Trick-taking games are a genre that’s been around for ages: Bridge, Hearts, and a more gamery games like Rage! We’ve now reached a point where there are a lot of solo and cooperative trick-taking games as well! To be cooperative, every single one of these games has a pretty severe notion of Limited Communication … if you could just communicate anything, most of these games would become trivial! So, most games on this list have very constrained notions of communication! Interestingly, most of these games also have a very constrictive player count, so we take note of that as well! Let’s take a look below!
(We also note that two of these are in German, which required me getting a translation, and a third was mostly German but luckily included English rules!)
10. Park Life
Player Count: 1-4
This cooperative Trick-Taking game is a little misleading because, depending on the version of Park Life you get, there’s a very different trick-taking game!
The Deluxe Hedgehog version (above) has a different version of a trick-taking game …
.. than The Deluxe People Edition (above)!
Both games have a solo game, but the game is a little better with more people. These games are at the bottom of this list because they seem the least developed: they are very cute and have some interesting ideas for trick-taking games, but feels like they could use a little bit of either explanation or work.
Still, you may play these and fall in love with them because of the cute art!
9. Lindyhop
Player Count: 2-Player Only
This game presents is an interesting theme, as a trick-taking game recreating a dance from 1928 (from the African American communities of New York City). Two players “dance” with each other, with trick-taking simulating the back-and-forth/give-and-take as players try to “groove” together.
Players traverse a path together, picking up tokens if they land on exact spaces. See above.
Players play cards and the difference in card value is how far they move! The art is gorgeous (see above) and very thematic: there are even special powers on some of the cards!
The only reason this is a little lower on the list is because there is really only one opportunity to strategize: at the beginning of the game! But it’s a fun little romp that’s easy to bring out.
8. Claim with the Expansion Claim: Alliances
Player Count: 2-Player Only
Claim by itself is a 2-Player only competitive trick-taking game.
But, with the Claim: Alliances expansion (see above) this becomes a cooperative trick-taking experience!
This is one of the games that was originally in German, luckily I was able to find English rules online!
Since the way to play cooperatively is to use the Alliances expansion, you first have to learn the base game! The game proceeds in two phases, both powered by trick-taking! In the first phase, you play tricks to try and recruit cards for the next phase. The winner of each trick gets the named recruit, and the loser gets the “random” top-deck recruit! The second phase has the players trying to win factions (using trick-taking): whomever wins the most factions, wins!
In the cooperative game, some Alliance cards are added to the mix. During the recruit phase, the winner has to take an Alliance card, which includes bad guys and commanders, and at some point, both sides must have a commander whose factions they MUST win!
This is a little lower on the list because you have to get the base game under your belt before you can play the expansion. But there are some cool ideas in here, including the two phase system and some special powers on some factions!
7. The Fox in the Forest Duet
Player Count: 2-Player Only
This is a 2-Player trick-taking game where players play tricks to move around a forest map collecting gems.
The art is cute and the game is pretty light. The Communication Limitations are fairly draconian once you have your cards (you can’t even discuss strategy), but you can discuss strategy between rounds. We had fun playing it; it’s a lighter game that isn’t crazy rule heavy.
6. Trick ‘n Trouble (Fangt Doc Crazy!)
Player Count: 3-Player Only
What???? A 3-Player only game???
This is a bit of a surprise as a 3-Player only cooperative game! It has kind of a spooky (silly spooky) theme!
Players try to fulfill tasks based on the cards from “won tricks”: The players have a tableau of tasks to fulfill (see above).
The “trick” in this game is that some of the cards are double-colored, and you can use them as you wish.
This was a surprisingly fun little game, even if the 3-Player only count is a little different. Like most cooperative trick-taking games, the limited communication permeates and you can’t really talk about the cards in your hand.
5. Sail
Player Count: 2-Player Only
I’ve been able to get Sail to the table a number of times with Sam and Kurt over the past year! It’s a fun theme as you use trick-taking to help move a ship towards its final destination!
Winning a trick means “usually” moving the boat in your direction (towards you), but there are many different things that happen along the way!
Can you avoid the Kraken? Can you move forward when you really need to?
Using trick-taking as a means to move the ship forward is real interesting mechanism! If you like Sail, be aware that Sail Legacy is coming to Kickstarter soon!
4. For Northwood
Player Count: 1-Player Only
Yes, that’s right, this is a solo trick-taking game! It sounds like this can’t work, but it works really well! The tricks are “conversations” with fiefs, and you try to make fiefs “friendly” to you by winning them over with conversation! It’s a pretty thin theme, but it works pretty well as a trick-taking schema.
