Welcome back to Cooperative Adventure Game Month! We have talked a lot about cooperative adventure games this month, from the silly Starlings Box One to the grimy noir Saints and Sinners. We end this month with a discussion of a Top 10 of one of our favorite kinds of cooperative adventure games: the point-and-click adventure!

Make sure you re-read that! Yes, this is a list of Board and Card Games (not Video games) that work like the original LucasFilm point-and-click adventure games such as The Secret of Monkey Island, The Day of the Tentacle, or the more recent Thimblewood Park! Granted, a board or card game doesn’t have a mouse pointer to move and click, but there’s certain elements that make a game feel like a point-and-click video adventure game!

What makes a board game a point-and-click adventure game? For us, it breaks down into three fundamental elements:

1. You explore a world!  The game is about exploration and discovery, as you “move” from location to location.  In the point-and-click video games, you could “point-and-click” to move around a map!
2. You solve puzzles by combining objects!  You need to find objects and combine them in unique ways to solve puzzles. In the point-and-click video games, you would “point-and-click” on items/verbs to combine them!
3. You move along in a story!  You are part of a story: this is interactive fiction!

So, if a board or card game has these fundamental elements, we call it a point-and-click adventure game! If it moves from location to location like a duck, combines items like a duck, and is part of a story like a duck, it’s a duck!

Take a look at our review and discussion of the newest  Monkey Island game for more thoughts on what we like about these type of games! 

To be clear, all the games on this list are “play-once” because you reveal the plot and main elements!  You can play it again, but you probably want to wait a few years until you forgotten everything!

Honorable Mention. Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger

Ages: 10+
Play Solo? Yes, but best with a group
Number of Players: 1 or more Players
Time: 60 minutes per chapter (5 chapters)

This isn’t quite a pure point-and-click adventure game, but it’s so close we have to mention it!  You explore a very silly world, find objects, and use them for both dice mitigation and helping you with puzzles.

But this feels so much like a point-and-click adventure!  We make choices in the game and we explore the world, but it so silly! The dice are the only reason House of Danger is down at an Honorable Mention: the dice take the pure puzzle aspect out and poke just a little bit of randomness here.

There is another game in the Choose Your Own Adventure series, but House of Danger was the funnest!

10. The Shivers

Ages: 10+
Play Solo? No, there has to be a GM: best with a group
Number of Players: 2 or more Players
Time: 60 minutes per chapter (5 chapters)

The Shivers is almost more of an Role Playing Game (RPG), as you have to have to have one player “run” the game, so you can’t really play it solo.  That’s really the only reason this is #10 on this list ….

Otherwise, this is a beautiful game with Pop-Up Components!  The physical nature of this game makes it feel more like point-and-click than many of our games on this list!  But the RPG nature and lack of solo drop it just a little. 

This game is a fun little cooperative point-and-click type adventure game with a sense of humor and beautiful components!  Take a look at our review of The Shivers to see if this is something you might like.

EDITOR: We recently got a comment on our blog about the Shivers from William T Tiller:

Its funny you should compare it to Monkey Island because I did the Shivers art. I am Bill Tiller, and I worked at Lucas Arts as a lead artist on the adventure games The Dig, and Curse of Monkey Island, and A Vampyre Story. In fact there are a few refences and easter eggs that refer to Monkey Island in The Shivers. Larry Ahren, a writer, designer, and animator on Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle and director of Curse of Monkey Island also wrote one of the scenarios in the game. Those may be the Shivers game feels a lot like a point and click adventure game.

9. Coded Chronicles: Scooby Doo! Escape From The Haunted Mansion

Ages: 12+
Play Solo? Yes, but best with a group
Number of Players: 1 or more Players
Time: varies (there are a number of interconnected scenarios)

Players take the role of their favorite Scooby Doo characters and explore the Haunted Mansion, solving puzzles to pursue the mystery in this box! The object interaction is very simple (using the first number of the character combined with the number of an object), but it’s a pretty simple and elegant way to combine objects! 

This is one of the simpler point-and-click adventure games on this list (with House of Danger being the simplest), but it’s a really fun mystery! And it totally feels like a point-and-click adventure as you explore the house, combine objects, and work towards solving the final mystery!

There are other games in the Coded Chronicles series as well if you like this style of adventure game!

8. Paper Point N Click: Eppi

Ages: 8+
Play Solo? Yes, but best with a group. The solo mode is still quite good!
Number of Players: 1-4 Players
Time: 5-8 Hours for the whole adventure

Eppi is the next adventure book game series in the Paper Point-and-click line of games.

This game is an exemplar of the great things a board game can do in the  point-and-click genre!  This particular game is aimed more towards families and is probably best in a cooperative group, but it still works very well solo.  The exploration, story, and puzzles that come out of this game are just outstanding!  This feels like a real point-and-click adventure game.  This is aimed at a younger or family-friendly audience, which may be outside your wheelhouse (which is why it’s only #7).

Unlock Epic Adventures: Mission #07

Ages: 10+
Play Solo? Yes, but probably best with a group
Number of Players: 1-6 Players
Time: 60 minutes

The Unlock! games are nominally called Escape Room games, but they share quite-a-bit of DNA with point-and-click adventures!  The Unlock! games, which use cards and an app on a phone to direct the action, are a perfect example of point-and-click adventure games!  A story unfolds as you unlock new locations and items, and you to explore and combine items to push forward!

