Best Cooperative Board Games for Families and Adults

Forbidden Desert is Matt Leacock's follow-up to Forbidden Island, and the stronger of the two. Your team crash-lands in a desert city laid out as a grid of tiles and must dig up the four parts of a flying machine and escape before the storm buries you or the water runs out. Each player takes one of six adventurers with a special ability, such as the Climber who stands on buried tiles or the Water Carrier who refills canteens.

The clever part is the storm. A gap in the grid moves every turn, sliding tiles around it and piling sand on them, so the map you planned on is gone by your next turn. Water is shared and scarce, which forces conversations about who walks where. The storm meter starts at one of four difficulty levels, so a family can win the first game and an adult group can still lose on the hardest setting.

The weaknesses are the ones every co-op shares. A confident player can direct everyone else, and the game does nothing to stop that. Once a group masters it, replay comes only from harder difficulty.

Pandemic is the cooperative board game most others are measured against. Matt Leacock designed it in 2008, and the current Z-Man edition adds two roles for seven in total. Players are a team of specialists, such as the Medic, Scientist and Dispatcher, moving around a world map of 48 cities. Four diseases spread from city to city, and the team wins by discovering all four cures before outbreaks, cubes or the player deck run out.

The tension comes from the epidemic cards. You shuffle 4, 5 or 6 into the player deck to set the difficulty, and each one intensifies infection and reshuffles cities that already have cubes back on top of the infection deck. The cities you just treated get hit again, so the game keeps pressure exactly where you are weakest. Wins usually come down to the last few cards.

The common complaint is quarterbacking. All hands are open, so one experienced player can direct every move, and quiet players can end up watching. Rules variations help, but the box itself does not solve it. Pandemic also caps at four, and once a group wins comfortably at six epidemics, the base game has little left to teach.

Sleeping Gods is a cooperative storytelling campaign, and the closest a board game gets to a choose-your-path novel. Ryan Laukat designed and illustrated it, and Red Raven Games released it in 2021. Your crew sails the steamship Manticore through a strange sea in 1929, trying to find enough totems to get home. The map is an atlas book: sailing off the edge of one page opens the next, and every numbered location sends you into the storybook for an encounter with choices.

The campaign is long and flexible. Reviewers report full playthroughs of roughly 12 to 20 hours, and a journey log lets you save at any point, so sessions can be one hour or four. Combat uses cards rather than dice, and crew members gain abilities and injuries that carry forward. The box holds more than 400 cards.

The trade-offs are commitment and price. At $109.99 tracked, Sleeping Gods is the most expensive pick by far. It needs the same group, or a solo player, coming back several times. The rulebook is heavier than the other two, and replaying the same campaign is far less interesting than the first voyage.