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’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!

I tend to like competitive games, but I like my coop games to:

• be difficult, or have a difficult mode. To me, there’s no fun in winning on the first try
• to foster table talk OR a different kind of fun player interaction. That’s why The Lost Expedition didn’t click for me, it felt like just throwing some cards on the table.

That said, I enjoy Pandemic (a classic), Hanabi, Just One, and Magic Maze. I haven’t really tried heavier ones but I’d love to play Spirit Island some day.

And for very young kids, My First Orchard is great!

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.

• 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.

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.

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

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

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

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 recently went to a convention and picked up Clear the Decks which is an old timey naval combat game where 1to 4 players work together to sink an enemy ship. It has a variety of difficulties that scale from trivial to dang near impossible to beat.

If you like the theme I think it’s worth checking out.

Roll camera is Co-op and really fun. The theme is that you are making a movie. During the game you have to balance budget and time while trying to shoot all the scenes of the movie, and while problems are continuously happening. It may be balanced to the easy side generally, but you can tweak the difficulty by starting with different budgets and amounts of time.

Hanabi and The Crew, both card games — and both limited-information games. Hanabi is basically Klondike Solitaire distributed over a team of players who can’t see their own cards (and have a limited number of pieces of information they can tell each other); The Crew is a trick-taking game with variable goals and scalable difficulty.

My partner and I really enjoy mini rogue.

It can be brutal at times but often you can track your downfall back to a risky decision earlier.

It’s a one or two player dungeon crawl. Some light rpg mechanics, dice based combat and events, some traders and items to find.

To me it captures games like deep dungeons of doom and legends of grimrock very nicely.

Single player rules also feature a campaign mode, the old gods expansion adds a couple cool events and new bosses.

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.