10 Must-Play Cooperative Board Games for Adults

10. Arkham Horror: The Card Game

Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games (FFG)

Arkham Horror: The Card Game puts the personal (and pulpy) touch on investigating the horrors of Lovecraft.

Played over a campaign, you’ll start with either a prebuilt character deck or one you’ve created yourself. Using this deck, you’ll explore the world and try to uncover a Myskatonic mystery.

Throughout your adventures, you’ll fight or run away from monsters, investigate the unnatural, and see the indescribable.

Each new experience leaves a permanent change in your character and their deck. Affliction cards may get added from the trauma of facing the vile monstrosities you’ll encounter, or you might get lucky and find new items and ability cards to help in your fight.

Seeing your character survive such trials and challenges feels both personal and immersive. The game does a wonderful job of bringing you into its world.

Now what it does poorly is tell you how to get started. If you’re beginning in 2024, there are so many different expansions and versions available it’s hard to know what to buy.

For my money, I’d start with the Revised Core edition (linked above) which has enough cards to start playing with four players and includes other niceties added to the game over the years.

9. Lands of Galzyr

Publisher: Snowdale Design

Return to the world of Daimyria in Lands of Galzyr. You might know this place and its animalfolk from Snowdale Designs’ other games such as Dale of Merchants and Dawn of the Peacemakers, but you’ve never had a chance to explore it like this.

As a cooperative adventure game, you get to carve out your own path through Daimyria. Going to the cities and places you want to visit and getting up to all sorts of hijinks.

Every type of animalfolk you run into has a distinct personality, heavily influenced by their animal type. From the stalwart macaws to the chaotic ocelots, they’re all so fun to interact with that you can’t help but want to join whatever cockamamie scheme they’re up to.

The joyful and silly nature of Lands of Galzyr sets it apart from most other RPG games I’ve played, which are often much darker in tone and focus on combat.

Here, there’s no combat to be found. The drive to keep playing is purely based on the fun you’ll have and the oddball character you’ll meet on your adventures.

Lands of Galzyr is a fantastic cooperative game for families, or anyone who wants to enjoy some low-stakes fun.

8. Mechs vs Minions

Publisher: Riot Games

Before Riot Games released Arcane on Netflix, this cooperative board game was the best way to immerse yourself into the world of Runeterra.

Starting at Rumble’s mech driving academy, you (along with Tristanna, Heimerdinger, Ziggs and Corki) play through a 10 game campaign to save Runeterra.

Each round starts with a real-time drafting phase where you’ll rush to pick cards without having the time to think things through. You then add these cards to your control sequence, an unchangable series of cards controlling your mech.

Watching players take turns activating their control sequence can be awe inspiring or hilirious. As your mech can sometimes destroys 30 minions on a turn or walk randomly off into a corner before firing its weapons into dead air.

Mechs vs Minions is mechanical mayhem at its finest. Enhanced by its incredibly impressive components, including a complete voice-acted campaign.

It’s a blast of a cooperative board game, and accessible for all experience levels. From first-timers to seasoned board gamers, you’ll have a lot of fun with Mechs vs Minions.

7. Forbidden Desert

Publisher: Gamewright Games

Having crash-landed in the middle of the sandiest strip of land this side of the Sahara, you have limited water and no obvious way of escape.

Welcome to the Forbidden Desert.

Together, you and your team must build a new flying ship with parts found buried throughout the desert.

A tough task at the best of times, but with the sun beating down and a raging sandstorm nearby it becomes near impossible. That is unless you cooperate and communicate effectively with your team.

Each turn you’ll have four actions to move around the map, shovel sand off of tiles, and search for the needed missing parts.

Use your wits, and items found around the sandy dunes to make an improbable escape.

There’s a clear sense of adventure and danger in Forbidden Desert as it perfectly toes the line between flavour and strategy. Resulting in a great family cooperative game that is sometimes tense, but always fun.

6. 5-Minute Dungeon

Publisher: Wiggles 3D

While most of the cooperative games on this list will make you stroke your chin in thought. 5-Minute Dungeon will have you on the edge of your seat excited yelling with your team.

As you’d expect from the name, you’ll have 5 minutes to make it through a challenge-filled dungeon before defeating a final boss.

These challenges aren’t difficult, usually requiring your team to play cards to match the challenge’s symbols. But they are numerous, and 5 minutes isn’t a lot of time.

After the first round, you’ll start looking for ways to cut corners and shave off every second you can.

In our games, instead of placing cards down in a nice, orderly fashion, we throw them at the discard pile letting them lie where they landed.

5-Minute Dungeon is a silly yet extremely fun board game and with rounds taking only 5 minutes, you’ll be hard-pressed to stop at one round.

Quick Tip: If you’re looking to buy this game, I highly recommend grabbing 5-Minute Dungeon: Curses Foiled Again as well. This adds a lot of much-needed variety as the base game can get stale after few games.

5. Project: ELITE

Publisher: Artipia Games, CMON

There’s this fun juxtaposition between the theme and the mechanics of Project: ELITE. You’re meant to be this elite squad armed to the teeth and fighting back against an alien invasion. Yet it plays like Starship Troopers meets the 3 Stooges.