This particular box has three adventures in it (See Unlock!  Epic Adventures, which we reviewed here), all of which are great point-and-click adventure games!

But it was Mission #7 (the last of the adventures) that really captivated us!  This story was fun and interesting and tried a few new things we haven’t seen in Escape Rooms before!

6. Unlock! The Adventures of Oz

Ages: 10+
Play Solo? Yes, but probably best with a group
Number of Players: 1-6 Players
Time: 60 minutes

The original Unlock! games came 1 game to a pack: later on, they started packaging them up up three at a time.

Before we got Mission #07 in the Epic Adventures box, The Adventures of Oz was available and one of our favorite Unlock games!

My favorite explanation that this is a Point-and-Click adventure is the back of the box: Search the scenes!  Combine Objects!  Solve Puzzles!  The Adventures of Oz was a really fun adventure that I was mesmerized back at an early RichieCon in 2018: it tried some really interesting things and was such a great adventure!

5. Chronicles of Crime

Ages: 12+
Play Solo? Yes, but probably best with a group
Number of Players: 1-4 Players
Time: 60-90 minutes

Chronicles of Crime is very much an app-driven game!  It made the #2 spot in Top 10 Cooperative Games 0f 2018! To quote:

If I had to characterize this game, I’d say it’s an old text-style adventure game!  What?  In the old adventure games, you could only “manipulate” the items on screen on in your inventory.  “Get light”, “Drop light”, “talk man”, “ask guard about skull” and so on.  In this game, all your items are on cards in front of you!  When you want to interact with the items, you use your smart phone to scan a code on some cards!  So, if you want to “ask guard about skull”, you’d scan the code on the Guard card, then scan the code on Skull card!  And the phone would tell you what he said!

 

This interaction is great!  Except, you are trying to solve a crime by interacting with the world in front of you!  Really, really fun!   You move around from location to location, physically LOOKING at animations at locations (really!), and then scan cards.  (“I think there’s a shovel here at this location … Um … Oh! There’s a ‘gardening tools’ card!  Scan that!”)

 

Surprisingly fun, amazing graphics (you HAVE to have a smart phone to play), but a lot of content!  It’s also easy to play!  A GREAT game!

There are multiple versions of this game: 2400, 1400, 1900, all of them very interesting iterations on the base game! I’d recommend any of them! In fact, 2400 made our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2021!

4. Unlock! The Treasure of Tonipal

Ages: 10+
Play Solo? Yes, but probably best with a group
Number of Players: 1-6 Players
Time: 60 minutes

So, this is one of the more difficult of the Unlock! series!  The pirate theme and puzzles really kind of make of you feel like you are reliving some of your Secret of Monkey Island days!  

Without giving away too much, this point-and-clock adventure had one of the funnest stories and the best “last puzzle” I’ve ever played.  I want to replay this again it was so much fun!

3. Adventure Series: The Grand Hotel Abaddon

Ages: 12+
Play Solo? Yes, but probably best with a group
Number of Players: 1-4 Players
Time: 90 minutes per chapter (3 chapters)

This is a very different kind of point-and-click adventure game: it’s quite text heavy, but it uses cards to denote objects and locations.  

The Location cards are oversized cards, and the objects in the game are plain cards marked with numbers.  

Every player assumes the role of a character, with little standees moving around this world.  The story centers on a hotel as “strange things” happen.  It’s quite an interesting story that unfurls over 3 sessions!  This is the 4th game in the Adventure Series line: it made our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2022! We really loved this game!

2. Adventure Series: The Dungeon

Ages: 12+
Play Solo? Yes, but probably best with a group
Number of Players: 1-4 Players
Time: 90 minutes per chapter (3 chapters)

The Dungeon is in the same series of games as our last entry: The Adventure Series.  This game series burst onto the scene in 2019, and it was so fun it made it all the way to out #2 spot on the Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2019!

This was probably the first board and card game that really felt a point-and-click adventure game!  You explored a dungeon!  Combined items!  Solved puzzles! You ventured through a story together!   There was nothing else like this, and this series totally captured my game group!

1. Paper Point N Click: Cantaloop

Ages: 16+
Play Solo? Yes, probably best solo
Number of Players: 1+
Time: 5-8 Hours

Cantaloop nails the point-and-click adventure book game better than any game I have ever played!  When this came out in 2021, it was ground-breaking!  Using the book format with red acetate decoder to move through an adventure game was new and original.

The way players moved through Locations, combined objects, and solved puzzles was very innovative! Even the help system was innovative!

What made this so good was the writing! Jokes were strewn everywhere, and everything seemed well-thought out! Remember when Monkey Island would tell you a joke when you tried to combine two weird things? The same happens in Cantaloop! Cantaloop rocketed to the #1 Spot on my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2021 !

This series is an ongoing story over three books, told in 3 standalone books: Breaking Into Prison, A Hack of a Plan, and Against All Odds. See our reviews of all three games here, here, and here.

The only thing to be careful of is that the games are slightly raunchy (see above) and some adult material slips in (which is why the game is 16+ for ages), but it’s always done to be funny and doesn’t detract from the game.