Before we head into the top anticipated cooperative games of 2024, let’s take a look at the anticipated cooperative games from previous years and see how those games have been doing!

We started doing this in 2021 with the Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2021, and believe it or no, there’s still a few there we were waiting for and/or processing games in 2023 from that list of 2021!!

• Onimaru.  Promised Delivery Sept 2019. We don’t think we’ll ever see this.
• Isofarian Guard.  Promised Delivery Dec. 2020.  It finally arrived here in 2023 … and we didn’t like it.  Those of you who blinked may have seen a review here, but we took it down when we realized we may have played it slightly wrong.  We ended up selling it to someone else: It had amazing components, but we just didn’t like it.
• Freedom Five.  Promised Delivery in Nov 2021.  It is pretty late, but we have been seeing some regular updates: this will probably deliver in 2024.

There’s still quite a bit of stuff happening here in 2023 from our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2022!

• The Stuff of Legend: This finally arrived in 2023 and we liked it!  See our Review of The Stuff of Legend here!
• Valor and Villainy: Lludwick’s Labyrinth: This arrived in early 2023 and my game group really liked it!  We liked it so much, it made the #4 spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2023!!  See our review of Valor and Villainy: Lludwick’s Labyrinth here!
• Earthborne Rangers:  This arrived later in 2023, but we still did get a chance to play it.  Cooperatively, it was pretty good, but I think this is a better game solo: it made the #2 position on our Top 10 Solo Board and Card Games of 2023!! See our full review here to see if Earthborne Rangers is something you might like!
• Arydia: The Paths We Dare Tread: Promised Delivery Dec 2022.  We have been seeing regular updates.  Hopefully this delivers in 2024. UPDATE: The Kickstarter is showing mayyyyybe December 2024.  Probably 2025.
• Rat Queens To The Slaughter: Promised Delivery  May 2022.  There have been some very worrying messages from the publisher about this game and squandered opportunity.  We are not convinced we’ll ever see this made, but we think they are making some progress.  Who knows when we’ll see this, if we do.  We remain hopeful.
• Union City Alliance: Promised Delivery Oct 2021.  Yes, this one is taking a really long time, but the publisher does a pretty good job of keeping us up to date.  We really do believe this is imminent and will be delivered in 2024.

Interestingly, the majority of things from our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games from 2023 actually delivered in 2023!  (This is especially weird when you consider how much we have in the backlog from 2021 and 2022!)

• Gathering Gloom: This delivered late late 2023.  The rulebook really frustrated us to the point that we stopped reading.   We hope we can still get a review up of this, because it looks like a neat game, but that rulebook is daunting and long!
• Tamashii: Chronicle of the Ascend:   This arrived later in 2023. The game is pretty good and just a little shy of being  a great game!  Check out our review of Tamashii: Chronicle Of The Ascend here!
• Kinfire Chronicles: Delivered late 2023.  We liked it, but want to play more of it!  See our first impressions here!  This game has a lot of potential, we just wished we could have played it more!  So, we made it our Honorable Mention on our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2023!
• Daybreak. Delivered later 2023. Played it a few times.  We hated how random it was: the four orthogonal sources of randomness can destroy this very very tight game.  We can’t recommend it currently, but maybe we haven’t given it a full chance.  We want to try it again and see if we are missing something, because we feel like we are the only ones who didn’t like this.  
• Doomensions: Pop-Up Mystery Manor: It arrived right at the very end of 2023.  Man oh man, did we like this! See our review of Doomensions: Pop-Up Mystery Manor here! This made the #7 position on our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2023!
• The Dark Quarter: Promised Oct 2023.  This is from Lucky Duck, so we  pretty sure it will be delivered in 2024 or maybe early 2025. We are not worried that this one is late.
• Hacktivity:  Promised Feb 2023. This publisher has been very open about his problems, and how his printer went out of business!  Yet, his perseverance makes us think we’ll still see this in 2024.   We are cautiously optimistic we will still these, despite all of the problems.
• Set A Watch. Promised Delivery in Feb 2024.  When we listed this game, we didn’t have a promised delivery date.  I am 100% confident this will deliver in 2024: these guys have done a great job on the Set A Watch series: see our reviews of  Set A Watch and Set A Watch: Sword of the Coin here!
• Legends of Storm City: This delivered (PDF) early 2023.  I kinda liked it, but my game group didn’t like it at all.  See our full discussion of the roll-and-write Legends of Storm City here!
• Tesseract.  This delivered mid 2023.  This met all the hype and ended up being the #2 game on our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2023! The components are fantastic! See our review of Tesseract here!

Okay, let’s see what our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2024 look like! As we have done in previous year, we give a link to its website, a promised delivery date, and a summary of the game from BoardGameGeek!

