Happy New Year! We finish writing this list on December 31, 2023 and reflect on what a great year it has been for cooperative games! This list is a culmination of the very full year of 2023 playing cooperative game with our friends!
We played about 52 brand new cooperative games over the past year! Whew! There were even more solo and cooperative and expansions in there! This year was an especially good year for expansions and solo games, so if you are surprised a game didn’t make this Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2023 this year, make sure you check out our Top 10 Cooperative Solo Board and Card Games of 2023 or our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2023 to see if it maybe made one of those lists!
As we reflect back on the New Year, we remind everyone that we don’t take any money or promotions or advertising of any kind here at Co-op Gestalt: we buy all the games here with our own money! All of our opinions are our own! You may not like our opinions, but at least you know they are our own. We love cooperative games and just want to share those gestalt experiences with everyone!
Honorable Mention: Kinfire Chronicles
Plays Solo: Yes (but you have to play two characters, and it’s better cooperative)
Player Count: 1 to 4
Ages: 14+
Length: 45-60 minutes per chapter, 20+ chapters
Kinfire Chronicles is a wonderful game, of which I played far too little. It works okay as a solo game, but you must play two characters to play. Some of the mechanisms (the Boost idea in particular) work better in a cooperative game, and I think this game is really meant to be played with you and your friends going through a bit of a dungeon crawl.
The best thing about this Dungeon Crawler is how quickly you can learn the rules. Games like Gloomhaven have 56 page rulebooks; in this dungeon crawler, the rules come out piecemeal, making it easy for everyone to learn as you go.
The reason this makes the Honorable Mention is simple: we didn’t get to play nearly enough of this! It’s got a long campaign, and my friends were tired of campaigns … even though this one is easy to get into. What we did see what great: we look forward to playing more! Given what we’ve seen, this may well shoot to the top of the charts the more we play!
One of my favorite parts of this game were the acrylic standees from the Upgrade Kit! See above! If you find yourself drawn to this game, I think I would strongly suggest getting the Upgrade Kit for the standees and some other amazing upgrades!
Take a look at our review of Kinfire Chronicles here to see if this is a game you and your friends might really enjoy!
10. The Lord of the Rings Adventure Book Game
Plays Solo: Yes (but you have to play a phantom hand)
Player Count: 1 to 4
Ages: 10+
Length: 20 minutes per chapter, 8 chapters total
This game is part of the Adventure Book Series of games, which is a system on which can play different Intellectual Properties. We saw the first one of these games with The Princess Bride Adventure Book Game and really liked that (see here)! This new one, based on Lord of the Rings, is probably the best evolution of this system! It’s a light (ish) campaign in the world of Lord of the Rings!
My solo play was quite fun, but my cooperative play with Sara was one of my favorite experiences of the year! Players work together to make decisions and control the fate of the entire party (not just one character)! Every chapter has many tense decisions! The best part of this system is that rings are fantastic wild cards, but each use of a ring causes corruption for the entire campaign! So, all throughout the game, you are have to decide: “Do I use the ring to progress but take the corruption?”
Many of my friends have bought and played and loved this game too: it’s been quite the hit in my gaming circles. The simplicity and the theme both just shine through!
See our review of the Lord Of The Rings Adventure Book Game here to see if this is something you might like!
9. Deep Rock Galactic
Plays Solo: Yes (either the solo player alternates between two dwarves or plays a single dwarf with the BOSCO robot)
Player Count: 1 to 4
Ages: 12+
Length: 60-150 minutes (it really depends on the mission you go on)
Deep Rock Galactic was okay to pretty good in our first few sessions, but it seemed to get better the more we played it! This was mostly due to the documentation: when this first came out, the rules that came with the game weren’t “quite” enough to play through. But, as the game became more mainstream, you could get updated rules, questions answered, and just more documentation. Once you had that, the game became a lot more fun because the rules were better/understandable!
This minis are great! And even if this game is a little uneven and random, it’s still fun romp in this universe with dwarves blasting monsters and caverns! If the theme speaks to you, or if you know the video game well, I think you will enjoy this game that much more!
Deep Rock Galactic was also a suprising hit at RichieCon 2023 this year! It’s surprising because it’s a big and daunting game, but the fans of the video game seemed really interested in this game!
Take a look at our review here of Deep Rock Galactic The Board Game to see if this is something you might enjoy!
