Top 10 Cooperative Board Games | Best Co-op Tabletop Games

hello everybody welcome to totally tabled my name is shaggy and today i'm doing another top 10 list this time my favorite cooperative games absolutely adore cooperative games one of my favorite genres but there are some notable games that are not going to be on this list and i want to explain why a lot of games that are technically co-ops i either haven't played cooperatively or i just don't want to because i consider them to be solo only games there's a couple of big ones one of them being this war of mine technically you can play it as a co-op i never have and i really have no desire to to me it's really a solo game that has some cooperative rules sort of bolted on to it and not in a very great way also games like spralopolis or lost expedition or all of the oniverse games all of those games have cooperative rules but i have only played them solo or i prefer to play them solo so they will not be on this list the good news is i have talked about all of those games in my prior lists especially in my top 10 solo games and my 11 through 20 top solo games so if you want to hear more about those games go check out those lists anyway let's get started right away with my number 10 and that would be forgotten waters in this game you play as pirates going on crazy adventures you play through a scenario a grand story that is all on an app and in fact the entire thing is voice acted which is absolutely incredible the voice acting here is amazing and really immerses you in this crazy kind of magical fantasy pirate world it's very light-hearted and funny and honestly the app works fantastically but this really is about the experience experiencing this story you are making decisions and there is this wonderful like timed worker placement thing where you're given a list of different actions that you can take based on where you are or what's going on and you quickly place your character on a worker placement spot hopefully a spot that they have the skills to do well and you all have to discuss that and pick it very quickly you then just resolve the work replacement spots and a lot of times it involves a little extra story where you have to make decisions and oftentimes roll for a skill a lot of dice rolling and you're you're rolling these uh these d12s and you know depending on the amount that you get different things are gonna happen you're gonna have different levels of successes and failures you know improving your skills getting cards that give you special abilities it's a ton of fun it's a really great romp of an adventure each time and there's a number of different scenarios that you can go through each one quite long in fact so we haven't even played the entire uh game all the way through yet there's so much content but we've had a fantastic time so far with uh with the scenarios that we have played so that's my number 10 forgotten waters number nine is ghost stories in ghost stories players are monks trying to defend a village from wave after wave of beautifully drawn monsters it's basically a tower defense game where you're moving around a three by three grid of sort of random tiles each with these special actions and you're using those in order to vanquish all manner of nightmares you know spirits demons abominations it is incredibly difficult and unrelenting just when you think you have a handle on things more and more monsters show up these these different ghosts incredibly beautiful artwork and in order to survive you really have to use a lot of teamwork and strategy and and collaborate with one another and that's what i really care about in a cooperative game this is one of the earlier games that i bought and i used to play it a lot but not so much anymore so there's a little bit of nostalgia sort of factoring into this pick but even after all this time the gameplay holds up the artwork is some of the best that i've ever seen in any board game it really is a classic that's my number nine ghost stories it wouldn't be a totally table top 10 list unless there was a massive amount of cheating going on and our number eight is very much a massive cheat because i'm including three games three party-like cooperative games and the one you're gonna pick is based on player count so my number eight is code names duet if you're at two players so clover if you're at three or four players and just one if you're at five to seven players okay and i've clumped these three together because they kind of fit that same sort of party-esque co-op style even though codenames duet is just for two players i still kind of it's still sort of a party game it's it's a two-player version of codenames a game that i adore and i actually like this version better turning code names into a two-player cooperative game is i mean just a brilliant design feat you are simultaneously giving clues just as you would in codenames to your partner you're working off the same grid of of words but you have your own template showing which words you're trying to get them to pick and you just go back and forth and you try to get it done in a certain number of guesses just really clever stuff and it's so much fun you could technically play it with more than two but i you know it obviously works best at two just fantastic now so clover is kind of a similar you know word style game where you are writing clues to try to get the other players to guess the orientation of these tiles that each have four words on them and it's very clever because you know you can use the other clues to try to help you with some of the other ones and it seems like it would be easy but man this game is so hard we have maybe it's just me but i find coming up with because you have these pair of words and you're trying to come up with one clue that will incorporate both words and they could just be anything so it's very hard to come up with those clues the cool thing here is that everyone is doing that at the same time and then once everyone has completed that you go one by one doing the guesses so there's no down time whatsoever really clever stuff in a really clever production to make that all come together and work seamlessly highly recommended and