Category: Co-op Games

Big Book of Madness, The

| OTSG Staff

So far your first year at the Elementary College has been slightly disappointing. They taught you to light a flickering flame at the tip of your finger, but other than that you’ve spent much more time reading books than learning powerful spells as future great wizards like you should.

So when you heard about the Big Book of Madness hidden in the great school library, you couldn’t help but to sneak in and peek in this intriguing tome in spite of your professors’ warnings. When you slowly lift the cover of the terrible book, dozens of dreadful creatures rush out, threatening to destroy the world itself! This was your mistake, and only you can fix it now! Learn from the library to fight back against the monsters, and try not to sink into insanity…

The Big Book of Madness is a challenging co-operative game in which the players are magic students who must act as a team to turn all the pages of the book, then shut it by defeating the terrible monsters they’ve just freed.

Each player has their own element deck that they build during the game and use for several purposes, such as learning or casting a spell, adding a new element to their deck, destroy or healing a curse. Spells allow you to support your playmates, improve your deck, draw cards, etc. — but the monsters from the book fight back. Each comes with terrible curses that are triggered every turn unless you dispel them in time. They will make you discard elements, add madness cards to your deck, or lose spells…

If you manage to turn six pages and defeat all of the monsters, you win the game!

Game Mechanics:

  • Cooperative Game
  • Hand Management
  • Player Elimination
  • Variable Player Powers

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • 30 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.68

Astro Knights: Eternity

| OTSG Staff

You and your group of rag-tag intergalactic scrappers are suddenly faced with the responsibility of defending your home world from those that seek to destroy it. Join forces and work together in this cooperative deck builder to strategically defeat the Boss before they destroy you and all you love. Play through all the scenarios and master the new mechanics introduced in this stand-alone continuation of the Astro Knights series!

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 45 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.86

Adventures of Robin Hood, the 🟢

| kithorning

Take on the roles of Robin Hood and his companions as you struggle against Prince John and the sheriff in this innovative cooperative board game. Your adventures will take place on a “living” game board, that “remembers” what you have accomplished in previous missions and unveils new secrets and actions as you further the campaign. Everything is easy to assemble and disassemble, making set up and clean up as quick as can be!

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.82

Frostpunk: The Board Game

| OTSG Staff

In Frostpunk: The Board Game, up to four players will take on the role of leaders of a small colony of survivors in a post-apocalyptic world that was hit by a severe ice age. Their duty is to effectively manage both its infrastructure and citizens. The core gameplay will be brutal, challenging, and complex, but easy to learn. The citizens won’t just be speechless pieces on the board. Society members will issue demands and react accordingly to the current mood, so every decision and action bears consequences.

The players will decide the fate of their people. Will you treat them like another resource? Are you going to be an inspiring builder, a fearless explorer, or a bright scientist? Is your rule going to be a sting of tyranny or an era of law and equality?

The game is based on a bestseller video game by 11bit studios, the creators of This War Of Mine. The original (digital) edition of Frostpunk is a highly successful strategy-survival-city-builder, a BAFTA-nominee that originally launched in 2018.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 120 – 150 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 4.39

Dawn of the Zeds

| OTSG Staff

The postcards in every local drug store read, “Welcome to Fabulous Farmingdale!”, an ad campaign that was the brainchild of Mayor Hernandez (who coincidentally employed his wife’s public relations firm to market their community). But right now, things are far from fabulous in Farmingdale and, for once, everyone isn’t blaming the Mayor. Some kind of virus or poison is turning ordinary people into vicious, zombie-like killers. It is not clear how the disease spreads (though it seems that physical contact is certainly one way), but it is obvious what the illness does to its victims.

These undead, nicknamed “Zeds” from the local newscasts as the acronym for “Zombie Epidemic Disease,” are now converging on your corner of the world around Farmingdale. As best you can tell, you have been left to your own devices to stop them while the National Guard organizes a relief column, but that could take days, perhaps weeks, for them to fight their way to you and until then, what can you do?

With little choice between survival and a gruesome (un)death, you realize that you must coordinate the defense of the town of Farmingdale and its surrounding villages. You must lead the good citizens and emerging heroes of these communities to halt the Zeds’ advances by (re)killing them, attempt to coordinate the discovery of a cure to this vile scourge, and preserve as much of the area and as many of its inhabitants as possible. There’s no time to lose…

Game Mechanics:

  • Campaign / Battle Card Driven
  • Cooperative Game
  • Dice Rolling
  • Solo / Solitaire Game

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 5 Players
  • 90 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.80

Arkham Horror: The Card Game

| OTSG Staff

Something evil stirs in Arkham, and only you can stop it. Blurring the traditional lines between role-playing and card game experiences, Arkham Horror: The Card Game is a Living Card Game of Lovecraftian mystery, monsters, and madness!

In the game, you and your friend (or up to three friends with two Core Sets) become characters within the quiet New England town of Arkham. You have your talents, sure, but you also have your flaws. Perhaps you’ve dabbled a little too much in the writings of the Necronomicon, and its words continue to haunt you. Perhaps you feel compelled to cover up any signs of otherworldly evils, hampering your own investigations in order to protect the quiet confidence of the greater population. Perhaps you’ll be scarred by your encounters with a ghoulish cult.

