boardgames

Spirit Island is really good as you can adjust the difficulty and it's always different Stars of Akarios if you want a Gloomhaven Light Experience with some 7th Continent sprinkled in.

I see a few of my favorites have been mentioned already (Aeon's End, Spirit Island, The Crew, Pandemic Legacy) but here's a few more:

• Gloomhaven: There's a reason this game was at the Boardgamegeek #1 spot for years. Absolutely an epic game, with so much strategy and variety involved. For those who are intimidated by the complexity, size or price of the game, there is also Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, which is essentially a light version of the game. An excellent starting point, and not any less fun than it's big sibling.

• Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood: Another big campaign game with very interesting mechanics. The game is quite hard and punishing, but you have lots of difficulty levels you can play on. The story is set in a land overrun by the Deepwood, a forest filled with huge monsters. You play a band of mercenaries who defend people from those monsters.

• Sprawlopolis: A game consisting of 18 cards, that contain city blocks and roads, and each player places a card down to add to the city. Each card has a different scoring system on its back, and you draw a few for each game, so every game feels entirely different. Quick to play, and fits in your pocket so you can bring it anywhere.

I'm a big fan of the Forbidden series (in before the Forbidden Stars joke).

Forbidden Island is really accessible and a blast to play when you use alternate map layouts, they add a nice twist and lots of replayability to the game.

Forbidden Desert is a step up in difficulty and also a real blast to play.

Forbidden Sky is a but finicky but still fun to play.

Forbidden Jungle has not been released yet, but I'm sure I'll have to get it to complete the collection!

My wife and I had a blast playing through Pandemic Legacy S1

Coop games where you fight a system often feel unsatisfying to me. However, I think coop games are an excellent way to bring new gamers on board. My favorite coop games:

• Menara: a coop dexterity game. Game is always tense and I find the difficult adjustments to be nicely balanced. This is a very underrated game, in my opinion

• The Crew: in Portugal we used to be big on trick taking games. Every family owns a deck of cards! The crew retains the feel of the classic trick taking games and slap a very nice cooperative gameplay. Really clever, really fun. If you really like trick taking games this is a no brainer. Still haven't tried the second one, can't wait to try it.

• Aeon's End: I like to play this one as a 2 player game, don't like it with more players. I really enjoy deck building games, this one nails it. I love how you don't shuffle your deck, really improves the strategy and reduces RNG.

Hanabi, for sure. Avoids quarterbacking through hidden info, lots of levels of difficulty, and genuinely beautiful (E: in the deluxe edition, at least)

Mysterium - something easy to learn and can be played by up to 7 people. One of the players is trying to tell others (psychics) who their killer is using very nice looking but rather ambiguous cards.

Maximum apocalypse - up to 6 characters doing different missions in different types of the apocalypse (zombies, nuclear war, aliens, robots). Map is randomly generated so even though there is limited number of scenarios they are replayable.

Sherlock Holmes consulting detective (multiple boxes) or Bureau of investigation - investigation in Arkham & elsewhere. These are text based puzzles (e.g. solve a murder case).

Spirit island - it's basically anti Settlers of Catan :) Still learning to play it but so far it seems like an amazing game with many scenarios...

Aeon's End is probably my favorite coop game, although I'm still not very good at it. It's a deckbuilder, which is a genre I really like.

The Crew is a cooperative trick-taking game which is an absolute blast and fairly light. Both the original space one and the deep sea version are great.

On the grittier side, I think This War of Mine is worth playing at least once for the experience.

I can recommend the new Deep Rock Galactic board game. Great time. It looks like it should be a complex game with all of its minis but each session is less than 1.5 hours from my experience. Also, the minis are fantastic, definitely worth the price and space :).

This might be controversial but I really love Kingdom Death: Monster. It's an amazing work of insanity that no reasonable group would ever publish. Spirit Island gets an honorable mention.

I'm trying to cull my collection to one shelf per game genre. Here are the ones that made the cut for my co-op shelf:

• The 7th Continent (2017)
• Agents of SMERSH (2012)
• Burgle Bros. (2015)*
• Dawn of the Zeds (Third Edition) (2016)
• Flash Point: Fire Rescue (2011)*
• Forbidden Desert (2013)
• Freedom: The Underground Railroad (2013)
• Ghost Stories (2008)*
• The Grizzled (2015)
• Horrified (2019)
• The LOOP (2020)
• Pandemic: Iberia (2016)*
• Police Precinct
• Wok Star (2010)
• Zombicide (2012)

The four with asterisks are my favorites.

