My Top 10 Cooperative Games

Welcome to this week’s gaming post! We all love our competitive euro games, but sometimes it’s nice to relax a little bit and play something cooperative. In the past, I’ve listed my top 5 gateway games, mid-weight games, and heavy games, but honestly it was difficult to narrow this down to only five games, so I’ve included 10 this time. A side note, I’m only including games that are fully cooperative; I didn’t consider any games that can also be played competitively or games with expansions to make them cooperative. So without further ado, here are my top 10 cooperative games!

A Matt Leacock design, Forbidden Desert borrows a lot of similar elements to Leacock’s more popular series Pandemic. In Forbidden Desert, players take on different adventurer roles to recover a legendary flying machine and escape the desert before they succumb to the unrelenting sand and sun. A challenging game with multiple difficulty options, this race-against-the-clock cooperative adventure remains a favorite.

A unique experience that utilizes an app and some VR elements, Chronicles of Crime puts you in the shoes of your favorite crime drama. You’ll scan QR codes on location, character, and item cards that will trigger different stories within the app. This is a great game to play with a friend or significant other, and the wide variety of expansion content and spinoffs will provide plenty of additional content to dive into. 

Arguably the most approachable game on this list, MicroMacro has players solving crimes using a large, black and white cartoon style map with overlapping scenes. The game feels like an extension of a Where’s Waldo? where players are tasked with finding characters throughout the city in order to solve crimes. This game feels approachable for all ages and skills, especially considering that some cases are marked to show which might be suitable for younger audiences. Like Chronicles, if you like the core system, there are many sequels to keep you coming back. If you’re interested, I wrote a review on the second game in the series, Full House, here.

Spoiler alert, I love The Crew. So when I heard that a game was taking core ideas from The Crew and combining it with one of my favorite IPs, The Lord of the Rings, I was all ears. The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game contains 18 chapters that take players through the events of The Fellowship of the Ring novel. This game doesn’t stray too far from what makes The Crew so enjoyable, while still offering enough interesting mechanisms to make this game feel like it deserves a place on your shelf alongside The Crew. I recently wrote a review on the game here; plus, the sequel, The Two Towers, was recently announced.

I wasn’t expecting much from Bomb Busters before playing it; however, after playing through the first few missions, I was hooked. In each mission, players draw and order a hand of numbered tiles, which are hidden from the other players, representing wires to a bomb that your team is tasked with diffusing. The goal is to correctly pair up tiles from your hand with other players’ tiles until everyone has successfully “clipped” all of wires…otherwise, the bomb explodes! There’s a whopping 66 missions in the core box that offer different challenges, promising plenty of replayability. Surprisingly addictive, the 2025 Spiel des Jahres Winner, Bomb Busters is a blast, pun intended.

Arkham Horror: The Card Game is a testament to how thematic a board game can be while utilizing only card decks. While there are individual scenario packs, the meat of the game has players taking on the role of Arkham investigators throughout a multi-episode campaign. For fans of Living-Card-Games (LCGs) like Mavel Champions or The Lord of the Rings, this is a great game to play with a friend or partner. Additionally, there’s enough content for this game to keep even the most die-hard fan engaged for years.

An open-world adventure game, Sleeping Gods, throws you out into its vast world with an overarching goal: find enough totems so that you and your crew can return home. However, how you approach that goal is largely up to you. Sleeping Gods is a campaign game, which will likely take you somewhere between 10-20 hours to complete; however, you’re likely to only see a small fraction of the game’s content in just a single campaign, making repeat campaigns still exciting. If you’re someone that enjoys the open, explorative nature of video games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, then I recommend giving Sleeping Gods a look. I also discussed my thoughts on its sequel, Distant Skies, here. 

One of my favorite video games is Baldur’s Gate 3, and Arydia is the closest a board game has come to replicating that feeling. Effectively D&D in a box, Arydia feels like a mix between an adventure game like Sleeping Gods and a dungeon-crawler like Gloomhaven. At the start, players create their own character from one of six different paths (i.e., classes) and one of nine characters (i.e., races) to play through a legacy style campaign that is fully resettable. I have around 20 hours in the game so far and I still feel like I’ve only uncovered a small fraction of the entire game. Stay tuned for a review coming soon.

I mentioned The Crew earlier, and Mission Deep Sea is my preferred version of the series due to its dynamic mission system that gives the game seemingly infinite replayability. I grew up playing trick-taking games, and I’ll admit I was a bit skeptical when I heard about making the trick-taking mechanism cooperative. However, the concept absolutely works, and in an age where there’s so many trick-taking games being released, it’s a wonder that the idea didn’t catch on sooner. The game is also surprising simple to teach to anyone familiar with trick-taking mechanics and super portable, and there’s something magical when you get a group where everyone is in-sync on the strategies. A staple go-to game for me, and easily one of my favorites of all-time.

While I tend to play Gloomhaven more digitally these days, this campaign, dungeon crawler still holds a special place in my heart. While I really enjoy leveling up my character and the surprisingly simple but deep card play system, my favorite aspect is the inclusion of characters retiring. This feels extremely thematic as each character has their own hidden goal, that once met, allows the character to retire from the campaign while also unlocking a new playable character. I’ve owned Gloomhaven for years, and I imagine it will take me many more before I complete my campaign. And with the recent early access release of the digital version of Frosthaven, there’s enough content in this system to keep me engaged for quite some time. 

With that, those are my top 10 favorite cooperative games! What are your favorite cooperative games? I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of the games I’ve mentioned or suggestions for future lists in the comments below. Happy gaming!

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