Snag Some Cooperative Games for Your Less Competitive Gift Recipients

I love playing all types of games and am competitive to a fault. It’s kind of ironic because one of my favorite genres of games is the polar opposite of that. If you aren’t familiar with cooperative games, then you’re missing out. Instead of working against one another, you’re working toward a common goal. We often refer to it as everyone against the board. Everyone wins or everyone loses – together. The idea of everyone being on the same team changes the entire feel of the experience. The fact that two of the three winners of this year’s Spiel des Jahres, the game industry’s most prestigious award, were cooperative games is pretty telling of their impact. If you have a family member who struggles with winning or losing gracefully, introduce them to cooperative games. Read over the ones on this list to match up with the gift recipients on your list:

Avatar: Aang’s Destiny

The Op

Experience the epic story-telling of Avatar: The Last Airbender in this easy-to-learn Deck-Building Game. Players will take on the heroic role of Aang and his allies and play cooperatively to defeat Adversaries, complete Objectives, and make their way through the four nations to restore balance to the world and fulfill Aang’s destiny as the Avatar.

Come together and cooperatively build community in this city-building game. As city expansion is approved and starter tiles are laid, the mayor secretly decides where to build new amenities or businesses. Will all other players be able to collectively guess what the mayor has in mind, linking tiles to create tree-lined streets? Make the right connections and watch as a unique and quirky city emerges before your eyes!

Cloudship

AMIGO Games

Grow flowers by dropping water into the correct plots of land from your cloudship dangling above the board. But, be careful not to drop hail, and to drop the water into the correct spaces. Cooperatively grow the flowers before the storm arrives!

Tranquility: The Ascent

Lucky Duck Games

Tranquility: The Ascent is a standalone sequel to Tranquility, with players working together to complete a grid of numbers as they scale the mountain. Starting at the bottom of the mountain, players are tasked with completing a pyramid-shaped grid from the base to the summit. If players complete the mountain and top it with a summit card, they win; if a player cannot take an action on their turn, everyone loses.

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In this cooperative art-themed card game for three to seven players, there are two teams: painters and museum directors. At the start of the game, the museum directors present two cards, each with a picture that represents a visual theme that they have chosen for an upcoming museum exhibition. Next, the painters place some matching picture cards from their hand face down.The museum directors have to guess which picture cards the painters have submitted for the exhibition and which are forgeries.

Celtic Animals Knot Dice

Black Oak Games

Create beautiful Celtic knot designs while playing with these amazing dice! These new Celtic Animals Knot Dice have numbers (pips) on the faces and animal designs, for all sorts of new puzzles and an amazing cooperative game.

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DaDaDa

The Op

Dadada™ is the outlandish party game for everybody! It’s the game where saying “Oofdaloo” refers to a toothbrush, or “Foorabing” describes the sun – You’ll be scratching your head and laughing out loud in this soon to be party favorite. With a variety of sounds and icons, you create a new language each time you play!

Magic Dwarf

AMIGO Games

The card game followup to the award-winning Magic Mountain! Race your apprentices down the path, before the evil witches get to the end. Play cooperatively or competitively!

Spotlight is a cooperative game where you look for hidden pictures… with a magic flashlight! Start each round by looking at the top card from the deck to determine the hidden picture to find. Then, all players use their flashlight to look for all copies of the hidden picture! Each board is composed of a transparent layer on top, depicting a different part of the game scene, and a black cardboard background, that makes everything dark and difficult to see… but the white spot on the flashlight can “illuminate” the scene with a magic optical effect! No batteries required!

Magic Maze Tower

Sit Down Games

Magic Maze Tower is a new standalone game in the universe of the Magic Maze line. The adventures of the dwarf, the elf, the barbarian and the magician at the mall were a failure and our (brave) adventurers find themselves prisoners of a tower, or rather, of a high-security prison. Magic Maze Tower is played on a single Level tile, without an hourglass (you can take your time!), without a “do something” token, but the communication is still limited: Speaking is forbidden.

Toriki: The Castaway Island

Lucky Duck Games

Explore a deserted island in this digital-hybrid cooperative adventure game that’s perfect for the whole family! You’ll need to gather food and items, combine resources to craft items, chart the findings you discover, and eventually find your way off the island. The adventure plays in 6-8 hours, with opportunities to stop and save the game in the app at any time.

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Adventure Party

Smirk & Dagger Games

A cooperative, party-weight, guessing game that delivers a robust role-playing experience.You and your friends are classic fantasy characters facing up to 3 unique adventure scenarios – but you will be rolling your 20-sided die behind your player screen so no one can see the result. Based on your roll, you will describe your characters plan of attack – and then what happens… with enough detail that the GM (Guess Master) can guess as close to your roll as possible.

One of the best benefits of cooperative games is that it allows players of different experience levels to participate together. Cooperative games are an excellent option for family game nights also!

Are you more inclined to play a competitive or cooperative game?

 

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