Games

Stardew Valley the board game.

Nemesis and Dead Cells are the board games doing that for me right now. Nemesis is semi cooperative, but there are full co-op objectives if you don't wanna play versus. Dead Cells is completely co-op. Both have resulted in good stories and experiences that stay with you after the game is done in my friend group.

Arkham Horror 3rd Edition — NOT the LCG.

I recently got Moonrakers, and it is 10/10 in my opinion. It can be competitive, and the rules certainly support backstabbing and sabotage, but it can be played very cooperatively. There is a winner, but you could even modify the rules to "try to get everyone to 10 prestige in x number of rounds" instead of first to 10 wins.

Battlestar Galactica boardgame. It's mostly cooperative, with the chance of having one or two players being traitors, but even without them, it's very unlikely the humans win in the end. It's expensive and needs a lot of table space to play, tho.

Captain Sonar can be an interesting choice, since it can be played turn-by-turn or in real time, with two teams of 1-4 each. If you working with your team doesn't create a sense of connection, I don't know what will.

Spirit island is my favorite game to play with a group. It has you trying to protect an island from colonists who damage the island with their expansions. Each player has different abilities that force you all the work together & requires a lot of teamwork to win especially some of the higher difficulties.

Here’s some great cooperative games that either have big groups working together OR have the whole groups:

Escape from the Dark Castle - a fun little dungeon crawler where you flip cards and roll against dangers as you try to overcome obstacles. Completely cooperative but mechanically simple.

Wavelength - the base way to play is technically a ‘competitive’ in that there are teams and points but it’s relatively chill and I’ve often played this at parties with large groups cooperatively cause it just makes for a great conversation starter.

Phantom Ink - two teams but the mechanics are very fun and the game overall has a great tone.

Ravine - cooperative game where you try to survive after a plane crash.

I would also maybe recommend looking into some light roleplaying games like The Zone or Fiasco. These are almost always gm-less or easy to run and focused on building a fun narrative together.

I guess it is better to go for games that are cooperative and where everyone can contribute how they can without pressure. So I would suggest strategy games where everyone decides together what to do and all the players are united against the game, but in a way that it's harder to put the blame on someone if they fail to do what's expected of them (Ex : Hanabi). Here are some of my favourites that corresponds to this :

Pandemic

Horrified

Forbidden Desert

In order to get good recommendations you're going to need to provide additional information. How many people are playing? How complex can a game be? What games have you tried and loved? Is there a favorite mechanism? What is the game duration you're going for? 10 min? 30? 3 hours? What's your budget?

Generic recommendations based on my library:

• Just One - Favorite party game

• Brass Birmingham - My favorite; Beware it's quite complex and lasts around 3 hours

• Blood Rage - Cool dude's on a map game with very nice minis

• Turing Machine - Good puzzle game

• Slay The Spire - If you love slay the spire, you'll love cooperative slay the spire as well

• Menara - Favorite dexterity game

boardgamegeek.com is the imdb of boardgames, check it out.

Dead of Winter - The co-op variant of the game, without a traitor. Zombie apocalypse game.

Meeple Party - A co-op game about throwing a party and making sure personality types don't clash. Perhaps on the nose for your group, but I still recommend it.

Mental Blocks - Once again, play the variant without a traitor. This is a game about solving a 3D puzzle from different perspectives with limited abilities to communicate or touch certain blocks.

I really like Mysterium. It's kinda cooperative, but players also work independently. The premise is that one player is a ghost, and the rest of the players are psychic detectives who have their own vision of how the murder happened. The ghost gives out clues using surreal, dream-like cards for the psychics to figure out their personal guess on what the weapon, location and murderer was. At the end the ghost gives clues to which psychic was right.

I personally like it because it isn't just logic and strategic thinking, you have to use your creative/artistic part of your brain as well, if not moreso.

I'm sorry, but if you have this problem, it's entirely caused by who your players are as people, not by the games itself. Even cooperative games leave people that get pissed, pissed at each other. For example, if one person wants to do something that another person finds suboptimal, and then the cooperative game is lost some time later.

I love Deep Rock Galactic, Terra Mystica, Mysterium.

Honestly, it depends

My favourite board game without a doubt is diplomacy, but those games go for like 6+ hours and requires 7 people. Also everybody will be yelling at everybody at some point, so yeah probably not a good pick lol

That being said, my favourite game to bring out for people not too into board games is wingspan. Fairly simple board game with enough depth to it. Also it has cute drawings of birds

I will always recommend base Catan. It's simple enough that anyone can learn to play fairly quickly, and moves quickly enough that no one gets that mad if they lose. If anything, I find losing a game usually coincides with people understanding it better and being open to playing another round so they can demonstrate that understanding.

You’ll never perfectly solve the “no pissing people off” issue because in competitive games you necessarily have people benefit at the expense of others and in cooperative games you’ll fall into the trap of backseat-driver players telling you what to do on your turn.

