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Battlestar Galactica boardgame. It's mostly cooperative, with the chance of having one or two players being traitors, but even without them, it's very unlikely the humans win in the end. It's expensive and needs a lot of table space to play, tho.
Captain Sonar can be an interesting choice, since it can be played turn-by-turn or in real time, with two teams of 1-4 each. If you working with your team doesn't create a sense of connection, I don't know what will.
Spirit island is my favorite game to play with a group. It has you trying to protect an island from colonists who damage the island with their expansions. Each player has different abilities that force you all the work together & requires a lot of teamwork to win especially some of the higher difficulties.
I really like Mysterium. It's kinda cooperative, but players also work independently. The premise is that one player is a ghost, and the rest of the players are psychic detectives who have their own vision of how the murder happened. The ghost gives out clues using surreal, dream-like cards for the psychics to figure out their personal guess on what the weapon, location and murderer was. At the end the ghost gives clues to which psychic was right.
I personally like it because it isn't just logic and strategic thinking, you have to use your creative/artistic part of your brain as well, if not moreso.
You’ll never perfectly solve the “no pissing people off” issue because in competitive games you necessarily have people benefit at the expense of others and in cooperative games you’ll fall into the trap of backseat-driver players telling you what to do on your turn.
That being said, here are some of my favorites I’d like to suggest:
Cooperative:
Competitive:
In-Between:
Catan is nice because you spend 90% of the time building your stuff, and only 10% losing to one of the other players.
Downside is Catan is fucking boring. It’s one of those games where most of the time you’re stuck waiting for your next turn. 5-6 player add on just makes the game infinitely worse. Out of the expansions, Seafarers is nice since it gives you more to do, tho the standalone Starfarers is my go to pick if I gotta play Catan since it sorta has the best parts of all expansions plus random encounters and a more even start. I also like that in the 5-6 player mode 2 players take their turns simultaneously. Tho Catan still isn’t my go-to of board games.
It depends on the group. Sometimes you have people intentionally cutting you off, revenge robber placements, and politics.
Newer cooperative games mostly avoid the quarterbacking issue by having secret info, or just making it complicated enough that it's impractical for 1 person to track everything.
Check out !boardgames@sopuli.xyz in case you're not aware. Lots of discussion happening there.
Regarding your question, it's hard to say since you don't mention any mechanics, or complexity level, that you prefer. Based on the couple of examples you provide, you seem to like cooperative card games. If so, you should check out 'The Crew'. It's the most popular of that genre in my game club.
Looks fun, just ordered the game now! 😊
The Crew is solid.
The Gang too, which is sorta similar. I’ll bring a bag of board games and only end up playing The Gang all night if it comes out too early.
Here’s some great cooperative games that either have big groups working together OR have the whole groups:
Escape from the Dark Castle - a fun little dungeon crawler where you flip cards and roll against dangers as you try to overcome obstacles. Completely cooperative but mechanically simple.
Wavelength - the base way to play is technically a ‘competitive’ in that there are teams and points but it’s relatively chill and I’ve often played this at parties with large groups cooperatively cause it just makes for a great conversation starter.
Phantom Ink - two teams but the mechanics are very fun and the game overall has a great tone.
Ravine - cooperative game where you try to survive after a plane crash.
I would also maybe recommend looking into some light roleplaying games like The Zone or Fiasco. These are almost always gm-less or easy to run and focused on building a fun narrative together.
Dead of Winter - The co-op variant of the game, without a traitor. Zombie apocalypse game.
Meeple Party - A co-op game about throwing a party and making sure personality types don't clash. Perhaps on the nose for your group, but I still recommend it.
Mental Blocks - Once again, play the variant without a traitor. This is a game about solving a 3D puzzle from different perspectives with limited abilities to communicate or touch certain blocks.
Oh yeah. Dead of Winter is so good!
I guess it is better to go for games that are cooperative and where everyone can contribute how they can without pressure. So I would suggest strategy games where everyone decides together what to do and all the players are united against the game, but in a way that it's harder to put the blame on someone if they fail to do what's expected of them (Ex : Hanabi). Here are some of my favourites that corresponds to this :
Pandemic
Horrified
Forbidden Desert
If you like Horrified, you should try and track down the Ravensburger Wonder Woman game. Similar style but has an awesome mechanic to prevent coop quarterbacking.
