Top 10 Cooperative Board Games

0:00 welcome to allies or enemies I'm Jess and I am Sean and today we are talking about co-op games you know what let's just get right to it we do have a couple of honorable mentions and my honorable mention goes to unlock which is an escape room in a box and it's a game system and the good boxes are really good but it really depends on what box you get and my honorable mention is art project and this one may sneak into the top 10 it's just one that's still pretty new to us so I wasn't going to squeeze it in there just yet but let's get to the main event and in true Co-op fashion we could not agree on a number 10 but we very cooperatively decided that we would each put in our number 10 and then one to nine is our shared list smoos together so why don't you go ahead and do your number 10 first my number 10 is Sky team and we played this once in person at a convention and we've played it Oodles of times on BJ since it's just a fantastic game where you're both pilots and you're using these Dice and Silent Communication to try and keep the plane steady and land it but we don't have a physical copy yet and my number 10 is Nemesis and this is basically aliens it just doesn't have the license but in Nemesis you are your different like soldiers and scientists and stuff you're

1:31 on this ship it's full of aliens they're trying to kill you you want to get rid of them and you want to usually want to land it on Earth sometimes it's a little bit different where you want to land it there's a few different ways to win there's loads of different ways to lose you can also play this in like a mean semi Co-op way but we always just play strict Co-op and I do I this one was pretty high for me but a little lower for you but I I really like this one and it is my number 10 all right share number nine is unmatch Tales to a maze which is a co-op version of unmatched and so you can take any of your characters that you have from previous unmatched versions and play them in this Cooperative style and so instead of one versus one it's now both of you against these different bad guys and there are two sides of the board so you can play against two different bad guys and both Moth Man and the aliens are really interesting yeah and it's not just both of you either you can play from one to four players and I really like that you also have a solo mode now with all of your unmatched stuff but it I was really unsure of how I would feel about this works super well just take all that that toy box of stuff you maybe already have and make it into a co-op game and that is our number nine our number eight is the crew and this is a this is a a Cooperative trick-taking game it's actually got a campaign to it as well you don't have to use the campaign but what happens is everybody's got a hand of cards

3:02 everyone's got these missions you know what missions people have you don't know what cards people have and they cannot tell you there's no communication in this so you just got to play your cards and give them very meaningful looks and hope that they can read what you want and it works really really well to take trick taking and make it Co-op and campaign yeah and it's technically for three players plus but we really like the two-player variant because you get to see a third of the cards that the like bot player has and I think it works great as a two-player game as well our number seven is pandemic Legacy and I'm going to go with season one I think that was our favorite one that we played I think if we had just finished playing it it would be way higher but that's the tricky things with Legacy games is after the passage of time you almost forget a little bit how great it was but Legacy games are just so much fun as it changes the game like each time you're playing and pandemic I think it was like one of the first ones and it just did it so well yeah I think risk maybe was the first but we didn't play Risk but pandemic was kind of the one that like shot it up into the stratosphere this was the one that blew it up and we've played all three of them and I really like zero I think best out of the three but we're just clumping them all together and I still like the pandemic system too I think we decided we're only going to put in one pandemic but it was tough because we love the Clone Wars one we love the uh what is the Iberia one is really good and looks classy too it's just such a solid system

4:34 and that is our number seven our number six is Marvel United and this is probably the game that we own the most of we very rarely go into kickstarters or at least we don't buy like the big Deluxe editions of things but we went big on Marvel United X-Men because I love the X-Men so we got an embarrassing number of boxes of this game we' have played through all of the X-Men characters now we played against all of the bad guys and it's just a super simple system that has a surprising like amount of Engagement for how simple this game is yeah cuz all you're doing is you are playing a card and doing the very basic actions that are on that card and you get to use the previous players card and that is it but with the mix of bad guys that you're fighting cuz I think that adds more variability than your person really it it feels different each game and you're right we're like surprisingly engaged in this very simple game every time and it's got so many X-Men and I just I love the X-Men so much so that is our number six our number five is Gloom Haven and we played through all of Gloom Haven and when we were in the midst of it we loved it oh it like took over our lives yeah it's all we thought about yeah we played multiple g games in an evening anytime we came close to retiring a character we just kept playing to make sure we re tired it we I wanted to make us like mugs of all the different like character

