What is your player personality? If you are someone who does not know much about the board gaming scene, then a cooperative game might be a good entry-point. It also works well for those who are not very fond of competitive games but are looking to enjoy the social aspect of board gaming. Cooperative board games are games where you either win as a team or lose as one. They are designed to have players compete as a team against the game. Events are triggered usually by way of cards and these determine how well (or not well) you and your team of players are doing.
Here are a bunch of cooperative games that we recommend having in your kitty.
In Flash Point Fire Rescue, you and your fellow players are all firefighters responding to a frantic call for help. A fire has broken out and you and your team have mere seconds to assess the situation and gauge the best plan of action to move forward. Each and every turn is tension-filled as you try to fight the fire or rescue victims while still investigating the points of interest. The game comes with two rule sets – family and experience. Add to this the 3 levels of difficulty and you can be assured that no two games will ever be the same.
In this game of Pandemic, time is running out faster than you can imagine. You and other players around the table assume the roles of multiple specialists whose sole job it is to find and cure diseases that are spreading all around the world. During the game, it is imperative that players play to their strengths and plan their steps to eradicate these diseases before they overwhelm the world with outbreaks. The Operation Specialist must focus on building labs to find the cure while the Scientist must go out in the world and try and stop the spread. This nail-biting game will have you rushing to the end.
The Zombies are here in the world of Zombicide. In this co-op game for 1-6 players, you have to kill all the zombies. Each player can select a different character with unique skills and collaboratively fight the zombies and escape alive. The game comes with a cool set of miniatures representing the heroes and the zombies. There are a total of 10 scenarios to be played and more can be downloaded from the designer's website. The game includes a solo mode too, ensuring that the game can be tabled even when it is just you. Zombicide won the 2013 Ludo Award Best Board Game Editor's Choice Winner.
The 2009 Spiel des Jahres "New Worlds Game" Winner, Space Alert, is a 1-5 player co-op game of survival. It's a quick game with a single game lasting about 30 minutes. As the player, you are the crew members of a small spaceship scanning dangerous sectors of the galaxy. Your overriding objective is to protect the ship. The threats vary from space battleships and interceptors to different interstellar monsters and abominations, asteroids or even intruders and malfunctions on the spaceship. You allocate various tasks amongst yourselves in real-time to defend the ship. Work together or be destroyed! The game offers several difficulty levels, huge variability increasing replay value.