A brief history of cooperative board games

Cooperative board games hit their stride in the 2010s — but what came before, and what comes next?

When I consider the moments in gaming that have brought me the most raw excitement and joy, cooperative games race to the forefront.

It’s the excitement of a last-round win in Pandemic as my wife and I teach her aunt and uncle the game for their very first time.

It’s the late nights with Spirit Island, where we’re certain the game has escaped our grasp, but we manage a win all the same.

It’s hanging out with friends across the country in 2020, reading newspaper clippings and suspect interviews in Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective.

It’s the raw emotion in Pandemic Legacy — Season One when something completely unexpected had a major influence on our campaign.

Cooperative gaming has played an unmistakeable role in my growth in board games. It has been there alongside my discovery of new and exciting games. But in the realm of gaming, cooperation as a focus is a decidedly new innovation, with just a smattering of influential cooperative games finding any success.

The first cooperative board games recorded — at least in Board Game Geek, which is largely definitive — date back to the 1930s. Designed by Dennis Wheatley, titles like Murder Off Miami and The Malinsay Massacre were are “realistic document games,” essentially acting as interactive stories. 

A few scattered games appear here and there before our next entry, but they can largely be explained away as quirks of the data. Hi Ho! Cherry-O, for one, is listed as a cooperative game released in 1960, but it wasn’t until 2007 that cooperative play was introduced. Some others involved some cooperation in the course of play, but they weren’t truly cooperative games — they nearly universally declare a winner. Others still, like Democracy or SIMSOC, exist more in the realm of political roleplaying than traditional board games.

The earliest what we might think of as a cooperative game now might be 1967’s Configurations, which bills itself more as a puzzle than a game, or Captain Scarlet Game, released in the same year. The latter describes itself as “a unique type of team game.” It’s hard to argue — my research hasn’t revealed a game that fits the cooperative bill more effectively than that one. No game before 1980 cracks the top 1,000 cooperative games on Board Game Geek. The first two to do so are Intruder and Citadel of Blood; the former is a solitaire game playable with support for up to three players, the latter is a role-playing game with no game master.

Simply to reduce the scope to a manageable place, I’ve focused my data analysis on cooperative games that are ranked within that top 1,000. It gives us a place to start, and while we miss some games as a result, we can classify them into a few distinct categories. The first, and arguably the most interesting, are those role-playing games without a game master. That’s a pattern we see continued, though the language to describe them has shifted somewhat. The second category is games that are more simulations than they are games. We see this with political simulations primarily, but there are others. These now might be classed more under role-playing games. A third category for consideration are games that are simply cooperative takes on uninteresting styles of gaming — a roll and move game is not an interesting game worth considering, as it’s no more cooperative than it is competitive. Finally, there are those few games that do meet the cooperative bill.. 

1982: Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective

The very earliest cooperative games we have here are mirrored by a classic 1982 board game. The focus is on “realistic documents,” like a newspaper and a city directory. Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective is the first enduring cooperative game to be released. While others predated it, none have survived the test of time. This one has: It’s repeatedly received new editions, is still actively printed, and has several new iterations of the game with new stories.

In Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, you play as a team of investigators attempting to solve a variety of mysteries. The bulk of the game is spent reading interviews with witnesses, suspects and other persons of interest, as well as consulting newspaper entries and a map of London.

The ideas behind Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective are not difficult to understand. It’s a nonlinear storytelling game, and it has shaped many games since. Imagine Chronicles of Crime or Detective without the influence of Consulting Detective. This set a particular mold that has retained a strong influence.

For the following 24 years, from 1983 to 1999, the cooperative gaming landscape underwent slow, largely unremarkable growth. 1987 saw the release of Arkham Horror, which was developed as a board implementation of The Call of Cthulu role-playing game. Some games gained a reputation for cooperative play despite not being fully supported in the rules — 1989’s Advanced HeroQuest, for one, saw a pattern of house rules adapting its solitaire play into cooperative play. 1995’s Warhammer Quest takes the Advanced HeroQuest system and adapts it to the popular Games Workshop theme.

2000: Lord of the Rings

The first 21st century foray into cooperative gaming came from one of the hobby’s greatest innovators. Reiner Knizia took a timeless trilogy and adapted it into a game that plays in 90 minutes — or, for comparison, roughly one-half of the time it takes to watch one of the Peter Jackson films (or quite a bit less than half the time it would take to watch one of the extended editions.)

Despite its successes as a game, and despite its special award in the 2001 Spiel des Jahres awards, Knizia’s contribution to the cooperative canon didn’t lead to an immediate change in gaming. It’s instead limited to role-playing forays into board games (Dungeons & Dragons Basic Game, Arkham Horror’s second edition) or distinctly child-focused games (The Little Orchard, The Ladybug’s Costume Party.) And while both of those takes on the genre are interesting in their own ways — why did it take so long for children’s games to turn toward cooperation, I wonder? — they aren’t entirely reflective of where cooperative gaming has gone.

Cooperative gaming remained hard to come by. It wasn’t until 2008 that the genre started to move from a novelty to an established sphere of gaming, a hypothesis reflected in the chart below.

We see a clear uptick start to form after 2008, and it becomes easy to figure out one particular inciting event.

2008: Pandemic

Where Lord of the Rings gave shape to a genre, Pandemic gave it a course. The influence of Matt Leacock’s first major game is difficult to overstate. While he self-published two designs (Borderlands in 1995 and Lunatix Loop in 2000) prior to Pandemic’s release, this one put him on the map. In 2021, Z-Man Games indicated “over 5 million copies” had been sold worldwide, a feat only an extremely select group can claim.

