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!

• 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.

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.

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!

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

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)

I’m trying to cull my collection to one shelf per game genre. Here are the ones that made the cut for my co-op shelf:

• The 7th Continent (2017)
• Agents of SMERSH (2012)
• Burgle Bros. (2015)*
• Dawn of the Zeds (Third Edition) (2016)
• Flash Point: Fire Rescue (2011)*
• Forbidden Desert (2013)
• Freedom: The Underground Railroad (2013)
• Ghost Stories (2008)*
• The Grizzled (2015)
• Horrified (2019)
• The LOOP (2020)
• Pandemic: Iberia (2016)*
• Police Precinct
• Wok Star (2010)
• Zombicide (2012)

The four with asterisks are my favorites.

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.

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.

Our current favorites are:

• Sprawlopolis - quick, small game while still being challenging
• Arkham Horror LCG - excellent narrative and great deck construction
• Frosthaven - epic battles with clever cardplay
• Terraforming Mars: Ares, Crisis Expansion - engine building in the TfM world
• Skytear Horde - tense back and forth card battler with a good AI system

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.

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.