in my mind best at like that three to four player range and then if i have five or more players i'm breaking out just one i maybe the original co-op party game or at least the one that really made it popular really simple concept here where you have one person who's gonna be guessing everyone else gets to see the word that you're trying to get them to guess and everyone is secretly writing a one-word clue then they all look at the clues that they've given and if any of the clues are the same then you have to throw those out so you have to be careful about what clues you give you don't want them to be too obvious because then you might match with other people but you also don't want them to be too obscure because then the person guessing won't have very good clues to guests with it's super simple and works so great with a big crowd just really one of the most perfect party games out there that's just one number seven is a game that you've heard me talk about many times i've even done a full playthrough of this one and that is the loop this one works fantastically both solo and cooperatively a really fun puzzly cooperative game with a really fun theme and this very clever card play system where you can loop cards use them over and over again if you manage to line things up properly i've talked about this in my top solo games of all time and like i said i've done a complete playthrough watch the play through to just see how clever and interesting the card play is it also has this really fun cube tower system where you're dropping cubes uh in this little uh plastic tower that's then distributing them randomly into three different sectors you're trying to keep those cubes from piling up it's colorful it's fun it's got a ton of replayability this one is flown under the radar as i've said and i just cannot understand why there's even expansion out now i hope to do a playthrough of that one but man this is such a great game don't let this one pass you by i i feel like i'm the only one banging the drum of this game but i really think it's one that you should check out that's my number seven the loop my number six is arkham horror the living card game sometimes i just want to go on you know a goofy adventurous ride just sort of turn off my brain a little bit just explore push my luck roll some dice or in this case draw tokens from a bag and just experience a fun and that's what the arkham horror card game gives me it's not something i want to do all the time but i've had so much fun with this game in a cooperative setting just experiencing the interesting story and the different surprises and the creative use of the cards this feels like a board game but just with cards and it is so packed full of ideas i mean look cthulhu is a little played out for me i'm not like a huge lovecraftian fan or anything like that but at least it's interesting it's more interesting than zombies for sure and i find the system of pushing your luck to be really interesting here i don't know i just i keep coming back to this one and it never disappoints me i it was always endlessly interesting so that is my my number six arkham horror the living card game number five is another game that i've mentioned before and it's also a little bit of a cheat this is pandemic iberia but really you can put any of the pandemics this is really the pandemic system the pandemic legacies just base pandemic my favorite is pandemic iberia i really love the little things that iberia adds to the pandemic system the water the railroads and i just i prefer the historical setting i think the added mechanisms they just add they're you know they're not very complicated but it adds just enough interesting strategic choices like you know am i going to focus on building a train network so i can move about the map quicker in the future or do i really try to mop up the sick patients right now do i spend a few extra actions to lay down some purified water in these sort of areas but you know between the the cities so that i don't need to like return to that part of the map as you know sick people start showing up i think unlike some of the other pandemic variants iberia adds a lot of strategic depth without over complicating you know the sort of the core perfect pandemic system but of course any pandemic makes for a wonderful cooperative experience for pretty much anybody and so you know whichever one is your favorite you can sort of stick that in here that's my number five the pandemic system but in particular pandemic iberia my number four is an incredibly popular game it's spirit island this is a game that actually left off of my top solo games because despite having played it several times i still am not quite sure how i feel about the solo game but as a two-player cooperative game specifically as a two-player cooperative game i'm all in i love this at that player count now this is a little bit more complicated than i normally like to play for cooperative games but when i'm in the mood for something that's going to absolutely break my brain this is great i mean first of all the theme is to die for how great is it to finally be fighting back against colonial invaders rather than embodying them you know i think i think the box sums it up best it says the cooperative settler destruction strategy game and that's exactly what you're doing here i love that you're playing these crazy ancient powerful spirits charged with protecting the land and the inhabitants of the land against these invaders it's so refreshing and the gameplay here is just absolutely top-notch the invaders use this sort of three system for you know creating havoc on on the island first they explore they show up onto the island then they start building buildings and then finally they start blighting the land and so you're using these cards with all these powers to try to wipe them out or you know generate enough fear to spread enough fear among them to sort of scare them away and there's all these different types of spirits each have their own deck with all these different special abilities and it's really clever because your actions they're either fast or slow which means they're either gonna be able to resolve before the invaders