wiped, leaving the guesser far less to work with. It’s an ingenious idea that leaves players caught in an uncertain vice over just how obscure they cant get away with being, while still being worried they might be the victim of doublethink.

The Crew: Mission Deep Sea

You likely know trick-taking games from long time classics like Whist and Bridge. The Crew: Mission Deep Sea cleverly repurposes the concept into a cooperative game through the use of missions, demanding that certain players win tricks of particular types. So you might have to win a trick containing a yellow one, for example, or two consecutive tricks or even no tricks at all. This would be easy if you could show each other your cards, so your communication is limited to one card for the entire hand, recasting the game as a strategic puzzle with plenty of tension as you wait to see whether having to follow suit will tease out a critical card or fail the mission. Fast, fun and with fifty varied undersea missions, this is a pearl of a design. This game earned a spot on our best family board games list as well.

Return to Dark Tower

Some of you may have childhood memories of the original Dark Tower, an extraordinary 1981 fantasy board game powered by an electronic gizmo that gave it a real sense of magic and wonder. Most copies of that original no longer work, but it’s been resurrected and revamped in this new edition, which features an all-new, all-tech tower that connects to a mobile app via bluetooth. It allows you to select from a far wider variety of characters and quests, villains and monsters than the original. The board layout and major concepts of the original, such as collecting warriors, are retained, but between the app and a raft of new mechanics, the game is transformed into a narratively rich, strategic challenge where you must prioritise and deal with a series of ever-growing threats: it can also be played cooperatively as well as the competitive setup of the original. The app provides detail such as dungeon exploration, while the tower lights up and rotates of its own accord, spilling deadly skulls out into the kingdoms below.

Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective

Sherlock Holmes is one of the most enduring fictional characters of all time, and for good reason. Watching him solve a seemingly impossible mystery with all the confidence and bravado of a stage actor has been a favorite pastime of generations of book readers and television watchers.

With Consulting Detective, you finally get the chance to step into the shoes of Holmes and test your own deduction skills in a series of nonlinear mysteries. What makes the game great is how it refuses to hold your hand; each mystery presents a short setup and then sets you loose on London, leaving you to visit notable locations, interview suspects, and make educated accusations. Be warned, however, that these mysteries are tough, and may make you question your intelligence on more than one occasion.

If you like these types of games, you can also check out our guide to murder mystery board games for similar options.

Arkham Horror: The Card Game

If your co-op group could use an eldritch touch, get Arkham Horror: The Card Game to the table. In this cooperative card game, players take on the role of detectives who are investigating various supernatural occurrences within HP Lovecraft’s world of cosmic horror. It’s a scenario-based experience with each mission at the mercy of an arcane Mythos, a set of conditions that must be met lest the investigators succumb to insanity.

Arkham Horror features customizable decks that are built around each investigator’s special abilities, and most scenarios can play out over a handful of sessions, lending a feeling of progression to the game. As you investigate new location cards, gather clues, and fight monsters, your detective will amass weaknesses that can hinder future games which, thematically, illustrate the mental toll of dealing with arcane horrors. It’s a great horror board game you can play with loved ones.

Spirit Island

Protect your island from a vicious mob of colonizers in this heavy co-op experience. Players are spirits of the land, and must use their unique powers to fend off settlers. Every turn, you’ll play a card from your deck of powers. Matching a card’s element with the element of the spirit usually grants a bonus effect, meaning that careful planning is necessary.

As the game goes on, the colonists will inevitably spread and ravage the land, making Spirit Island a race against the clock. They’re predictable, though, and if you plan efficiently you can head them off before they do too much damage. Players’ cards combo off of each other nicely, too, and there are few things in tabletop gaming as satisfying as eliminating a host of settlers in one fell swoop. Spirit Island is substantially more complex than other games of this style (Pandemic, Forbidden Island, etc.), making it an ideal choice for those seeking a meatier co-op experience. This game can also be found on our list of the best board games for adults.

