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Cooperative Board Games

Cooperative board games are becoming more and more popular these days. Unlike more traditional games, in a cooperative game, all players are on the same team, striving to beat the game itself. From the quick, light-hearted Forbidden Island to the day long epic Arkham Horror, they are becoming a significant niche in the board game genre.

Have you ever played a cooperative game? If so, which one? What was your experience? Would you reccommend it?

Games Board Cooperative

A couple of them, the one that sticks out is "Betrayal at House on the Hill"

Essentially, the players take on the part of that bunch of naive people who wander into the local haunted mansion, and get locked inside. They explore for a while, "Building" the mansion room by room as they go and trying to survive the ghostly events within, eventually, someone triggers the "Haunting" a random event that will consume everyone involved unless they work together to counter it. The hauntings are myriad, ranging from an elder vampire awakening to a giant bird seizing the entire house and flying off with it.

Cooperative Board Games Reviews RPG & Card Board

My gaming group does a lot of board games and we have played a number of co-op games. Pandemic is probably one of the biggest that I can remember. You work together to prevent the spread of 4 viruses. It's a tough one but fun. A new one I just got is called Stuffed Fables which is a story-telling game with the players pretending to be stuffed animals protecting a little girl from the various monsters and crawlies under the bed. A new mechanic which we are just getting into.

Games Board Cooperative

Pandemic is a truly excellent game, and now has several variants. My personal favorite variant is The Cure, a dice version. It simplifies the strategy a bit, because the "Map" is much smaller and easier to maneuver around. There are six zones, each representing a continent, so moving around is a LOT easier. It manages to keep the feel and tension of the original game, however.

There is also Pandemic: Iberia, which I haven't played. It appears to be Pandemic a hundred years ago, so I imagine it's pretty deadly.

Pandemic: Legacy is a campaign version of the game. As you play it, you actually change the map and the roles gain experience and new abilities. It's meant to be played in several sessions over a long time.

Pandemic: Cthulhu takes the mechanics of the game and uses them to battle extradimensional horrors in Arkham. If anything, it's deadlier than the original, but it handles Cthulhu very nicely.