Project: ELITE is another real-time dice game where every action you do, from shooting your gun to picking your nose, requires a dice roll to see if you’re successful.

But there’s no limits on how many actions you can do. So during every round, of 2-5 minutes, you’re frantically rolling dice and moving your character as fast as possible.

While most die rolls result in a positive outcome, such as moving, shooting and healing one side of the die causes you to put more aliens on the board.

Which, in my plays, happened a lot more while we were two actions away from victory.

Project: ELITE is a lot of panicky fun, where sometimes your only option is to laugh because your platoon spent an entire round moving a three spaces to the left.

4. Pandemic: Iberia

Publisher: Z-Man Games

Out of all of the versions of Pandemic I’ve played, Iberia is still the best.

Taking place in 1848, your goal remains the same as always; stop the spread of four different diseases ravaging the world.

Only, being in 1848 you don’t have the same technology as you would in the modern Pandemic games.

For instance, there’s no mass transportation. You can’t jet around the planet to solve outbreak after outbreak. At least, not to begin with.

Since Iberia is set during the Industrial Revolution. Aside from finding a cure and helping people survive, you can also build a train track across the country. Letting you move multiple spaces for one action.

While this doesn’t sound so appealing at the beginning of the game, by the end you’re moving 10-15 spaces without having to waste your turn moving.

The addition of these trains is far and away my favourite part of Iberia. However, there are also other improvements in this edition as well.

Such as virulent-strain-like cards from Pandemic: On the Brink, and an additional challenge mode.

So, if you’re looking for another entry into the growing world of Pandemic. I highly recommend Iberia.

3. The Crew: Mission Deep Sea

Publisher: Kosmos

Long-time readers know I’ll never miss an opportunity to shill The Crew: Mission Deep Sea.

For good reason – I’m addicted!

Also, it introduced me to the world of trick-taking games.

Put simply, trick-taking is a type of card game where you play follow the leader. If the first player plays a blue card, you must play a blue card. Then whoever played the highest-valued blue card wins and collects all of the cards played.

The Crew: Mission Deep Sea takes this formula and adds a challenge deck. Giving players specific objectives to complete within the strict confines of trick-taking.

If that weren’t enough, it also limits communication. You get one chance to pass a piece of information to everyone else and then must resort to awkward eye contact.

Because of this, even though you’re working together, your thinking is siloed. With the cards in your hand, you have a unique perspective, and challenges to solve.

I can’t get enough of the problem solving in this game, it’s insanely fun. Not to mention, how quick the rounds are, how easy it is to set up, and how simple it is to explain.

All in all, a near-perfect cooperative board game!

2. Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion

Publisher: Cephalofair Games

Four adventurers walk into a bar… at least they would have if they weren’t so stubborn about finding a missing blacksmith.

That’s the start of the dungeon crawling campaign within Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion. But it quickly becomes so much more.

Throughout its 15-ish scenario campaign, you jump from one combat encounter to the next with delicious bits of narrative drip-fed to you in between.

Now, people go crazy for Gloomhaven and after playing Jaws of the Lion, I now know why.

Unlike your usual dungeon crawler, there’s not a die to be seen. Everything is done through decks of cards and abilities.

This gives Gloomhaven a deterministic feel, where with enough thought and strategic nuance you know you can win any scenario.

As a result, you get this game that encompasses the two worlds of board gaming. The theme-rich power fantasy of adventure games, and the more reserved efficiency-based gameplay of your typical European strategy games.

On top of that, there’s an incredible amount of variety. Each of the four heroes have a distinctive playstyle, unique abilities, and decisions to make when levelling up.

Then the campaign itself goes in the direction you choose. With branching paths available, every time you play you’re getting a singular experience made by your table.

Jaws of the Lion is a superb board game, and the best way to learn how to play Gloomhaven.

1. Spirit Island

Publisher: Greater than Games

Spirit Island isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s the most complex title on this list, it’s confronting in its views of colonialism, and it’s the best cooperative game I’ve played.

Taking command of a magical spirit, you work alongside natives (the Dahan) to push away settlers from your island.

Given colonisation is such a strong theme within board gaming – I’m looking at you, Settlers of Catan. Being on the other side, where you’re the one being colonised, gives you enough pause to think about the deeper implications of expansion, resource control, and exploitation.

While important, don’t pause for too long. Otherwise, you’ll miss out on Spirit Island’s sublime gameplay.

You start as a fledging spirit, powerful but not powerful enough to drive back the invaders who will explore, settle and thrive.

Each round you level up your spirit, gaining new abilities or allowing you more actions per turn. Hopefully, reaching a tipping point where you overcome the settlers and win the game.

As for why it’s so complex, Spirit Island overwhelms you with an abundance of information. Showing you everything that will happen in the next three turns and how you can stop it.

But you’re not going to have the cards to stop it. So you have to consistently make difficult trade-offs and sacrifices to win.

Then, every spirit has a drastically different playstyle and path to power. For instance, the Earth spirit is great at defending but poor at removing invaders.

Ultimately Spirit Island is a brain burner of a cooperative game with a massive range of variability and a theme that challenges your world view. Making it an easy pick as the best co-op game around.