6:04 symbols that we were and so we've just found it incredibly engaging it was the only Dungeon Crawler I could really get you on board with and be considering that a big part of the co-op genre is Dungeon Crawlers it was great that we found something that both of us could enjoy yeah unfortunately Frost Haven fell off a little bit for us I think it was just Gloom Haven hit us right at the right time it was like the perfect game at the perfect time we had tons of time in our lives it seemed and we played it four or five hours a night and it's just such a smart um I think one of the reasons I like this As a Dungeon Crawler is it gets rid of the dice so it's just a simple like not simple at all but this awesome kind of more Euro feeling card playing system and I really like that card system and it's just the right amount of challenge there wasn't like too much like stuff to mess around with in this one I felt like it got to the good stuff and I still really like it and it's our number five number four is the heaviest one on this list and that is Spirit Island and spirit island is a brain it's not just a brain burner it is a brain breaker sometimes this there's a lot of thinking and there's a lot of working with your team and if you can Alpha game this especially with more than two my hat's off to you because there's no way my brain can take that it's really I it's just enough for me to focus on what I'm doing and then talk to you and this game is you are spirits on this island you're getting rid of the colonizers you're coming to ruin your beautiful island and

7:37 so you're getting rid of them with your different Spirit powers and there's all these asymmetric Spirits I don't even know how many we have now because we've got a bunch of the expansions too many I think and they all play really differently as well and it's just such a clever different game just a bit tricky the fir the initial learning and then also just understanding that curve of like you are losing so bad until you finally start winning yeah it did take us a while to wrap our heads around it because it gets harder and harder and feels almost impossible but at the same time your spirit's getting stronger too so just when you think you're about to lose the tides turn and go in your favor and there are so many levels you can do to increase the difficulty but we barely touched those cuz we're really just enjoy the like playing the different asymmetric characters and playing lots of those rather than getting like really good with one and increasing the challenge with like those one those few spirits and we're not good enough at it as well so that is also an important thing but we're getting a little bit better and it is our number four our number three is horrified and I'm going to go with the original one universal monsters and it's a really simple system it's almost like pick up and deliver what you're doing but you always have these different bad guys and for Universal ones you get like Dracula and Invisible Man and all of these great characters and they've done such a good

9:09 job of creating like the world where they're all intermixed because the board has the locations of all of the different monsters and then the villagers also tap into the characters from the various like books and movies yeah it really it's such a simple game but each of the monsters you have to do something a little different to deal with them so the pickup and deliver is kind of saving your possible what are most likely going to be victims but hopefully they're just going to be villagers and so you're saving them by moving them around the map but at the same time you got to do different stuff like you got to smash Draculas coffins or connect Frankenstein and the Bride of Frankenstein uh because then they fall in love which is great and I like the other games of it too like I think that the American monsters ones the monsters are a little bit more complex but I love the 50s theme and then Greek monsters we just recently picked up and I really like that one that's definitely the hardest of the three cuz we felt like we're big shots for the first two this one has really knocked us down to size but in a good way yeah it's a really simple game but we've played it so many times and it is our number three our number two is Marvel Champions and this is just a purely card-based kind of a deck building game where you are you're playing cards and beating card-based bag guys and that deck build building thing at first I was like I don't think I I've never been that into deck builder so we were just using the the just the straight up starter decks you get for each character but as we've played it more and more it's impossible

10:40 not to get into that part of it and to start realizing like oh yeah these couple if we put these and we and then you feel really good about making these awesome decks and you need to because some of those bad guys especially in the newer obviously the X-Men ones are my favorite in those newer X-Men boxes there's some tough bad guys that you got to fight and we have had a lot of trouble so we've really had to make those decks but but it's it's a really solid challenge that we certainly don't win every time and it's just really fun to play as the different characters as well because they can play so differently and so like I'm not as familiar with the X-Men as you are but even I have enjoyed just the different styles that each of the characters have played into and it's one that it's interesting cuz one person can be eliminated but I'm still invested in the outcome cuz I'm like usually I've been eliminated by pulling off like a really strong move so I'm really hopeful that you can at least like finish it off and it's really cool too finding two characters that kind of complement each other as well so that you've got like your role on the team too but that is our number two our number one is DWF romantic which is just such a chill game it is a tile placement game and you are cooperatively building out this quaint little village with houses and Fields and a railroad trying to accomplish tasks the challenge is it may not be for everyone because you don't necessarily like win or lose you're just trying to get these high scores and these achievements but I it's such a Cooperative Vibe you are like

12:12 doing it together and so chill that I love it yeah we play this one all the time this has become like our official rainy day game or we're just feeling stressed and we just want to play like a really comfortable board game this is that and I got and I feel like there's such a place for that in co-op games usually co-op games are so stressful and you're working together against a thing and you only win like 50% of the time which is what you want in a solid Co-op game but I really like just being able to play just being chill not worrying about yeah and there's no bad guys it's just you're just nature you're just building stuff and it's it's just so like lovely and in theory you can't lose but one time we did so terribly that you put it in as a loss even though like officially you can't lose yeah we got 32 wins and one loss and you know what we deserve that one to be marked down as a loss but that is our number one and that is it that is our top 10 co-op games and I know that there are oodles that we miss there's oodles that we wanted to put in there we cut this down from a list of like 35ish or something that we thought might be in the top 10 but I would love to hear about the other ones that we really need to play thank you so much for watching as usual please like subscribe and and hopefully we'll see you next time for another game