Best Cooperative Board Games
While playing competitive board games, players often strategize quietly, a running internal monologue that hopefully ends in a win. You keep all your moves to yourself in hopes the other players won’t find ways to undercut your game or thwart your best move.
And if it happens, watch out. Sore losers, sore winners, or arguments about the rules might derail the game or post-game conversations entirely. Nobody wants the game to go south because a few players aren’t handling the competition well, but it does happen (especially in families, right?). So what can you do?
Several solutions come to mind (find a few more here), but the easiest is to choose the kind of game where players don’t compete with each other.
With cooperative games, the players all work together to beat the game. Players discuss strategy and moves together, naturally encouraging consistent interaction. If you win, you celebrate together. If you lose, you have a chance to discuss your strategy together so the group can have a better chance next time.
Best Games to Play When You Don’t Want to Compete
Defend your castle towers against the monsters in this cooperative board game. The board contains colored rings that the monsters advance through on every turn. Use your warrior cards to hit monsters in rings that correspond to the type and color of your card. If you defeat all the monsters before you lose all of your towers, you win.
2. Race to the Treasure
In this cooperative game for kids, beat the ogres to the treasure to win. First, roll a set of dice to determine where the keys are placed on the grid-like board. Then take turns drawing tiles. Place each path tile on the grid to create a path to keys and then the final square. Ogres get placed on their red squares. If you cover the final square before the ogres, you win.
3. Forbidden Island
Find the treasures and escape the island together. Collect treasure cards and discover all four treasures, then escape by meeting on the correct tile and using a card to escape in a helicopter. Meanwhile, with each turn individual tiles from the board become flooded or disappear entirely, limiting movement and opportunities to discover the treasures. When you’ve discovered the treasures and escaped, you win.
4. Hoot Owl Hoot
Work together to move all the owls into the nest before the sun moves across the sky. Each player starts with three face up cards, either suns or colored circles. If you’re holding a sun card, you’re required to play it. Otherwise you play a colored circle and move one owl token to the next circle on the board of that color. To win this game for kids, have all owls land in the nest before the sun reaches its final square.
5. Outfoxed
Figure out which fox stole the pie before the fox escapes. On your turn, either search for clues or reveal suspects. If you don’t roll the right symbols, the fox moves along the board. If you do roll the symbols you need, either move your piece to the clue bubbles or flip two suspect cards face up. With enough clues about what the fox is wearing, narrow down the suspects until you’re sure you have the right fox. If you guess correctly before the fox reaches the final space, you win.
6. Pandemic
Save the world by working together to cure the four diseases on the board. Use your player’s role to your advantage as you move from city to city, prevent outbreaks as often as possible, and gather city cards to cure each colored disease. If a disease spreads too far, you run out of time, or too many outbreaks occur then your team fails. However, if you cure all four of the colored diseases in time, you win.
7. Dinosaur Escape
Help the baby dinosaurs escape the island before the volcano erupts. Roll the die. A volcano symbol adds a piece to the volcano, but a number allows you to move a baby dinosaur and flip a fern tile. Find the fern tiles with pictures of the baby dinosaurs. If the baby dinosaur is in the same colored spaces as their picture, they escape the island. Get all three baby dinosaurs off the island before the volcano is completed to win.
8. Hanabi
Create numbered stacks of fireworks in each color in this cooperative card game. Every player holds their hand facing away from themselves, so you’ll be able to see every hand except your own. Give other players information about the cards they’re holding, play your own cards with the correct number and color to add to a stack, and complete stacks in each color numbered 1 to 5 to win. If you don’t finish all your stacks, the game will judge how well you played.
9. Happy Bunny
Work together to collect more carrots than the farmer in this cooperative game for kids. Move the bunny along the track, harvesting the number of carrots on each space you land. The regular carrots make a line for the farmer and carrots with a bite mark make a line for the bunny. Once the bunny reaches the end of the board, compare the carrot lines to see which is longer. If the bunny has the longer line, you win!
10. Crossing the Woods
Help the squirrel return to her home in this cooperative board game by playing cards to determine which direction she will move. Here’s the catch: everyone must keep their hand secret, play one card facedown without speaking to the other players, and the squirrel takes several movements at once. Any time the squirrel can’t move as directed, remove a single card from the deck. If the squirrel makes it home before the deck runs out, you win.
11. Stardew Valley: The Board Game
In this marathon cooperative game, based on the video game Stardew Valley, complete four of Grandpa’s goals and a bundle each for six rooms to restore the community center. You’ll need to buy seeds, farm, explore the mines, fish, and add buildings to your farm. The goals vary by game so you never know if you’ll need to reach the bottom of the mines or make enough friends. If you love the video game Stardew Valley, you’re sure to love the board game. But even without experiencing the video game, this complex, varied game is sure to delight strategists everywhere.
Where to Start
Not sure which game would suit your group? I’d give Castle Panic a try. It’s challenging enough for strategists, but the simple mechanics offer most ages the ability to play. It also has many variations in the rulebook, meaning you can change things up from game to game. Unless you’re looking for a game that works for the very youngest of players, Castle Panic is a solid option for interesting repeat plays.
If you are looking for a game for the youngest players, Race to the Treasure is a great one. It only takes about 5-10 minutes so the game won’t outlast a child’s attention span. And if they love it and ask for it again and again, it’s not too boring for the older players.