Zombicide: Black Plague

Who doesn’t like to bond over some good old fashioned zombie slaying? Zombicide is a cooperative survival game where players work together to complete scenarios. The Black Plague version puts a fantastical spin on the original game, and drops players into the role of paladins, magicians, and knights to take down the evil necromancers responsible for the zombie outbreak.

You’ll pick up new weapons like crossbows and swords, explore a citadel crawling with the undead, and take on several missions in this dungeon-crawling adventure. It’s a tense and thematically-refreshing take on the tried and true zombie formula with surprisingly easy-to-learn rules.

Cthulhu: Death May Die

Cooperative games where you try and save the world from some deranged monstrosity out of the work of arch-racist HP Lovecraft are ten a penny. What makes Cthulhu: Death May Die stand out isn’t just the beautifully horrible miniatures in the box but the way it integrates help and harm. In order to gain new skills, your characters have to also lose some of their sanity, resulting in a clever balance of tactical trade-offs while encouraging you to come up with daring gameplay plans that deliberately expose yourselves to danger. The resulting reel of cinematic action-horror moments doesn’t feel much like Lovecraft but it is a ton of fun.

For more ideas, check out our roundups of the best board games for adults and the best trivia board games.

Matt Thrower is a contributing freelance board game and video game writer for IGN. (Board, video, all sorts of games!)

EA has joined Square Enix in failing to see the leap year coming, as just like Theatrhythm Final Fantasy on Nintendo Switch, EA Sports WRC isn’t working because it’s February 29.

Fans of the rally racer took to social media to complain about the game crashing upon launch today, and EA soon published a statement explaining it was looking into it. “We are aware of an issue on console in which the game may crash on startup,” it said on X/Twitter. “This is currently being investigated and will be fixed as soon as possible.”

Guidance for PlayStation players:

1⃣ On your console, go to Settings > System > Date and Time > Set Date and Time > Set Manually.

2⃣ Change the date to March 1, 2024.

3⃣ Once this change has been done, the game should function normally.

— EA Help (@EAHelp) February 29, 2024

The fix isn’t complicated despite involving a little bit of time travel, as EA returned soon after telling players to change their hardware to March 1. This isn’t just an in-game solution, however, as players have to change their entire console’s date in the system settings.

Not including functionality to have a game work on February 29, which of course arrives every four years, may seem a tad ridiculous, but EA Sports WRC developer Codemasters isn’t the only studio to make the mistake.

Fans also flagged that rhythm Final Fantasy spin-off Theatrhythm Final Fantasy remained on an infinite loading screen until system settings were changed away from the date. Time will tell if another studio makes the same blunder.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

When No Rest for the Wicked was first revealed at The Game Awards last year, its painterly art style was unsurprisingly a big topic of discussion. Simply put, it was the most striking trailer of the show. While it looked akin to Dungeons & Dragons sourcebook artwork in motion, the gorgeous art also made it somewhat obvious as to who was behind the images.

“This is almost like our DNA,” says Gennadiy Korol, co-founder of Moon Studios and its director of technology. “That’s the trademark of Moon, we want our games to look timeless. We want them to look like a painting that is animated.”

That much was obvious to anyone who played Moon’s Ori games, but No Rest for the Wicked seems to take that idea and push it into the next dimension. By transitioning to 3D, Moon has left the ‘illustrated’ vibe of Ori behind for something that looks like a painted reality. It’s hard not to draw parallels to projects like Netflix’s Arcane or the Spider-Verse films, which make their 3D animation appear like 2D, hand-drawn artwork. Those projects will likely prove timeless, and Moon Studios hopes the same for No Rest for the Wicked.

Achieving art design immortality requires an approach that bucks many industry trends. Aiming for higher visual metrics than that used in other games simply won’t cut it. “I think it’s always about art direction and art style more than just ray tracing and polygons,” says Thomas Mahler, Moon co-founder and No Rest for the Wicked’s creative director.