Our current favorites are:

• Sprawlopolis - quick, small game while still being challenging
• Arkham Horror LCG - excellent narrative and great deck construction
• Frosthaven - epic battles with clever cardplay
• Terraforming Mars: Ares, Crisis Expansion - engine building in the TfM world
• Skytear Horde - tense back and forth card battler with a good AI system

I'm loving Eldritch Horror, but it also can swing both ways due to chance. If you get the base game, I highly suggest getting the "Forbidden Lore" expansion as well, since it makes the base game more complete.

I love Burgle Bros 1 and 2 for coop gaming. Fun theme and working out plans together is a blast.

I've been playing lots of Hanabi lately too.

• Regicide is very impressive in its weight class and considering that all you need is a standard deck of cards. No reason not to try it
• In the pandemic-family my favorites are Pandemic: The Cure which turns Pandemic into a dice rolling romp and Pandemic: Fall of Rome, has cool cube movement and dice based combat rules. One step up is The LOOP which is somewhere between Pandemic and Spirit Island, uses card driven actions and has a push-pull mechanic
• Aeon's End and Heroes of Tenefyr for deckbuilding. The latter is kinda like a multiplayer co-op Friday, fun push-your-luck decisions
• Shipwreck Arcana for co-op deduction.

Honorable mentions: Mantis Falls for 2p semi-coop. You have to work together to get to the end of the road but there is a 50% chance that your partner is an assassin biding his time.

My absolute favorite is Betrayal at the House on the Hill.

It's just designed so well. The pre-haunt phase allows new players to learn the basic rules of the game by playing. Like, we were playing this, and a somewhat seasoned member of the boardgame crew was late and she missed the base rules. We just shoved her a character, she was confused how no one explained her stuff, but after 1-2 turns of other people, she understood 90% of the base rules without explanation. That's really impressive from a design standpoint.

And then, the game flips into the post-haunt phase, and some antagonist scenario happens. This is when things go nuts. One game, one player turned into Doctor Frankenstein, and Frankensteins Monster was placed on the board. And we as the normal players had to scramble to kill it. In another game, I turned into a giant snake god to kill everyone - but a bad cellar layout saved the players.

In other cases, there is a hidden, randomly chosen antagonist and things go nuts. People steal items from each other, because of good ideas and things go nuts.

I love this game. It starts out as a really approachable coop-game if you know action-point-based games. You bumble around in a haunted mansion, Bob usually almost dies because of bad luck (and we make fun of him), and then the haunt hits and it becomes everyone against Bob, except Bob is a horrible monster now.

No matter if you win or lose, you will have a funny story to tell how Bob is a jerk, or we were heroic.

Legends of Andor is quite nice and has a lot of expansions already. I definitely can recommend too many bones. A great game, although a bit expansive.

I found the game Castle Panic recently. The rules are fairly simple and didn't take too long to understand which was a hit with my friends. The element of chaos and the near-constant pressure until the end was fun. If it is too easy, you can handicap yourself in one or more ways which will increase the difficulty.

Another vote for Pandemic. My wife and I played a TON of the original years before the actual pandemic. Started Pandemic Legacy Season 1 with some friends and it's an absolute blast too (literally... at some point you have to permanently remove / destroy game pieces and we strapped them to a bottle rocket and shot them into the night sky).

It's definitely a game where there are basically a lot of ways that you can lose and only one way to win. It often feels like the loss conditions are closing in from all sides. More often than not it also feels like the line between winning and losing is razor thin and you feel like you are "grabbing victory from the jaws of defeat". This can be a little stressful at times but I find it enjoyable. It has a built in mechanism to alter the difficulty too, so you can get as close to the jaws of defeat as you like.

Very much recommend the base version.

Also recommend the Legacy version, but it's a bit of a commitment and can only be played through once (but that playthrough is spread across something like a dozen play sessions)

Terraforming Mars isn't strictly coop but it sort of has a coop aspect to it. You could play it as a coop if you wanted to (try to terraform mars before X number of generations).

Edit: turns out someone has actually written up a pretty comprehensive set of new rules/instructions for a coop variant on BGG https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2009605/man-against-nature-cooperative-variant

I like Ghost Stories, quite imbalanced but fun to play (/lose)

• Arkham Horror
• Legends of Andor
• Escape Room games