Players strategize using a set of face up cards, but receive some face down cards afterward and have to program 3 actions using the whole set without communicating, adapting plans based on the newly revealed cards. Then each action plays out simultaneously for all players. It makes sense in action and is really quite elegant. I’m a big fan.
Ouhhh that's interesting. I love Horrified, it is one of my favourite game, but unfortunately I often end uo quaterbacking while I would prefer people sharing their thoughts. Will check this one out for sure, thanks for the suggestions !
In order to get good recommendations you're going to need to provide additional information. How many people are playing? How complex can a game be? What games have you tried and loved? Is there a favorite mechanism? What is the game duration you're going for? 10 min? 30? 3 hours? What's your budget?
Generic recommendations based on my library:
Just One - Favorite party game
Brass Birmingham - My favorite; Beware it's quite complex and lasts around 3 hours
Blood Rage - Cool dude's on a map game with very nice minis
Turing Machine - Good puzzle game
Slay The Spire - If you love slay the spire, you'll love cooperative slay the spire as well
Menara - Favorite dexterity game
boardgamegeek.com is the imdb of boardgames, check it out.
We've really enjoyed playing Slay The Spire on Tabletop Simulator. It's really fun to try and combine your abilites for the best results. And the roguelite makes it fun to play over and over again, just like the pc game. I would have already bought the physical game if it wasn't around 150€ here
I didn't think anyone else knew about Menara. It's so good, and no other game has made me laugh that hard.
It's definitely an underrated game!!
Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne for me. I play those with my wife and we don't really get in each other's way. She usually wins but I don't care.
We love Wingspan. Meadow is pleasant.
Just One was a great game for 4 people. Three people have to get the fourth person to guess a particular word. They each write down a one-word hint. If any two (or more) players write the same word hint, they don't get to show that word to the guesser. It's a lot of fun when you see the different ways people interpret words to come up with hints and how two (or more) words can work together to make you think of the answer.
The pandemic board games, either one of them can give that feeling.
Me and my friends are terrible at that game apparently. Our poor Legacy game world…
I don't know if I'd considered it a board game, but the Forbidden Island game (and the others like it) spring to mind. The idea is that you and the other players have to work together to gather everything you need including the treasure you came for before the island you're on sinks into the ocean.
It's fun working together and I always thought it did a good job of incentivising that.
Seconding Forbidden Island/Desert/Sky. Island is what I break out to introduce new folks to co-op gameplay, then switch to Desert once they get the hang of it.
Pandemic hits a lot of the same notes, and can get really hairy at the end.
Mansions of Madness. It's my wife's new favorite game. The game has many different scenarios and they play out pretty differently each time. The game is almost all co-op, so it's players VS. the game. I was actually against the need for an app at first but it simplifies a lot and helps keep track of a lot of the mundane stuff.
I don't know how the game does it, but in so many sessions the last actions are so important. I have often won the game within the last possible action. Such a great feeling.
Going from "easy, everything is fine" to "everything on fire, NPCs dead, several Monsters" in two rounds. Then winning by a clever set oft actions, where several player habe to coordinate, is peak feeling oft accomplishment.
Betrayal at the House on the Hill has about 50 different scenarios so almost every playthrough is different. But it's best to have at least 4 players to be more fun
Imagine is one of the favourite games in my IRL friend group whenever we get together. It's basically Alias, but instead of explaining the word verbally, you use transparent cards with shapes drawn on them that you can overlap and move around. It's chill, fun, and fits any group size.
Calico is my personal favourite, because the concept of making a kitty blanket is just too cute to pass on.
P. S. The link isn't where I bought the game - I just googled the English version and posted the first link I found.
Carcassonne.
I find it quite fun to play semi-collaboratively too.
Yeah. It's super easy to house-rule Carcassonne as a pure co-op game. Remove the farmers (to keep your sanity, because co-op is actually much harder), keep the rules about Castle and road occupation (where a tie gets scored for each tied player), and play to maximize the combined players score. None of the strategy is lost and trying to carefully double occupy everything is sometimes a nail biting challenge.
There's actually a specifically cooperative expansion for Carcassonne, called Mists Over Carcassonne. It adds an element of managing a ghost population while trying to cooperatively reach a target score based on certain scenarios.