10. Cyberpunk Unfolds

Platform: Kickstarter Cyberpunk Unfolds: Immersive Sci-Fi Pop-Up Escape Game
Promised Delivery: Jan 2024
Summary: Pop-Up Escape Game that unfolds and make a 3d paper structure. Find clues, solve puzzles & explore a city full of hidden secrets.

We had such a good time with Doomensions this year (see our review here), another pop-up Escape Room game sounded great! We thought we’d give this Sci-Fi Pop-Up Escape Room a chance! There are a surprising number of Pop-Up Escape rooms available at the time of this writing! Hopefully this one will be good!

9. Defenders of the Wild

Platform: Kickstarter Defenders of the Wild
Promised Delivery: Aug 2024
Summary: Defenders of the Wild is a cooperative board game of animals against machines. Play as one of four unique factions and assemble your crew of defenders from a wide range of animal characters to resist the machines across a modular map that changes with each game.

War has come to the Wild. For millennia, animals have weathered shifting alliances and the cycle of the seasons—but they’ve never faced an enemy like this. An army of machines powered by corrupted magic is rampaging across the woodlands, enclosing everything in its path and exploiting the warmth of the world. Across the marshes, plains, mountains, and forests, scrappy crews of defenders rise up to resist the machine occupation. The partisans hail from four factions, each determined to fight back in their own way: the Council with its fortitude and bread, the Order with its wisdom of the flame, the Sect with its ingenious inventions, and the Coven with its spells and subterfuge.

This game looks kinda cute, but fairly strategic.  I like the art and the promised gameplay description!

8. Santorini: Deluxe Edition and Co-op Expansion

Platform: Kickstarter Santorini Co-op & Deluxe Pantheon Edition
Promised Delivery: May 2024
Summary: Santorini: The Riddle of the Sphinx is a co-operative expansion for Santorini that adapts the competitive experience into an ongoing adventure that players navigate together.

In this expansion comprised of a series of scenarios called “riddles”, players will seek to complete tactical objectives to solve the riddles. However, if players exhaust their supply of Santorini tower pieces before an objective is completed, the riddle remains unsolved and must be played again.

Each successfully solved riddle allows players to progress on the adventure map and unlock new gods to add into future riddles.

This kickstarter is a combination of a deluxe edition of Santorini and a co-op expansion for Santorini called Riddle of the Sphinx.  The components for the deluxe version look amazing, and coupling this with a cooperative mode make this something we are very much looking forward to!

7. Weirdwood Manor

Platform: Kickstarter Weirdwood Manor
Promised Delivery: Apr 2024
Summary: You will assume the role of one of six asymmetrically designed characters as you battle against one of the three different Fae Monsters, each with their own unique mechanics and loss conditions. You’ll make use of dice drafting, card play, resource management, and location actions as you move through the ever-shifting Manor in pursuit of the Fae Monster and his minions. You can also recruit additional companions to aid you and you will improve your character’s abilities as you earn experience.

My friend Kurt played a prototype of this at Dice Tower West; he said he really liked it and it would be right in our wheelhouse! A cooperative game with asymmetric powers in a spooky universe sounds like a lot of fun!

6. Flock Together

Platform: Kickstarter Flock Together – An Asymmetric Cooperative Game
Promised Delivery: June 2024
Summary: Flock Together is a beautifully immersive cooperative experience for 1-5 players. During the game, each player takes on the role of a unique chicken with asymmetric abilities and works together to drive off the invading predators before the third season ends.

Every turn, players choose their own strategy to progress their cause by selecting two of their eight available actions. Along the way, players will also have to manage leveling up, predator loot drops, traveling grubs, and adverse weather conditions. However, players must plan carefully, because as the seasons change, every predator that is still alive grows stronger and gains new abilities.

With eleven asymmetric characters to play and ten unique predators to defeat, Flock Together offers immense replayability that can be enjoyed with quick turns and an experience that lasts 25 minutes per player.

Beautiful art by Andrew Bosley? An interesting woodland theme and asymmetric powers? Yes please! This production looks gorgeous … hopefully it will play well too! I mean, who doesn’t want to play a chicken?

5. Luddite

Platform: Kickstarter Luddite
Promised Delivery: Dec 2024
Description: Luddite is a roll and write style game with a fully integrated graphic novel. In Luddite, one to an unlimited number of players will progress along the story of the novel whilst competing to destroy ever more complex automata. Creating a full campaign style game.

As a Luddite you will be hacking into the neural networks of the NED automata. These bionic, dog-like creatures are capable of performing almost any complex task to which they are assigned and, as such, have begun to replace vast swathes of the human population. As a Luddite, you will work to destroy these infernal machines.