8. Marvel D.A.G.G.E.R. (or Marvel DAGGER)
Plays Solo: Yes (the solo player alternates between two heroes)
Player Count: 1 to 5 (but best at lower player counts)
Ages: 12+
Length: 3-4 hours (yep, you read that right)
In this game, each player plays a Marvel super-hero working in a team! Players travel the world together to take out the bad guy! This is all about playing a super-hero team banding together to save the world! This is an action point game, as each player gets a certain number of actions each turn to move, attack, and do good!
Each player plays a hero of their choice, but since there is some randomness in the game (dice get rolled for combat), it is possible to get destroyed early on. To combat that randomness, each player really plays a Hero Pair: the other side of the hero card becomes a hero you assume if the first hero dies! This is a really nice way to allow players to keep playing without complete hero elimination!
This is a real long game (3-4 hours), and the turns can be very long; it’s probably better at lower player counts.
I have been told Marvel DAGGER is basically Eldritch Horror rethemed to a Marvel game, but having never played Eldritch Horror, I have no means of comparison! I just know that I had fun playing, and it’s a fun (if long) Marvel game! Just be aware of what you are getting into if you want to try it out! Avengers Assemble!
7. Doomensions: A Pop-Up Mystery Manor
Plays Solo: Yes (but like most escape room games, it’s better with more brains)
Player Count: 1 to 4 (we were also able to play with 5)
Ages: 14+
Length: 10-15 hours, 90 – 120 minutes per chapter, 5 chapters total (including finale)
This is a cooperative escape room with a pop-up manor! It is so cool looking when you see it all set up: see the picture above!
The game plays over 4 chapters (5 if you count the finale), and each chapter takes about 90 to 120 minutes to play. This is a quite a commitment: we ended up playing over a month at a rate of about 2 chapters per session.
The components are absolutely amazing, probably one of the best productions of the year! But of course, the centerpiece of the game is a pop-up manor: See below. Just be aware that, even though the cover looks kinda “kid-like”, this is absolutely a game for adults because of the complexity and subject matter.
6. Valor and Villainy: Lludwick’s Labyrinth
Plays Solo: Yes (the solo player alternates between two heroes)
Player Count: 1 to 6
Ages: 14+
Length: 25 minutes per player (but really more like 50 minutes per player)
Lludwick’s Labyrinth went over really well for our group! This is a standalone cooperative dungeon crawler game in the Valor and Villainy universe where players pursue a campaign to save the pizza maker (I kid you not!). This game has a sense of humor with its art and presentation that I really appreciate.
This is a dungeon crawler with dice, but it has lots of cooperation and good decisions! It also has probably the best tutorial I have ever seen in a board game! That first tutorial game makes it clear what you can and cannot do during a game!
In the end, it might be a little long and a little complex, but it was a fun romp! We even were able to bring in a 5th player a few times, so even though it was a campaign, it was easy to add/subtract people!
Take a look at our review of Lludwick’s Labyrinth to see if this is something you might like!
5. Suspects: Eternal Detective Claire Harper and Adele & Neville, Investigative Reporters
Plays Solo: Yes (and plays solo well)
Player Count: 1 to 6
Ages: 10+
Length: 90 minutes per mystery, 3 per box
This is actually a two-way tie, belying the weird release schedules of some games worldwide. These are both two games in the same series of the Suspects Murder Mystery games (and would fit well on our Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games). We reviewed the original orange box version of Suspects: Claire Harper Takes The Stage here back in 2022 and came to love it! That game made the #4 position of our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2022! These new Suspects games are just more detective games in that same series! They all present mysteries in a pack of about 54 oversized cards (where each box comes with 3 mysteries)!
Suspects: Eternal Detective Claire Harper was officially released in 2022 (if you believe BGG), but it wasn’t available in the USA until late 2023, so I count it as a 2023 game. We loved this game: see our review of Suspects: Eternal Detective Claire Harper here to see if you would like this version! This is just more mysteries in the world of Claire Harper like the original Suspects!
Suspects: Adele & Neville, Investigative Reporters official release was 2023, so it can qualify for this list! In fact, we received both Suspects copies at the same time! We haven’t officially reviewed the Adele & Neville version, but we have played it and loved it almost as much as the original Suspects games! This still feels like the same world, but instead of playing Claire Harper (who loves Agatha Christie), you play as reporters Adele and Neville (who feel very much like Tommy and Tuppence from the Agatha Christie novels) solving crimes!
All the Suspects boxes have 3 mysteries, wherein the mysteries is all on cards! These are fantastic mysteries that make you feel like an investigator in this world!