This is a tiny little game with super cute art!
There are special powers you can activate!
Winning is a victory point threshold, as you count how many friendly fiefs you obtain (and count the stars)! Because this is a solo-only game, there is no notion of Limited Communication! This is a really unique little game that I had to scour all the gameshops to find! I think there were reprints, so I believe this is back in stock!
3. Jeckyl and Hyde vs. Scotland Yard
Player Count: 2-Player Only
The two players cooperatively play the two sides of Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde, vying for control!
This is a fascinating idea, using trick-taking as a way to take control of the personality! To keep ahead of Scotland Yard, the two players must win tricks in such a way as to keep Scotland Yard off their tail!
The two players each play a different side of the personality!
I, unfortunately, was unable to get the English version for some time, so I ended up using Google translate to translate the German text to English! But this game was so cool, the art was so neat, and it had such neat ideas, I really liked it! That’s why, despite only having a German copy, this made it all the way to #3! (And I did finally get the English version: it is available more widespread now!)
2. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking Game
Player Count: 1-4 Players
This game has taken my game groups my storm: everyone loves it!
I played it solo when I was sick, and had a wonderful time going through the whole campaign solo!
My friends in Las Cruces have played through the entire campaign as a 3-Player game and love it! See our review here! I played a bunch 3 and 4-Player games at Dice Tower West with my friends Becca and Tricia and had a ball!
The reason this game is so high on the list is that everyone seems to really enjoy it! The fact that it can play at so many player counts speaks volumes to the design team! The solo game is very different from the 2-Player game, which is very different from the 3 and 4-Player game, and yet all the different modes seem to work, and work well! The theme seems to come through fairly well! My friend Andrew was surprised this was #2 and NOT #1 on my list!
1. The Crew: Either The Quest For Planet Nine or Mission Deep Sea
Player Count: 3-5 Players (sorta 2-Player)
There are two different versions of this game, but they are essentially the same kind of game. Like Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking game, the game players differently depending on the player count. There is a 2-Player mode, but it’s very clumsy and probably not the way you should play.
Players play tricks, but have to fulfill missions in order to win the game! The missions give the game focus, and change every game!
Honestly, even though I have the physical copy of both games (which are arguably the same game), I have played this game SO MUCH on BoardGameArena! During the Pandemic, this was the goto game for me and my friends! It was so easy to just bring this out and play for hours. Something called The Crew brought us together; there is probably some deeper meaning there.
What makes this #1 on the list for me is the brilliant rule that you can communicate WHEN IT REALLY MATTERS! You have a token that allow you to communicate once during your turn, by sharing the lowest, highest, ot “only one” of your hand. This is so unique: all the other trick-taking game have very restricted communication, but essentially there’s none or high-level “strategy” communications. With this one mechanism, The Crew makes it feel like your CHOICES MATTER: It matters when you choose to communicate, it matters when you choose to hold off, it matters!
This is the #1 on my list because I have played it so much more than every other game, and it’s so easy to play online or in person, and you feel like your limited communiques matter.
This review has been sitting in my hopper for over a year now; not sure why I didn’t get it out earlier!
Sherlock Solitaire is a very small cooperative card game for 1-2 players. This released early in 2024: I had heard about it from my friend Sam and so I quickly ordered it from Wise Wizard website about a month ago (early March 2024). It delivered pretty quickly! I got it to the table solo, but I didn’t want to finish my review until I tried it two-player cooperative .. Sam really wanted to play, but he was busy most of March.
This is a very small and thin package. It plays 1-2 players, is about 20 minutes, and plays ages 12+.
Let’s take a look!
Unboxing
Sherlock Solitaire is a teeny tiny box and very thin: see the Coke can above for perspective.
Except for the instruction pamphlet, it’s all cards .. just 55 cards.
The cards are pretty gorgeous.
The game is very pretty on the table: see above.
Rulesheet Not a Rulebook
The rulebook is not a rulebook but a rulesheet: see above. Sigh. It’s a pamphlet.
Considering it’s a pamphlet, it actually does ok on the Chair Test! It fits on the chair next to me and I can read it! The font is a little small (because it’s a folded pamphlet), but it worked on the chair next to me, as I consulted it during gameplay.
The set-up was pretty good: see the picture above.
The rules are a little sparse, but they does work.