This cooperative roll-and-write campaign looks interesting, but what makes it stand out is the graphic novel that comes with it! I am really looking forward to seeing what this one does! One fun fact: Luddite (which basically means a type of person adverse to technology) can be delivered electronically! As a true luddite, I got the physical version. 🙂

4. Once Upon a Line: The Butterfly’s Breath

Platform: Kickstarter Once Upon a Line – The Butterfly’s Breath
Promised Delivery: May 2024
Description: Once Upon a Line is a narrative game played out in chapters. Embody heroes and use their actions to play on a board of scratch off ink. Uncover hidden words and take their corresponding cards. This will reveal the next part of the story as well as new words to find in order to accomplish your mission.

• Fully immerse yourself in a personalized adventure.
• Elude traps (riddles, anagrams, palindromes, etc.).
• Complete your Quest before scratching off the last square on the Line of Tragedy.

This is strange one: it’s a word game, in a campaign! The main hook is that letters are “scratched off” the sheets (so they are one-time use). There’s some discussion about how the arrows direct your progress, but this just sounds like a fun cooperative campaign!

3. Leviathan Wilds

Platform: Kickstarter Leviathan Wilds
Promised Delivery: Feb 2024
Description: Long ago, the once-gentle leviathans lost their minds and tore the world apart. After generations of hiding and struggle, humanity discovered that the frenzied leviathans can be restored. Climbers willing to take the risk must explore the wilds and work together to remove a series of binding crystals to heal the leviathans roaming the world.

In Leviathan Wilds, 1-4 players will confront these colossal beings, with each creature being depicted across the spread of a spiral-bound storybook that makes up the game’s board. The book also forms the basis of a connected campaign mode built around the game’s story, with each of twenty included scenarios estimated to last around 45 minutes. Tougher difficulty levels are also available for added replayability.

This basically looks like Shadow of The Colossus, the board game! Players climb on the creature of interest, doing damage sort of like that old PS2 game Shadow Of The Collossus! This looks really different and interesting.  It had a relatively small Kickstarter (after trying a second time and succeeding), which is unexpected given the design pedigree of this game: Justin Kemppainen, (who worked at FFG and Z-Man for years)! I am expecting this to be great!

2. Marvel Dice Throne: X-Men and Co-op Missions

Platform: Kickstarter Dice Throne | X-Men • Marvel Missions Co-op • Deadpool
Promised Delivery: Aug 2024
Description: In Marvel Dice Throne: X-Men, you become one of eight of Marvel’s iconic X-Men, including Wolverine, Storm, Cyclops, Rogue, Gambit, Psylocke, Iceman, and Jean Grey!

Every Marvel Dice Throne hero is painstakingly designed and balanced to provide the most thematic experience possible, allowing you to truly embody your favorite heroes like no other game. Featuring all-new mechanisms and asymmetrical designs, these are some of our most innovative and exciting heroes yet!

Marvel Dice Throne: X-Men is a heart-pumping, fast-playing game of skilled card play and dice manipulation supporting multiple modes of play, including 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 2v2v2, or free-for-all.

We have played Dice Throne (see here), Dice Throne Adventures (see here), and Marvel Dice Throne with Dice Throne Adventures (see here) We really do like this simple, yahtzee-esque combat system! It’s so cool to be able to get X-Men in the Marvel Dice Throne universe, but what I am looking forward to the most is the Dice Throne Missions! This will make it easier to play Dice Throne X-Men/Marvel cooperatively! We love the Dice Throne Adventures, but it requires a little more of a commitment to the campaign: The Dice Throne Missions promises single cooperative scenarios! The quality of the Dice Throne has been phenomenal, so we are really looking forward to this! That’s why it’s #2 on this list!

1. Marvel United: Multiverse

Platform: Kickstarter Marvel United: Multiverse
Promised Delivery: March 2024
Description: In Marvel United: Multiverse, you take the role of iconic Marvel Heroes cooperating to stop the master plan of a powerful Villain controlled by the game. Each Villain unveils their unique master plan, with cards that trigger different effects, and threats that pose challenges across the locations. Heroes must choose carefully the cards to play from their unique decks, that not only offer different actions and superpowers to use, but also combine with the actions of other Heroes to do the impossible. Build your storyline, unite your powers, save the day!

It’s hard to separate just the one Marvel United: Multiverse game from this kickstarter! There’s so much content coming from this Kickstarter!! Galactus: Herald Expansion, The Wrecking Crew, and so much more! The Omniverse pledge has: Marvel United: Multiverse, Exclusive Wrecking Crew Villain Team, The Coming of Galactus Expansion+19 More
And this doesn’t include the stretch goals! I came into Marvel United later, but I have absolutely loved it! See our review of Marvel United (Parts I and II), Marvel United: X-Men (Parts I and II), Days of Future Past (see here), Fantastic Four (see here), and First Class (see here) ! In fact, Marvel United: Days of Future Past was so good, it made the #1 spot on our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2022! I can’t wait to see all the stuff that comes with this! The king-sized Galactus is probably my most anticipated component!