I liked the Suspects series solo so much that the Suspects: Eternal Detective Claire Harper made the #1 spot on the Top 10 Solo Board and Card Games of 2023!
4. Freelancers
Plays Solo: Officially from the box, no, but the website (where you run the app) has official rules for solo.
Player Count: 3 to 7 (1 or 2 player rules on the website)
Ages: 14+ (in NSFW mode, it’s probably a 18+)
Length: 90+ minutes
Freelancers is the next great game in the Crossroads line, the most recent being Forgotten Waters! Forgotten Waters was such a great game, it made many of our Top 10 lists: Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2020, Top 10 Cooperative Swashbuckling Games, and Top 10 Cooperative Storybook/Storytelling Games! Freelancers is the next evolution of this system: it’s a cooperative, funny, storybook game in the a wacky post-apocalyptic universe!
Both Forgotten Waters and Freelancers require an App (actually, a website you visit): the story is contained on the website! There’s plenty of interactions and lots of great writing and voice acting! This universe really comes alive and makes you laugh! This game is so much fun!
One of the many great things about this game is that there are bunch of positions that need to be crewed, so everyone always stays involved! And the game works well, maybe even better, at higher player counts! We played a 5-Player game and it just worked so well!
My first game session of Freelancers was one of my favorite gaming moments of the year: it was so much fun, and so easy to get into, and everyone was involved the whole time! This was a great game! The story is great! The voice-acting is great! The App is great!
Take a look at our review of Freelancers to see if this is something you might enjoy!
3. Race To The Raft
Plays Solo: Yes (slight mods to rules)
Player Count: 1 to 4
Ages: 8+
Length: Anywhere from 40-60 minutes
Race To The Raft could have easily been the #1 spot on our list! Honestly, it only ended at #3 because the components are slightly better for #2 and #1! And the components for this game were great!
This cooperative tile-laying game is a puzzle-solvers dream! Players have to figure out how collectively to move a group of cats to the raft! Every tile you place has so many choices: which stack do you draw from? What orientation do you use? Where on the map? Do I move my cat? Where do I put the fire tiles? Everything you do is a choice: if you get hoisted by your own petard, it feels like your own fault!
This game was quite a hit at RichieCon 2023! Even if players didn’t love cats or the theme, this game still went over quite well! And people who loved cats were fighting to play this! This game has just gone over like gangbusters in my play groups! This cooperative tile-laying game should have took the #1 spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Tile Laying/Placement Games!
Take a look at our review of Race To The Raft!
2. Tesseract
Plays Solo: Yes (solo players operates two characters)
Player Count: 1 to 4
Ages: 14+
Length: 60 minutes
Tesseract is a cooperative cube game that was #1 on our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2023! Players cooperatively deconstruct a cube, pulling dice off of it!
And the plastic cubes that come with this game are just some of the amazing components that come with this game! There’s a lazy susan for spinning the cube and optional metal dice!
The toy factor is quite high in this game, especially with the metal dice, but my friends and I had a blast playing this! The components are amazing (especially the metal dice)!
With all the emphasis on the components, it’s good to note we also really enjoyed the cooperative game, pulling dice off the cube to save the universe from imploding! This is a fun game with a major toy factor issue to reel you in!
Take a look at our review of Tesseract to see if this is something you might enjoy!
1. The Arkham Asylum Files: Panic in Gotham City
Plays Solo: Yes (but you really want more than 1 player: like most Escape Room gams, more brains is better!)
Player Count: 1 to 6
Ages: 13+
Length: 5-6 Hours totals, “about” 50 minutes per chapter (for 7 chapters)
When you look at the components of #2, you might what wonder “How could #1 have better components than metal dice?” You do when you get an augmented reality escape room in the Batman universe!
This is a weird one: you set up some really great components, but still look at the city through your augmented reality app! As you stare at the city through the app, things appears and disappear! It hard to describe how cool this experience was!
This is an escape room game: players cooperative solve puzzles in the Gotham City universe. This universe lives physically on the table and virtually in your app! In between the escape room puzzles, the augmented reality, and the really cool components that came in the game (besides the augmented reality), this was my favorite experience of the year!
The game is campaign game over 7 chapters, which we ended up doing in 3 separate sessions. After I was done, I packed it back up and gave to Charlie and Allison (my escape room buddies) so they could play it! (Charlie and Allison just gave it back to me the other night, saying they had a great time playing it!)
This cooperative escape room with augmented reality was easily my favorite experience of the year! Take a look our experience with the game in our review of The Arkham Asylum Files: Panic in Gotham City!
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