“We definitely make a conscious choice to always go against the trend, because the trend right now is doing physical-based rendering and all of this stuff,” he explains. “My problem is that a lot of these games that do that start looking the same.”

Mahler also notes games that chased huge technical innovations a decade ago haven’t all stood the test of time. Technology continues to evolve, and what was astonishing back then can look old today. “But, if I go into a museum and I look at these paintings that are literally 500 years old, I still think, ‘Oh, my God, that looks amazing,’” he says. “That’s the path that we are going down.”

On one hand, abandoning the tech race is liberating. You don’t need dozens of people solely focused on squeezing the most polygons out of your engine, or implementing photo realistic ray tracing. But freedom from those problems creates another equal challenge. Korol notes that there’s no “handbook” for a painted art style. Where developers chasing photorealism can turn to literal science for the answers on how to recreate light and reflections, No Rest for the Wicked’s art direction is entirely based on Moon’s own creativity. That can be somewhat mentally exhausting, but it allows the team complete control over the game’s look and feel.

“With the way we approach it, it really doesn’t matter what the physics is if the end result is boring, if the end result is not exciting,” says Korol. “Because physics doesn’t matter, it’s what people feel when they play that matters.”

While Moon had learned a huge amount about crafting a painted art style while creating Ori, the shift to three dimensions for Wicked required a whole new way of thinking. “I think the big challenge was to find something that works in 3D, that works with all of these 3D pipelines,” explains Korol, “but that still gives you this really direct artistic control and allows our artists to really create something that feels like a painting, as opposed to more of this ray-traced or normal-mapped 3D look.”

Creating a set of rules and principles for this art direction ensures that No Rest for the Wicked looks striking in every shot. But the direction ultimately fails if the characters, creatures, and world are bland and forgettable. As such, the project relies as much on its design as it does the digital brush strokes they’re painted with. That’s why Moon has tried to craft a fantasy setting that feels believable and relatable, while also being fresh and unusual.

“We don’t want our games to look like stuff that you’ve seen before,” says Mahler. “Obviously we take inspiration from historical stuff, and so on. We look at armor designs, like crazy stuff that was done hundreds of years ago, but then we always try to give it our own touch.” The result of this can be seen in the golden suits of armour featured in the trailer, with their bizarre coin-like headpieces and an unnerving lack of eyes.

“I think it goes back to world building,” adds Korol. “It’s exciting to build a world that people have never seen before, that we have never seen before, and go through that creative process of exploring and imagining it, and see what it can be.”

Part of Moon Studio’s approach to creating this exciting new world is a strict attention to detail. Like the paintings that inspired it, each frame of No Rest for the Wicked is filled to the edges with flourishes and carefully placed elements.

“Despite it not being photorealistic, we do like detail,” says Korol. “We didn’t go for this more simplistic, cell-shaded look. You will see a lot of detail in the reflection and the specular, in the way the materials react, because we did want this game to feel immersive.”

While it had to be adapted and evolved for 3D, much of this philosophy is the same as what powered the Ori games. Unsurprisingly, Moon hopes for similar results. “A lot of people would say that Ori [and the Blind Forest] still feels and looks great to play, and it’s eight, nine years later,” says Korol. “We hope the same thing happens with No Rest for the Wicked.”

That hope doesn’t just come from looking inwards, though. “I think it’s very interesting how people react now to games like Zelda: Wind Waker,” says Mahler. “Here’s cell shading, and even 20 years after, it still looks pretty good.”

“As technology evolves and we could potentially do photorealism, I still hope there’s going to be a part of the industry that does not just do that,” he continues. “That actually also just makes sure that, ‘Here’s this really unique looking game that looks unlike anything else in the market.’”

Of course, it goes without saying that Moon Studios will likely always be a part of that industry segment that holds the torch for unique art design. But as for the here and now, I look forward to seeing even more of No Rest for the Wicked’s strange creatures and beautiful landscapes in action, both as part of Wicked Inside on March 1, and when the game releases in early access later this year.

Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Features Editor.