take their action or after and that can make a real big difference you really have to wrestle with that and try to make sure you're timing everything right like i said this is a heavy you know there's a huge learning curve here but as a two-player cooperative game with some real crunch man fantastic there's a reason this is so popular and it's my number four spirit island number three is the crew in particular the sequel which i believe is called mission deep sea or deep sea mission one of those two the crew is simply a cooperative trick taking game you are given these missions and in the original one it was sort of like you know this person needs to take some per specific card like you know the three of pink you know or the seven of yellow so everyone has a mission that they're trying to complete in the sequel some of these missions are a little bit more interesting and creative like you know you have to take a trick with the sum of all the cards is 25 you know or something like that or you know you can't take any blue cards whatsoever stuff like that and they can get really interesting and really difficult to achieve right but everyone has these missions and then without really communicating you just start playing a trick taking game and you are just trying to play the cards in such a way that those missions will happen and you really have to use your knowledge of trick taking i mean this isn't a game for someone who is new to trick taking it it really is important that you understand all the subtle communication and deduction that you can that you can achieve just through the mechanisms of trick taking it's actually very thinky because it matters what cards you slough it you know it you really have to read into the cards that people are playing and it does feel much more like a deduction game than a trick taking game you have very limited communication you're you're able to put down a single card show like show the table a single card that you have and then indicate whether it's the highest in that suit the lowest in that suit or the only card you have in that suit and that's all you have and in some in some missions you you don't even get that so it's fascinating and there's a ton of pressure i think the reason some people might not like this game is that it really puts you on the spot a single mistake can cost you that mission and you have to you know redo it even just sloughing the wrong card at the wrong time or something can really ruin your chances but it is so satisfying when everybody's on the same page and you achieve something that seemed impossible and it happens all the time you can really like a group can really get good at this game and get better and better ah it's so much fun i've been playing a ton of this with my friends on board game arena actually just one of the one of the most satisfying cooperative games i've ever played that's my number three the crew okay my number two and number one are not going to be a big surprise to anyone who follows the channel i'm not going to speak a great deal on these because i've spoken about them many times before my number two is gloomhaven and again this includes gloomhaven jaws of the lion and i assume it's going to include gloomhaven uh or frosthaven when that comes out but the glue maven system i love it it's fantastic it's fantastic solo where i've spoken about it as one of my favorite solo games of all time and it's great cooperative and i've played it probably even more cooperatively than i've played at solo wonderful cooperative game a lot of opportunities to you know for teamwork and to to work collaboratively and get things done very satisfying when you figure out a dungeon a lot of times they feel very puzzly but it's just so much fun to progress your character and to go through the story it's just it's just such a wonderful fun system i'm definitely in the majority for loving this game so i don't think i have to be too convincing here glue maven fantastic and my number one super obvious here it's robinson caruso spoiler alert it's my favorite solo game it's also my favorite cooperative game i've spoken about this one at length and i've done a full solo playthrough of one of the scenarios so please go watch that i'm very proud of that play through i really love the way that one turned out this game is just so great and there's so much game here you know what i always want to say about robinson crusoe is it's not just a game it's a game system it comes with six scenarios that are completely different you know it they they tweak the rules but you get a completely different experience a different story out of it and every game that i've played of robinson crusoe has always had this wonderful survival narrative that takes place that's always compelling and interesting there's always fun and exciting things going on and you just have incredible difficult decisions this is a hard game but it's not as punishing as people make it out you know when you start to understand the game and you can learn these little techniques the game really opens up and it becomes difficult but fair with a lot of thrilling moments a lot of you know nail biting stuff going on please go watch the play through because i think it just perfectly shows off why i love this game so much it can be difficult to get into it can take a little bit of work but it's so worth it and with the new collector's edition coming out i just can't wait it is so much fun it's just an absolute masterpiece whether you're playing solo or playing cooperatively so there you go number one no big surprise robinson caruso 10 i think i even mentioned more than 10 games there brilliant cooperative games there are so many great cooperative games out there wonderful ones that i didn't even mention here if you enjoyed the video please click the like button subscribe to the channel check out some of my videos i've done playthroughs on several of these games go check those out but until next time thank you so much for watching and goodbye

Channel: Totally Tabled

Views: 54,729

Keywords: boardgame, boardgames, tabletop, top10

Id: dXePkH7GL7c

Length: 21min 18sec (1278 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 02 2022