Oh, I'm going to have to pick up a copy of Mists over Carcassonne. Thank you!
Ok, if you are against hard feelings, cross off anything that is directly competitive, that would be any game where players directly and willfully interact with each other in a way where one gains while another loses as part of the core gameplay. To varying degrees things like blood rage, root, monopoly/solarquest, everdell, 7 wonders, clank, carcassonne, ticket to ride, dominion, etc.
If your group must have competition, you'll need to stick to independent competitive games, this is anything where players are primarily taking actions in their own space and are progressing largely independent from each other. Example recommendations include things like Quacks of Quedlinburg, Shifting Stones, most roll and writes (welcome to series, cartographer with a minor exception), cascadia, verdant, etc
If you can do without competing with each other, cooperative games are definitely the way to go to minimize hard feelings (it'd only come up then if someone thought another player did something suboptimal causing a loss). The variety here is actually pretty large: simple trick taking games like The Crew series Information sharing games, like Mysterium "Combat" games of all complexities (generally ascending: Lord of the rings storybook, marvel united, D&D board games, Heroquest, Stuffed fables, Atlantis Rising, legends of andor, horrified, Arkham horror, marvel champions, mansions of madness 2nd edition, spirit island, Gloomhaven) Mystery/puzzle games (Adventure Games series, Exit The Game series, Animals of Baker Street)
I'd also like to call out 2 other games specifically: Stella, while it is a 1 winner competitive game where your score depends largely on other players, the push your luck and prisoner's dilemma aspect of how you earn points I think largely removes the feel bad aspect of competition. Kitchen Rush: pure cooperative, but it's also a real-time game where everyone is taking simultaneous actions to run a restaurant in 4 real time minutes stretches.
We got Tokaido for Xmas a few years back and it’s super chill to play with others
Here’s some suggestions, just games I find I get lots of play out of and people are always willing to play.
Dune Imperium is probably my favorite. It’s a deck builder with worker placement. It’s got a lot of different strategies you can take to win, there’s not one set way. Dune Imperium: Uprising is an updated (for the 2nd movie) version of the game that fixes some things from the first one, tho I think I still prefer the original. This one is a bit more serious, but I’m including it because it’s my favorite.
Everdell is a great game and very easy to get into. Mostly worker placement with some engine building. Cute theme and it looks great on the table. Definitely recommend giving it a look. Avoid the expansions when buying, they might add too much to the gameplay. There is an updated version Everdell: Farshore, which I’ve heard is better, tho I haven’t played it.
Clank! And any in that series are also super friendly and easy to get into. It’s a dungeon exploration deck builder. Personally I’d recommend going with Clank! Catacombs, which is the updated version that adds a tile based map so each play through is a little different. I have not played Clank! In Space or any of the others.
7 Wonders is a fun pick and pass type game. You build up your city and try to win via military, economic, or scientific power. Easy to pick up, and has more strategy in it than first glance. The 2-player version 7 Wonders: Duel has to be my favorite 2 player game. Note on Duel, if you get it, the only expansion I’d pick up is Agora, Pantheon just isn’t as impactful.
Black Hole Rainbows, absolutely ridiculous game, everyone scoffs at it at first and then has a stupid good time playing it. It’s stupidly colorful and definitely over produced but that’s part of the charm. If you can find a copy, buy it. Hard to get right now.
Ticket to ride is really fun. You kind of do your own thing building train routes the whole time. Not too much overlap to block other people unless you know the routes super well, and even then you don't know what people are going for based on the routes they have to complete. All in all, it's one of my favorite board games.
I don't hear about this one often but it is always the first game I bust out for newbies.
Camel Up!
Players place bets on little camels that run around the track. The turns move quickly, people love gambling, and you some strategy will help you win, but it's random enough that everybody has a chance at coming out ahead.
Someone might get the bet you had your eye on, but there's no direct "attacks" on other players.
One I haven’t seen mentioned is Puerto Rico. One thing I like is there is essentially no random chance to this game; everything that happens is a result of choices you or your opponents make.
Already mentioned, but worth reiterating:
And he sure to check out Rhado Runs Through for game reviews. He plays mostly with his wife, and so always reviews how the game feels to play together without backstabbing.