The Best Cooperative Board Games to Play as a Team in 2026

There's perhaps no more famous example of teamwork in fiction than the Fellowship of the Ring working together to overcome all of Sauron's power and save Middle-Earth. Now you can re-create that experience with this spinoff from the famous Pandemic system, wildly altered to act as an AI for the dark lord's marching forces than the spreading of disease. Each of you takes a character from the book and, as a group, you choose which plot beats you want to use as objectives, including "what-if" scenarios letting you tell your own version of Tolkein's story as you try to stave off Sauron's conquering armies while building the card hands you need to keep Frodo hidden from hunting wraiths as we discuss in our review.

Truly flexible open-world style board games where you could go almost anywhere, do almost anything, felt like a pipe-dream until Vantage came along. You play as crew members from a crashed starship who've been scattered to different parts of an alien planet. Each location has a richly portrated location card that you're only allowed to describe, not show, to your fellow players, to keep up the theme of only communicating over radio. Your group has a goal but, in reality, it's up to you to decide what you want to do as you wander an exotic world and take in the extraordinary range of options at your disposal, from seeing how far you can explore to settling down and starting a business. If you're wondering how on earth a board game can achieve such a rich outcome, read our Vantage review.

Endeavor: Deep Sea is pitched as a competitive game but it also comes with an excellent cooperative (or solo) mode that you can enjoy as a team, making is super-flexible, especially when you consider its very appealing theme of marine exploration and conservation. It present players with a tough optimisation puzzle that's very varied across a range of different scenarios and possible cards to discover as you set up your research team and dive into the ocean's depths. As you progress you'll build a game engine that'll let you take more and more combos and actions in extremely satisfying chains. Oh, and it won the prestigious Kennerspiel (that's German for "hobby game") award in 2025, too.

The Spiel des Jahres is the most coveted prize in board gaming, but it had never been won by a 2-player only title until 2024, when Sky Team scooped the gong. Its secret is giving two players the thrill of a fistful of dice to roll and the challenge of an instrument board that requires all sorts of different values and combos to satisfy as they try to land a plane, but then limiting communication, making for an incredibly tense time as you try not to accidentally step on each other's toes. Add in a slew of different scenarios of increasing challenge in different conditions at different airports and you've got the ultimate two-player cooperative experience.

f you've every played the video game on which this is based, you'll realise that it's only a short hop to take its insanely addictive deck-building formula and port it to tabletop. And, as we explained in our Slay the Spire: The Board Game review that's exactly what this does, and it's just as insanely additictive as you remember except now you have the added joy of getting to play it alongside friends which, as it turns out, is the big step-up that the game never knew it needed, allowing you to celebrate your triumphs, plot your strategies and bemoan your luck to enrich every tower run.

The trick-taking concept is so baked into traditional competative playing card games like Hearts that it comes as quite a surprise to find it can be repurposed for cooperative games. But that's exactly what happens here and not only is it just as challenging, exciting and fun as it is when playing head-to-head, but this box of delights also adds a narrative layer that sees you playing through the first book of Tolkein's masterwork via a series of missions, as we broke down in our Fellowship of the Ring: Trick Taking Game review. As a bonus, the production is absolutely lovely, especially at such a reasonable price point.

Lots of board games have tried to replicate the success of the Alien franchise, but it took this unlicensed homage to perfect it. Players must work together to survive a terrifying incursion of hostile lifeforms into a Martian base. You're on a constant high wire between staying slow and quiet or getting things done fast but attracting alien attention. It’s full of detailed mechanics that can spin the game out in crazy directions, from literal firefighting to a gung-ho battle against the extraterrestrial foe. The challenge is tough, the narrative detailed and the tension always escalating. But the real kicker is that it's possible for your friends not to be friends at all thanks to hidden goal cards that could be supportive or could be murderous, or the corporate military wing could be coming to take you all out to ensure your silence.

Check out our guide to all of the Nemesis board game expansions for more information about the game.

Narrative-heavy board games have always faced a content problem: there’s only so much variety you can achieve with boards and cards. Sleeping Gods belongs to a family of adventure games that bypassed this problem by putting everything into a huge flip-book, featuring a mix of maps for different quests. Sleeping Gods stands head and shoulders above its peers thanks to two things. First, it’s outstandingly rich storytelling, as you run through a rich mixture of encounters, characters and side-quests as you attempt to guide the lost ship, The Manticore, and her crew home from the strange dimension in which it finds itself. Second, is the detail with which the ship is brought to life, both in terms of strategic resource management to keep her going and her presence in the game world. Such is the wealth of content available that you can easily see a whole different story on a second play through, and such is the fun of doing so that you’ll surely want to try.