No matter what compels you, no matter what haunts you, you’ll find both your strengths and weaknesses reflected in your custom deck of cards, and these cards will be your resources as you work with your friends to unravel the world’s most terrifying mysteries.

Each of your adventures in Arkham Horror LCG carries you deeper into mystery. You’ll find cultists and foul rituals. You’ll find haunted houses and strange creatures. And you may find signs of the Ancient Ones straining against the barriers to our world…

The basic mode of play in Arkham LCG is not the adventure, but the campaign. You might be scarred by your adventures, your sanity may be strained, and you may alter Arkham’s landscape, burning buildings to the ground. All your choices and actions have consequences that reach far beyond the immediate resolution of the scenario at hand—and your actions may earn you valuable experience with which you can better prepare yourself for the adventures that still lie before you.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.55

Arkham Horror

| OTSG Staff

The year is 1926, and it is the height of the Roaring Twenties. Flappers dance till dawn in smoke-filled speakeasies, drinking alcohol supplied by rum runners and the mob. It’s a celebration to end all celebrations in the aftermath of the War to End All Wars.

Yet a dark shadow grows in the city of Arkham. Alien entities known as Ancient Ones lurk in the emptiness beyond space and time, writhing at the thresholds between worlds. Occult rituals must be stopped and alien creatures destroyed before the Ancient Ones make our world their ruined dominion.

Only a handful of investigators stand against the Arkham Horror. Will they prevail?

Arkham Horror (Third Edition) is a cooperative board game for one to six players who take on the roles of investigators trying to rid the world of eldritch beings known as Ancient Ones. Based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, players will have to gather clues, defeat terrifying monsters, and find tools and allies if they are to stand any chance of defeating the creatures that dwell just beyond the veil of our reality.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 6 Players
  • 120 – 180 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.36

Hour of Need

| OTSG Staff

The pages of Modern-day Saga Comics are filled with heroes and villains doing battle across both reality and the shared inter-dimensional space of the Astrallacy. While nefarious villains seek power and material wealth, valiant heroes fight to defend those that are caught in the middle of these epic conflicts—it is these everyday people that make reality worth fighting for, and now is their hour of need!

Hour of Need is a cooperative game of comic book action for 1–4 players (or up to 6 players with available expansions). Designed by Adam and Brady Sadler, Hour of Need is the latest installment in their line of Modular Deck System (MDS) games. Set in an original world inspired by modern comic books, Hour of Need puts players in the roles of diverse heroes attempting to thwart dangerous villains from carrying out nefarious deeds!

In each game of Hour of Need, players will need to use their chosen hero decks to tactically solve problems and thwart their chosen villain’s schemes, as presented by the chosen issue deck and board. Utilizing simultaneous turns that provides the framework for collaborative strategy, players have to work together to reveal the villain and prepare for the final showdown!

Featuring fast gameplay, highly-detailed miniatures, and a variety of modular fixed decks for heroes, villains, and issues, Hour of Need lets players create their own comic book stories in the MDS Comics world!

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 30 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.80

Hellboy: the Board Game

| OTSG Staff

Hellboy: The Board Game is a co-operative experience in which players face off against some of the comic’s most famous foes. Up to four people take control of iconic BPRD members, such as Hellboy, Abe Sapien, and Roger the Homunculus, then explore gothic locations and uncover ancient artifacts.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.92

Ghost Stories

| OTSG Staff

Ghost Stories is a cooperative game in which the players protect the village from incarnations of the lord of hell – Wu-Feng – and his legions of ghosts before they haunt a town and recover the ashes that will allow him to return to life. Each Player represents a Taoist monk working together with the others to fight off waves of ghosts.

The players, using teamwork, will have to exorcise the ghosts that appear during the course of the game. At the beginning of his turn, a player brings a ghost into play and places it on a free spot, and more than one can come in at the same time. The ghosts all have abilities of their own – some affecting the Taoists and their powers, some causing the active player to roll the curse die for a random effect, and others haunting the villager tiles and blocking that tile’s special action. On his turn, a Taoist can move on a tile in order to exorcise adjacent ghosts or to benefit from the villager living on the tile, providing it is not haunted. Each tile of the village allows the players to benefit from a different bonus. With the cemetery, for example, Taoists can bring a dead Taoist back to life, while the herbalist allows to recover spent Tao tokens, etc. It will also be possible to get traps or move ghosts or unhaunt other village tiles.

To exorcise a ghost, the Taoist rolls three Tao dice with different colors: red, blue, green, yellow, black, and white. If the result of the roll matches the color(s) of the ghost or incarnation of Wu-Feng, the exorcism succeeds. The white result is a wild color that can be used as any color. For example, to exorcise a green ghost with 3 resistance, you need to roll three green, three white, or a combination of both. If your die rolls fall short, you can also use Tao tokens that match the color in addition to your roll. You may choose to use these after your roll. Taoists gain these tokens by using certain village tiles or by exorcising certain ghosts. One of the Taoists has a power that allows him to receive such a token once per turn.

To win, the players must defeat the incarnation of Wu-Feng, a boss who arrives at the end of the game. There are also harder difficulty levels that add more incarnations of Wu-Feng, in which to win, you must defeat all of them.

There are many more ways to lose, however. The players lose if three of the village’s tiles are haunted, if the draw pile is emptied while the incarnation of Wu-Feng is still in play, or if all the priests are dead.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • ~60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.91