Six more great cooperative games
From trick-taking to a noisy party game, these cooperative games delight me with every play.
I love setting goals for myself every year — it’s one of the ways I try to make sure I don’t just play the same few games over and over — and that I don’t subject friends and family to new games every time we play. (I still do that. Thank you all for your patience.)
One of the — ahem — loftier goals I’ve set for myself is just finishing its fourth full year, and I’m starting to think I might have made it a bit too ambitious to actually get completed: I want to play 2,020 plays of cooperative games in the 2020s. I’m about 20 percent of the way there (I sort of suspect I might not have tracked some plays of some games, which is slightly tragic.) Still, I’m happy to have played as many cooperative games as I have, and it’s put me today in a position to talk about one of my very favorite types of board and card games.
Here are six more of my favorite cooperative games, following from six others I recommended back in March.
Daybreak
The most recently released game on this list, Daybreak is the latest cooperative outing from Matt Leacock, the designer of the Pandemic series and the Forbidden series, two of the biggest influences in cooperative gaming. He’s designed it alongside Matteo Menapace, a game designer and educator.
Daybreak is a game about solving climate change — full stop. It’s not a game with fantastical elements or futuristic technology: This is a game about now. Each player is a different section of the world — China, the United States of America, Europe, and the Rest of the World. They each have energy demands, which increase over the course of the game and you must attempt to meet.
Each turn, you’ll add cards to your five-card tableau, placing them either atop or beneath the cards already there. Each of those cards has symbols in the corner, which strengthen other cards— maybe they give you more energy for each action taken, or they allow you to take more actions, or they grant you other sorts of tokens. Daybreak is, in essence, a cooperative tableau builder, which will draw inevitable comparisons to, say, Terraforming Mars. I think this is a good deal more interesting, in part because of the five-card restriction, but also because this is a game in which play happens simultaneously. It’s a bit like Spirit Island in that regard, or Pandemic, were the game played with simultaneous action (it might be an interesting thing to house rule some day.)
I’ve only played Daybreak digitally to date (thank you, Board Game Arena, once again — and that’s also why I’ve used a press kit photo — which is quite nice, and I wish more board games had a solid press kit — but I digress) with our friends, with whom we’ve played a lot of Pandemic, among other cooperative games. It has some twists and turns that give the game a lot of variability — different crises that arrive at different times, challenge cards, and more that we’re just starting to explore.
Sail
I truly think there should be more a good deal more cooperative trick-taking games than there are, and Sail is a good example of what you can do in the style. This Japanese-designed trick-taker (rethemed from Hameln Cave and designed by Akiyama Koryo and Korzu Yusei) is a bit of a push-pull experience that has two players cooperating to move a ship around the ocean, avoiding a kraken and rocks. It’s a simple game to pick up and play, but the experience is trying. There are six scenarios to play through in the base game, and given they get progressively harder, I’m looking forward to swimming back to the ship with this one. (Is that the right metaphor? I don’t know. I can’t actually swim.)
Mists over Carcassonne
If you’ve ever thought that Carcassonne might make for an excellent cooperative experience, you’re right. (And not just because of this game — there’s a great cooperative puzzle variant of the Carcassonne rules I can send you if you’re curious. It’s about balancing points between colors.) This spooky spin on the classic has you chasing down ghosts, surrounding cemeteries, and working toward high scores as a group.
I wrote about this one in some more depth earlier this year, so do feel free to check that post out. I’ve linked to it below. I really enjoy the puzzle this one presents, especially because I think Carcassonne is at its best when you view it as a puzzle to be solved.
Spirit Island
It took me a while to get there, but I’m pretty firmly on the side of those that call Spirit Island one of the best cooperative games out there. It’s not for everyone, of course, as it’s a bit complicated and requires each player to understand specific rules for their unique abilities.
Spirit Island has each player taking on the role of a different powerful spirit protecting an island’s native inhabitants from invaders. Because each players’ abilities are in some cases quite different from each other, it requires a good deal of planning and thought. My favorite conversations around the table during this game have each player contributing something to a strategy — a rare enough feat in cooperative games that Spirit Island feels truly special.
echoes
Each of the four games preceding this one requires planning and coordination, but the Echoes series is a very different sort of game. In these games, you’re faced with a mystery to solve, with your clues all coming in the form of short audio clips. You’ll have to put on your best detective hat to be proficient here, but the games are absolutely not difficult from a mechanical perspective. These are all very much one-and-done, but nothing about the game is destructible, so it’s an excellent game to just move on to a friend.
Sound Box
There are not nearly enough cooperative party games. As much as I said that I want more cooperative trick-taking games, I think the world needs cooperative party games more. I’m sure I could say something cogent here about how humans were built to compete or something, but honestly, it’s cooperation that gives me joy — not competition. (Well, it depends on the context. Cooperative sports? Probably not great on TV.)
Designed by Hjalmar Hach and Lorenzo Silva, Sound Box is a game about everyone simultaneously making ridiculous sounds while somebody in your group closes their eyes, then tries to guess what sounds were made during a very short timeframe. This is quite frankly a ridiculous game, and I love how boldly it goes about its business.
Here we are again at the end of another Wednesday issue of Don’t Eat the Meeples. Thank you, as ever, for reading — I appreciate you and yours, and I hope I’ve in some small way been able to help improve your gaming experience. As always, I’d love if you shared this newsletter with a friend.
Next week: I’ll go through some of the trick-taking games that have really tickled my fancy of late.