I would be curious about your favorite coop games. I often find them a big lacking, often being a bit unbalanced. An example is Battle for Hogwarts, where one game can be a walk in the park and another absolutely impossible and rarely is there a balanced match.
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.
Seconding Spirit Island. It’s quite possibly one of my favorite board games of all time (and a huge favorite in my regular play-group)!
Even in the base game, the amount of diversity in play styles between the spirits is incredible. It’s absolutely a game that I could keep playing indefinitely and continue to discover new things.
Spirit Island is one of our favorite games of all time as well. It is for sure the most played game when it’s just my partner and me. I agree it feels endlessly replayable with all of the variety.
We have also been playing through a homebrewed legacy system for Spirit Island that I found on reddit. Definitely imperfect but still super fun!
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’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!
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
Darn it! :) Came in to recommend the OG pandemics game, and might wind up looking to get legacy thanks to seeing it a bunch in this thread! :) This instance might be expensive!
It was an awesome experience! We played it every night (sometimes twice a night) for the time it took to complete the campaign. Definitely some frustrating moments, but also some really memorable ones.
Did you play season 2 or 0? We loved season 1 but didn’t like the others. Felt that season 2 changed to much by inverting the core game and season 0 introduced to many concepts. A little over halfway through season 0 we stopped because we’d rather play a game we knew than learn yet another set of rules for that months objectives.