That being said, here are some of my favorites I’d like to suggest:

Cooperative:

• Time Stories (kinda like a time-travel themed mystery-solving role-playing game where the pre-built deck is your DM. 1-4 players. You can buy more decks, each with a different setting and story.).
• Pandemic (Stop ~~COVID~~ a deadly disease from killing off the planet. Work together to limit the spread and find the cure before it’s too late) (1-4 players)

Competitive:

• The Settlers of Catan (claim resources and land strategically to build the most prosperous kingdom) (2-4 players but there are expansions and spinoffs so this could be like 1-6 players)
• 7 Wonders (draft cards to build the most prosperous kingdom) (3-8 players IIRC)

In-Between:

• Betrayal in the House on the Hill (explore a haunted house until you find a dark secret that turns one of you into a villain the rest have to fight) (3-6 players)

Ok, if you are against hard feelings, cross off anything that is directly competitive, that would be any game where players directly and willfully interact with each other in a way where one gains while another loses as part of the core gameplay. To varying degrees things like blood rage, root, monopoly/solarquest, everdell, 7 wonders, clank, carcassonne, ticket to ride, dominion, etc.

If your group must have competition, you'll need to stick to independent competitive games, this is anything where players are primarily taking actions in their own space and are progressing largely independent from each other. Example recommendations include things like Quacks of Quedlinburg, Shifting Stones, most roll and writes (welcome to series, cartographer with a minor exception), cascadia, verdant, etc

If you can do without competing with each other, cooperative games are definitely the way to go to minimize hard feelings (it'd only come up then if someone thought another player did something suboptimal causing a loss). The variety here is actually pretty large: simple trick taking games like The Crew series Information sharing games, like Mysterium "Combat" games of all complexities (generally ascending: Lord of the rings storybook, marvel united, D&D board games, Heroquest, Stuffed fables, Atlantis Rising, legends of andor, horrified, Arkham horror, marvel champions, mansions of madness 2nd edition, spirit island, Gloomhaven) Mystery/puzzle games (Adventure Games series, Exit The Game series, Animals of Baker Street)

I'd also like to call out 2 other games specifically: Stella, while it is a 1 winner competitive game where your score depends largely on other players, the push your luck and prisoner's dilemma aspect of how you earn points I think largely removes the feel bad aspect of competition. Kitchen Rush: pure cooperative, but it's also a real-time game where everyone is taking simultaneous actions to run a restaurant in 4 real time minutes stretches.

Zombie Kidz is quick, cooperative, and has plenty of achievements (with a sticker book to record them) as well as unlockables through gameplay. You get to use teamwork and planning, and turns occur in quick succession.

I think it might tick every box you mentioned.

Mansions of Madness. It's my wife's new favorite game. The game has many different scenarios and they play out pretty differently each time. The game is almost all co-op, so it's players VS. the game. I was actually against the need for an app at first but it simplifies a lot and helps keep track of a lot of the mundane stuff.

Betrayal at the House on the Hill has about 50 different scenarios so almost every playthrough is different. But it's best to have at least 4 players to be more fun

Waaay obscure, but one of the few board games I've ever really enjoyed is solarquest.

I've played plenty of the usual board games over the years. They just weren't anything I ever played because I wanted to play them. It was something to do, and people seem to naturally gravitate towards card and board games.

I had a chess phase in my younger days. I still play checkers checkers from time to time. "Chinese" checkers too, along with go. But those are still things that I'll suggest when I'm with someone and looking for something to do while bullshitting.

I hate Life, and only play monopoly with the understanding that when I'm done with it, I'm going to give everything I have to whoever is the most behind. Sorry is okay, as is parcheesi.

But solarquest, I'll find people willing to play with me because I like it. That and heroquest, but heroquest isn't really a board game the way I think of the term, it's a constrained ttrpg.

Both of those, my mom got me for Christmas after I begged for them, and I've never once been disappointed with them. I got both of them the year they came out, so we're talking decades of play with both.

Heroquest, I used as a board with the figures good my d&d play for a long time as well as playing it as its own game.

Heroquest is cooperative, so I can definitely recommend it for low to zero conflict play. You're uncovering a map, finding treasure, building a character. It's d&d lite, in the best way. Original versions are expensive, but there's a ton of printable versions out there, and it was rereleased in 2021.

Solarquest is essentially space themed monopoly on the surface. But, beyond your pieces being rockets and the concept of buying up parts of the solar system, there's the flight mechanics where you have to have the fuel to go from one planet to the next. It adds a layer of thought and fun to it. Plus, you're learning some local astronomy.

There's rules for laser fights, and special roll actions, available as optional rules. It's just fun. There's an updated version available with more recent astronomy, fancier supplies and such, but I haven't bought it yet.

Both of them are games I play with other old farts, as well as kids of all ages. I genuinely can't recommend either of them enough.

Imagine is one of the favourite games in my IRL friend group whenever we get together. It's basically Alias, but instead of explaining the word verbally, you use transparent cards with shapes drawn on them that you can overlap and move around. It's chill, fun, and fits any group size.

Calico is my personal favourite, because the concept of making a kitty blanket is just too cute to pass on.

P. S. The link isn't where I bought the game - I just googled the English version and posted the first link I found.

One I haven’t seen mentioned is Puerto Rico. One thing I like is there is essentially no random chance to this game; everything that happens is a result of choices you or your opponents make.