The core conceit in Pandemic is relatively simple: You and your fellow players are attempting to solve a worldwide pandemic. It’s a game with which many of you will be deeply familiar, such is its reach. But far more than a popular game, it’s a game that defined and refined significant tropes we see with cooperative games today.

The biggest trope Pandemic set out: A danger that intensifies at defined points of progression throughout the game. In Pandemic, this comes as Epidemic cards are drawn and the discarded cities are shuffled and placed atop the Infect deck. When that happens, you’re locking into a set of defined threats, and the cumulative effect adds a greater sense of danger.

It’s a trope Leacock went back to with subsequent games in the Pandemic series: Iberia, Fall of Rome and Rising Tide transmogrify the game into different forms with the same basic gameplay loop but wide variety in theme. They feel like explorations of that core loop, adding new pieces of gameplay that will appear again later. Notably, these are each co-designed.

Leacock’s Forbidden series aims at the same loop, but with major shifts in difficulty. The first in the Forbidden series, Forbidden Island, aims at a younger and less experienced audience, tasking them with solving a puzzle before the titular island sinks. Forbidden Desert moves the problem to a shifting landscape of sand dunes and tunnels, but it renders the problem in a more complex scenario. Forbidden Sky takes the problem to a series of platforms with electric connections, and Forbidden Jungle populates the world with alien enemies. Each feels like an escalation in difficulty and complexity, though they each remain approachable.

From 2009 to 2014, cooperative gaming continued to grow through innovative, exciting games. Legendary took cooperation to deck-building; Mage Knight took cooperation to expert gaming; Descent reinvigorated the dungeon-crawler, helping push it from a shadow of an RPG into a fully fledged board game genre. And while much of that had substantial impact, nothing upended board games once again like Pandemic Legacy.

2015: Pandemic Legacy — Season One

Once again, Matt Leacock and Pandemic are at the center of our story. Leacock, teaming up with Rob Daviau, created one of the most exciting moments in gaming with the release of Pandemic Legacy. Daviau, who created one of gaming’s biggest innovations with the ‘legacy’ format, was only a few years removed from the very well-regarded Risk Legacy. The gist: You change elements of your game as you play through a campaign. Legacy differs from a campaign game in that the changes you make are permanent and affect all future games, providing an exciting bit of emergent storytelling.

While Risk Legacy was the progenitor of what we now recognize as a trend in gaming, it was Daviau and Leacock working in concert with Pandemic Legacy that pushed that particular trend. The push forward has continued, and Daviau and Leacock are teaming up again for a family-weighted cooperative game, Ziggurat, slated for a 2024 release.

With cooperative games taking a share of somewhere between 1.5 and 2 percent of games released from 2015 to now, it’s clear the genre has entered a state of maturity. The genre saw a peak around 2019, and it’s retreated somewhat from those heights — 2.5 percent of all games tracked on Board Game Geek had a cooperative mechanic.

Of course, it’s far too early to say if there’s a pattern emerging — is cooperative gaming going to drop off? Will it regain momentum in 2024? Are we one huge game away the genre reigniting? I do have my hypotheses, and I can summarize them briefly: We’re past the peak of cooperative gaming, but the genre has real staying power, and I don’t think there’s any reason to suggest it’ll drop off to pre-2008 levels. What we’ve seen is a gradual retreat to perhaps a new normal. We’ll have to check back in five years, I suppose.

An interesting thing, though, emerges if you narrow in on only the top 100 games on Board Game Geek. While that’s not a particularly reliable metric for determining popularity of a game outright, it is an excellent measure of user sentiment among the user base of the site. Taken with that particular grain of salt, we see that 23 of the top 100 games are cooperative. Further: 80 of the top 500 are, and 160 of the top 1000 are. While the number of cooperative games released every year is a small percentage of the overall games released every year, there’s a curious over-indexing to consider.

Perhaps we’ve seen a new maturity in cooperative gaming. We’re seeing cooperative designs now that would have rocked the landscape in 2008, when in-depth cooperative games tended toward excessive complication. But now?

2017: Spirit Island and Gloomhaven

These are two of the biggest games of 2017. They’re both games that have real heft to them, but they’re both cooperative. With Spirit Island, you have a cooperative game with asymmetric powers and abilities; with Gloomhaven, you have the clearest successor to the dungeon-crawling cooperative games of the early genre.

Both of these games established a clear path for cooperative gaming. While Pandemic remained accessible to new players, these two are decidedly less friendly to newcomers. That’s not even a bad thing on its face, though it might sound like a criticism. As board gaming has grown, shifted and thrived, there exists a wider audience for games of all sorts. Where cooperative gaming might have been targeted at more casual gamers for a time, there’s a breadth — and a depth — of offerings that appeal to gamers of all stripes.

When we look at Spirit Island, with its several expansions and the incredible depth of spirit powers, we see a cooperative game that’s harnessing the need to cooperative in new and interesting ways. It’s a game that manages to narrow your personal scope while growing the possibilities consistently. It’s a game that allows us to see the growth of the genre over a decade.

2023: Sky Team

What’s next for cooperative gaming? What will be the next big innovation? Perhaps a game like Sky Team, with its heavily modular design, provides a pathway. This is a cooperative game that’s rendered with remarkable confidence and verve. This game knows exactly what it’s setting out to accomplish.

Where the Pandemic series explored ideas over years, the missions in Sky Team explore ideas within a single box, without complication, and with only minimal adjustments to rules. It is no surprise that Sky Team is rapidly climbing the ranks on Board Game Geek, with its ranking at publication time an anticipation-building 201. I don’t suspect it will be long until it reaches the top 100.

As board gaming and cooperative gaming mature together, games with that effortless feel should hopefully come in more abundance. It should continue to feel like there are innovations aplenty and that a new one could be just around the corner. With any luck, we’ll see that and more.