The best cooperative board games

As if orchestrating a fireworks display isn't tricky enough, Hanabi wants you to do it with a pretty significant handicap. With only a handful of cards, you’re trying to play your colourful explosions in the correct sequence, with any incorrect plays costing you one of your precious fuse tokens. Run out and the display is over!

While that sounds relatively simple, the catch is that you hold your hand of cards facing everyone else, and can never look at your own cards. Other players can give you hints about what is in your hand, but never specific enough to give you all the details, making Hanabi a delightful deductive reasoning puzzle.

You play a group of survivors stranded among the dunes, trying to piece together an ancient flying machine to escape. Each turn, sand tiles will pile up on the different spots you need to search, and you’ll have to take turns prioritizing the different parts of survival: removing sand, searching for parts, and finding water to stay alive. Really easy for even new players or kids to learn and play, Forbidden Desert randomizes each time you play it, keeping it fresh each time.

A campaign game where your chosen investigators attempt to solve Lovecraftian mysteries without being driven mad or ripped to shreds. As you'd expect from the name, it's all about cards, with your heroes represented as a deck but also the scenarios you take on, the locations you explore, and the enemies you fight.

Each mission puts its own clever twist on the action. In one you might be exploring a town and trying to root out secret cultists, while another might be a desperate escape from a burning building, or a tense battle against the undead. Your successes and failures in each will follow you, modifying both your own deck and subsequent scenarios, adding further wrinkles.

If you enjoy your descent into darkness, numerous expansions allow you to keep the adventures going. Just beware that collecting them all can become a dangerous obsession...

A spin on classic deck-builder Star Realms, Frontiers adds additional cards to support more players, and changes the game to support cooperative play against special new nemesis enemies, each of which has their own unique rules. You’ll draft starships and starbases to improve your deck, and each card can help you afford to draft better ones, attack the enemy, or provide special abilities. It’s a portable and accessible take on a deck-builder, and compatible with all the existing Star Realms expansions, so you can add piles of options if you want a grander experience.

Step into the boots of an iconic hero from The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, gather their deck of cards (customising it by changing their class and gear, if you like), and set out on a series of story-rich campaigns.

Play is guided by an excellent companion app for phones, tablets, and PC, which cleverly streamlines play. Forget flipping through the manual or painstakingly playing out enemy turns, all the tedium is handled for you.

Each mission sees you either exploring a map by placing tiles and moving your miniatures across them, or taking on a challenge on a simple battle map. It's a simple set-up, but creative scenario design keeps it fresh and exciting. An exploration map might be a stealthy journey avoiding patrolling orcish sentries, or a desperate search through ancient ruins for a powerful artifact. A battle map might herald a tense tactical combat against a brutal boss monster, or a spot of mystery solving as you try and root out a traitor in a cosy inn. It's like a tabletop RPG campaign with the app as your diligent Dungeon Master.

Just like the original videogame, this tabletop adaptation is all about creating a beautiful tableau of rolling hills, rivers, and quaint little towns.

You have two stacks: the normal tiles and the task tiles. Task tiles ask you to build around them in some way, like surrounding a town with more town tiles. There are points to be won for completing these, and each normal tile does have some restrictions (you can only place the connecting sides of river and railroad tiles against connecting tile edges, for example), but Dorfromantik doesn’t have any way to lose. You and your friends are simply shooting for the high score each time, and the real reward is just a soothing experience ending in a beautiful map.

To make sure you still have something to strive for, Dorfromantik offers milestone rewards at different point totals, allowing you to open a series of sealed boxes and add more pieces to the game. It's a lovely way of gently increasing complexity and granting a sense of progression in a non-campaign experience.

Truly a game of pushing your luck for everyone involved, The Grizzled casts you as soldiers in the trenches of the Great War, all of whom just want to make it out alive. Each round, the current leader will choose a number of cards for all players to draw from the deck, and then players must take turns either playing a card or ducking out on the mission, at the end of which more cards are added to the deck.

Cards might be threats, where too many at once will cause the mission to fail, or cards that represent the fears and worries of the soldiers, so players have to be careful when they choose to play or back out—because the ultimate goal is to deplete the draw deck to win. The lack of shared information about what cards each player has creates a sense of anxiety that’s perfect for the theme, because any wrong move could doom the group's mission to being their last time over the top.