This is a “Living Card Game,” which means it’s kind of collectable, like Magic: The Gathering, but there’s no random element. You just buy sets and expansions knowing what cards are in each. And unlike a lot of LCG's, deck building is easy because it’s modular, seeing players pick fixed sets of cards to create decks for their hero and the villain you’re all working against. The meat of play features some classic concepts like dual-use cards alongside novel ideas like each player being able to flip from their hero to their alter-ego, with different abilities and hand sizes. This sets up some really interesting combo-based play where you pull off cinematic moves as you work together to thwart the villain’s schemes and save the day.

To call Gloomhaven a fantasy adventure game is technically accurate, but a bit reductive. It tells the story of mercenaries chasing different goals in a changing world, and the legacy they leave behind. Gloomhaven takes the legacy system from Pandemic Legacy and weaves it into an epic fantasy campaign that takes place over generations. Each hero comes with a personal goal that, when completed, sends the hero into retirement and unlocks new classes and story elements. Upon retiring a hero, you will take control of another, which results in an impressive sense of time progression. The game includes several sealed boxes that are only opened upon reaching certain milestones, which makes Gloomhaven a game with a grand scale that is unmatched in the board game medium.

This epic game is out of print, but now has a sequel, Frosthaven, with an all-new narrative and fresh subsystems which see you expending and guarding the titular town.

At first glance, this game of Stone Age survival doesn’t look anything special. You create a deck of cards for the scenario you want to play and distribute them between the players. Then you take it in turns to flip a card from your pile and face the challenges thereon with the skills and stone tools available to your tiny tribe. The magic happens when tribes come together, pooling their resources to overcome one tough encounter, but doing so loses them the chance to interact with the other tribe’s card. All at once, this mirrors a real slice of stone-age life, agonizing over passing up opportunities in order to secure an important prize, while giving players real emergent cooperation in how much they choose to aid each other. The survival narrative and variety of scenarios are just the icing on the rock cake.

Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island is a daunting and dark game, but players willing to wade through the sea of iconography, hefty rulebook and stifling theme will be rewarded with a satisfying survival simulation that rewards communication and teamwork. Based on the 1719 novel, players take on the role of survivors of a shipwreck that are must work together to gather food, build shelters, stave off attacks and explore the island. The combination of different scenarios and player characters ensure good replayability, while the survival mechanics do a fantastic job of selling the theme.

Check out our gudie do all of the Robinson Crusoe board game expansions for more info.

A lot of games on this list are, to a greater or lesser extent, strategy affairs. But cooperation is a great mechanic to use in party games too, and Just One tops the list. All the players bar one get to see a clue, and they have to write down a word related to that clue. Then all the clues get revealed to the remaining player who has to guess the original word. Sounds too simple, except the catch is that if any of the clues are the same they get wiped, leaving the guesser far less to work with. It’s an ingenious idea that leaves players caught in an uncertain vice over just how obscure they cant get away with being, while still being worried they might be the victim of doublethink.

You likely know trick-taking games from long time classics like Whist and Bridge. The Crew: Mission Deep Sea cleverly repurposes the concept into a cooperative game through the use of missions, demanding that certain players win tricks of particular types. So you might have to win a trick containing a yellow one, for example, or two consecutive tricks or even no tricks at all. This would be easy if you could show each other your cards, so your communication is limited to one card for the entire hand, recasting the game as a strategic puzzle with plenty of tension as you wait to see whether having to follow suit will tease out a critical card or fail the mission. Fast, fun and with fifty varied undersea missions, this is a pearl of a design. This game earned a spot on our best family board games list as well.

Protect your island from a vicious mob of colonizers in this heavy co-op experience. Players are spirits of the land, and must use their unique powers to fend off settlers. Every turn, you’ll play a card from your deck of powers. Matching a card’s element with the element of the spirit usually grants a bonus effect, meaning that careful planning is necessary.

As the game goes on, the colonists will inevitably spread and ravage the land, making Spirit Island a race against the clock. They’re predictable, though, and if you plan efficiently you can head them off before they do too much damage. Players’ cards combo off of each other nicely, too, and there are few things in tabletop gaming as satisfying as eliminating a host of settlers in one fell swoop. Spirit Island is substantially more complex than other games of this style (Pandemic, Forbidden Island, etc.), making it an ideal choice for those seeking a meatier co-op experience.

For more ideas, check out our roundups of the best board games for adults and the best trivia board games.

Matt Thrower is a contributing freelancer for IGN, specializing in tabletop games. You can reach him on BlueSky at @mattthr.bsky.social.