It even does a decent job at showing examples and counter-examples of “what is a set”! I appreciated that set of pictures!
Given the constraints of a pamphlet, this rulesheet worked pretty well. The pictures were all informative. There were a number of places where some clarifications could have been provided, but the ruleset was simple enough and consistent enough that we were able to extrapolate rules when needed.
This was a decent to pretty good rulesheet.
Gameplay
Choose a starting scenario: The Intro Case (The Valley of Fear) is just to get you into the game, so it has simpler win conditions. The Final Problem has a much harder win condition.
Each player (works for 1-2 players) takes either the Watson card or the Sherlock Holmes card. See above. The bottom of the card shows the special abilities of each player!
Basically, each character gets 4 cards on their turn to play to one of two areas: the Crime Scene or the Office. There are two types of cards: Investigator cards (labelled 1-4: see above) and Threat Cards (labelled A-D, see below).
Over the course of the game, the player(s) must play two cards to the Crime Scene and two cards to the Office each turn.
In the Office, you are trying to make sets of cards: you have to alternate investigator and threat cards (numbers and letters … see above). All investigators (numbers) must be in the same column, and all letters must be distinct in a column: these are the “sets” the players are making. If you get 3 full sets (4 investigators), you win!
However, you still have to play two cards to the Crime Scene as well: see above. If you ever get 2 of any type of card, you immediately discard those two cards and “do something!”
Two threat cards? You take a wound! See two threats above …
The wound card is a “timer” of sorts: if you ever get 3 wounds, you lose!
If you get two investigators on the Crime Scene, you invoke your special powers!
The rulesheet does a nice job of summarizing of how to use your special powers … see above.
If you get enough sets, you win! If you get 3 wounds, you lose! It all happens in about 20 minutes.
Solo Play
A game called Sherlock Solitaire had better have a solo mode! It does (thank you for following Saunders’ Law): it’s the main way to play!
Once I got past my first few games (after I had to decipher the rulesheet), the game moved pretty quickly.
The best part of the game was when I could be clever and play my special abilities in a clever way to move cards to/from the Crime Scene/Office. The worst part was when I just played cards and didn’t feel like I had a lot of choice. The game was a fairly engaging way to spend 20 minutes. It really did feel like a game of Solitaire as I moved cards around.
More Solitaire Than Sherlock
With a name like Sherlock Solitaire, you might be expecting something more like a mystery. No, this is a lot more Solitaire than Sherlock: you are just playing cards like a game of Solitaire.
Don’t get me wrong: I love the art! The art that comes with this game is gorgeous and very evocative of the Sherlock Holmes stories!
In the end, though, there is no mystery to solve. There isn’t really a lot of theme: this could have been a Cthulu game, a Zombie game, or a Smurf game. Or anything. Nothing about the gameplay really has to be in a Victorian Sherlock Universe.
The art is really the only thing that makes you think of Sherlock Holmes: and it is phenomenal art!
Two Player Game
I had to wait almost a whole month to play with Sam!! He was interested in the game, but was busy with family and work all March.
There are two ways to play Sherlock Solitaire 2-Player:
Play as the solo game, but both players together make all the decisions
Each player takes Sherlock and Watson, and alternates turns
We chose to alternate turns. The solo game with 2 players making all the decisions seemed less fun … and at that point, it’s just the solo game anyways.
What we found was that … the second player got a little bored. There is no strategy in a 2-Player game, as you have no idea what cards you get until your turn. What that means is that if you are waiting for you turn, you can do nothing useful!! You just sit there waiting for your turn.
The two-player game was much less interesting, as someone was always “waiting” with nothing to do.
… until we tried a little house rule.
House Rule for Two Players
When it’s not your turn, draw some cards! Instead of sitting there “doing nothing” during your friend’s turn, you can then “be thinking” about what you want to do when it’s your turn! To keep this from being too overpowering (from the game balance perspective), we choose to just draw two cards at the end of the turn and two at the beginning of the turn.
That way, we were still playing four cards per turn, but had a hint of what we could on our turn.
Weirdly, me and Sam didn’t feel like this changed the game balance too much, and in fact didn’t change our turn too much, but it felt like it mattered! With this simple rule, we both felt more engaged, even if it didn’t change the game too much! We felt like we mattered more, even if it was just a small amount! And that made a big difference.
Conclusion
If you were expecting something with a mystery of some sort, then Sherlock Solitaire may be a big disappointment. There’s a lot more Solitaire than Sherlock in this game: it’s basically just a card game about making sets and moving cards.
