No games that lead to players being pissed at other players, even outside of the confines of the game. I’ve had that happen with, for example, Secret Hitler, so no Secret Hitler.
The Mind seems to do that. Hanabi does it to an extent.
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.
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.
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:
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Just One - Favorite party game
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Brass Birmingham - My favorite; Beware it’s quite complex and lasts around 3 hours
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Blood Rage - Cool dude’s on a map game with very nice minis
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Turing Machine - Good puzzle game
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Slay The Spire - If you love slay the spire, you’ll love cooperative slay the spire as well
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Menara - Favorite dexterity game
boardgamegeek.com is the imdb of boardgames, check it out.
I didn’t think anyone else knew about Menara. It’s so good, and no other game has made me laugh that hard.
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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 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.
I think it really depends on how many people are playing. I’m not up on my board games but maybe someone more knowledgeable can chime in
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 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.
The problem with monopoly is that it fits your description…BUT!!! nobody actually plays it the right way. House rules are so ingrained into monopoly culture, that I’ve incorporated my own house rule. Anyone who puts money under free parking gets stabbed with a knife. When they tell me that’s not in the rules, I tell them to show me where money under free parking is in the rules. There’s so many of these house rules that people legitimately think are in the rulebook. They aren’t. So if you want to put money under free parking, I want to stab your hand with a knife. House rules and all.
One time I was playing monopoly with my mom. She had 53 dollars, and landed on boardwalk. It was unowned. I yhen said "I bid $54. She said “you can’t do that…”. I showed her in the rule book where I could, and she got angry at me.
So, the problem with monopoly is that most people assume they know how to play, and also assume they know the best stratagies. They don’t.
The best stratagy is actually to buy 1 of each property that can have houses built on them. Prioritizing the low cost properties first. Make THEM buy 2 of each, thinking they’ll get the monopoly, thinking they’ll get a trade. Then drain them further with the railroads and utilities. Eventually they’ll run out of money. Just NEVER trade them a property that would allow a path to them getting a monopoly.
Of coarse, all of that is easier said than done. That’s what makes it a game. But it all falls apart if people aren’t playing the same game.
I really don’t like Monopoly. It’s very widespread in the US, I’d guess one of the top three games, but it has a lot of technical failings as a board game.
I think that it’s actually a really good example of why popular American board games are not that fantastic. Europe has a stronger board game tradition, stuff like Settlers of Catan. I really didn’t appreciate how bad things were until I spent a while poking at European games.
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Monopoly has a hard-to-predict game time. One thing that a lot of European games that I’ve looked at do is to have a fairly-predictable amount of time a game will last. That makes it much easier to plan fitting a game into a schedule.
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Monopoly eliminates some players from the game early. They then have nothing to do while the rest of the players continue to play.
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Monopoly tends to wind up in a situation where a losing player will know well in advance that they’re going to lose. Yeah, they can concede, but it’s not a lot of fun to play the thing out.
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There’s a limited amount by way of strategy and it’s not very sophisticated. There aren’t a lot of variable paths that one weighs against each other. When it’s not your turn, there’s not much you can be planning or doing, just watching the person whose turn it is play. This gets more annoying the more players are in the game.
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It has a high RNG dependence.
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Most of the actual tasks you spend time doing aren’t very interesting. Linley Henzell, who wrote the roguelike Crawl, has a famous quote, something like “everything you do in a game should be an interesting decision, and if it isn’t interesting, it should be removed from the game”. I think that that is a very true element of game design. The banker counting out money to players or players paying rent or whatever is just drudge work – they aren’t making interesting decisions.
The game was originally designed by a Georgist as an educational game to argue for a land value tax. It wasn’t principally to entertain.
I really wish that a new, better game would replace Monopoly in the US as the big non-ancient (checkers, chess) board game.
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The strategy is to avoid Monopoly. It’s not like the game gets any funner if you’re playing by the rules.
the strategy is to buy everything you can ASAP but focus on monopolizing and developing the orange and red properties. they are statistically much higher to land on than other properties because people get sent to jail so often. When exiting jail rolling 6, 8, or 9 is very likely to hit orange first and then maybe red on the next roll.
tldr; punish the poor fuckers getting out of jail. yay capitalism!
- Tiny Epic Zombies is a cooperate, often hilarious, always satisfying zombie survival simulator.
- Tiny Epic Dinosaurs is a mildly competitive, generally delightful Jurassic Park / Petting zoo simulator.
- Tiny Epic pirates is a crunchy but quick pirate simulator where most interactions are your human controlled pirates evading the automated Navy while racing for loot.
- The Fast and the Furious (board game) is a fantastic quick co-op romp.
- Here to There is a story driven light economy game ever the focus is on building your economy engine to unlock the next interesting story twist.
- Machi Koro lacks a co-op variant, but it’s pretty chill and it’s easy to house rule the aggressive competitive cards to pay out from the shared bank.
- The Book of Madness is a fantastic light Co-op deck builder with great positive interactions and a fantastic theme (students at Hogwarts trying to close an evil book)
- Caverna is a robust building game with chill interactions.
Already mentioned, but worth reiterating:
- The Crew
- Tokaido
- Ticket to Ride
- Forbidden Island/Skies/Dessert/Forrest
- Pandemic
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.
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.
Just One can also do a lot more than 4 players. If you add additional writing surfaces and erasable markers (or pencils or whatever) it’s pretty much unlimited.
Edit: It has enough for 7 players in the box (at least my copy does)
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.
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.
