What are your favorite board games? I'm looking for games that are satisfying and lead to a sense of accomplishment or fulfillment or connection.

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We have a rule at my house: Never Monopoly.

It really is the worst.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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.

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Oh, I'm going to have to pick up a copy of Mists over Carcassonne. Thank you!

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Looks fun, just ordered the game now!

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I didn't think anyone else knew about Menara. It's so good, and no other game has made me laugh that hard.

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Newer cooperative games mostly avoid the quarterbacking issue by having secret info, or just making it complicated enough that it's impractical for 1 person to track everything.

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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

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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.

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It's definitely an underrated game!!

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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.

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Oh yeah. Dead of Winter is so good!

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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

Yeah. Diplomacy is fantastic...and we can strongly recommend that OP avoid it, anyway. Lol.

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tldr; punish the poor fuckers getting out of jail. yay capitalism!

Wow. I never caught this. Considering the game's origin as an anti-capitalist teaching aid, I wonder if it's intentional.

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If you like Horrified, you should try and track down the Ravensburger Wonder Woman game. Similar style but has an awesome mechanic to prevent coop quarterbacking.

Players strategize using a set of face up cards, but receive some face down cards afterward and have to program 3 actions using the whole set without communicating, adapting plans based on the newly revealed cards. Then each action plays out simultaneously for all players. It makes sense in action and is really quite elegant. I’m a big fan.

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Downside is Catan is fucking boring. It’s one of those games where most of the time you’re stuck waiting for your next turn. 5-6 player add on just makes the game infinitely worse. Out of the expansions, Seafarers is nice since it gives you more to do, tho the standalone Starfarers is my go to pick if I gotta play Catan since it sorta has the best parts of all expansions plus random encounters and a more even start. I also like that in the 5-6 player mode 2 players take their turns simultaneously. Tho Catan still isn’t my go-to of board games.

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Ouhhh that's interesting. I love Horrified, it is one of my favourite game, but unfortunately I often end uo quaterbacking while I would prefer people sharing their thoughts. Will check this one out for sure, thanks for the suggestions !

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We've really enjoyed playing Slay The Spire on Tabletop Simulator. It's really fun to try and combine your abilites for the best results. And the roguelite makes it fun to play over and over again, just like the pc game. I would have already bought the physical game if it wasn't around 150€ here

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What are your favorite board games? I'm looking for games that are satisfying and lead to a sense of accomplishment or fulfillment or connection.