The special powers of the Sherlock and Watson characters make the game interesting, as you can make many moves in the game that make you feel clever.
And despite the lack of theme to this all card game, the art is still very nice and evocative.
As a solo game, I’d probably give a 5.5 or 6/10. I might play it again: it’s pretty straight forward and quick … and there are moments where I feel clever. I freely admit that the art brings it up the score a little bit: the fantastic look makes this game stand out on the table.
As a two-player game, I would give the unaltered game a 5/10: there was just too much downtime between turns. If, however, we played with our house rule (always having two cards in your hand), then I would bump this up to a 6.5/10! We felt much more engaged even if it was just our preception! My favorite way of playing Sherlock Solitaire was 2-Player with our house rule: that’s probably how I’d play it again.
I know, I know. You really want me to make some kind of funny phrase like “One-Hit Heroesis a one-hit wonder” or “One-Hit and it’s out!” But those aren’t really apt descriptions, so insert your own funny phrase above! Let’s look below to see what it’s REALLY like!
One-Hit Heroes is cooperative boss-battling game I backed on Kickstarter back in April 2024. It promised delivery in March 2025, and lo-and-behold, it arrived March 29, 2025! So, it made it! Barely!
I hav to admit I was a little spicy with the delivery, as they literally left it ON THE STREET! See picture above! The package is literally on the street in front of my mailbox! Oi!
Luckily, everything was fine: the box and everything was in perfect shape. (I got two little upgrades with the box; a epilogue box and an extra hero pack: see above).
This is a medium sized box; see above and below for perspective.
It does have a slightly weird shape; it’s not a Ticket To Ride sized box. However, it’s not too bulky or too awkwardly shaped.
It contains some cards and tokens, as well as three separate “Episodes”. See above.
The components are all pretty high-quality. The cards are NOT linen-finished and are all very shiny. That’s actually my major complaint with the components of the game; when playing, the games seems very “shiny”: the cards, plastic trays, are all “shiny” and can be distracting.
Rulebook
The rulebook is good.
The rulebook feels like it has a weird form factor (look how loooooong and thin it is above) …
… but when you open it up, it fits PERFECTLY on the chair next to me! See above!! The rulebook stays open, it’s easy to read, and there is no pages drooping over the edges! One-Hit Heroes gets an A on the Chair Test! See above!
The Component page is nice; it shows and adds correlative text to everything.
The Set-Up page looks good and is easy to follow, for both the Heroes and the Boss. See above.
It does a great job explaining the player mats!
Overall, the text is big, easy to read, has a legible font, and is annotated with many pictures describing play. There are also parenthetical phrases notated for “extra information”.
The back of the rulebook could have been a little better, but whatever, this was a good rulebook. It explained the game, showed the components and set-up, and was fairly easy to read.
Gameplay
Players work together to take down a boss; a single boss battle takes about 20 minutes (the box is pretty accurate in its time). An “Episode” in the game is 4 to 5 boss battles, which each boss getting harder and harder.
Each player takes and plays one character of the six above. Each deck has 11 cards with very different personalities. Take Sofia, for instance; her story is on the back of her card!
What do her cards look like?
See some of the cards from Sofia above.
Each player grabs a tray (above) for their character and puts the cards into the tray (below).
As the game name implies (One-Hit Heroes), the Heroes can only take one hit before they die! Even more so, if any character dies, all players lose! It’s up to the players to stop from getting hit!
Each character has two items slots for Items that “help” (see above), but arguably the Items are more important for stopping a hit! Players can destroy an item to avoid a hit! (Thematically, the item takes the hit instead of the character).
Items are a coarse way to stop hits; it’s usually better to stay out of way of hits if possible (since you only have two items)! One-Hit Heroes uses a notion of an “Aggro track” for each hero. See the track running left to right at the top of the tray? It’s empty for Will right now.
… but Edric (above) has a track almost full of Aggro! Basically, the fuller the track, the more likely you are to incur the wrath of the boss and take a hit!
This is a boss-battler after all! The Punch-Bot (the very first boss from the very first episode) only attacks when a Heroes’ Aggro is in the “red range”. So, if the players can keep their Aggro low, Punch-Bot won’t even attack!
But, Aggro will go up. Either from bad news cards (like above) …
… or every Attack you do ups your own Aggro! If Sofia uses here Sidearm (above) to so one yellow damage, then does one damage to the Punch-Bot, but takes 1 Aggro! Every attack you do that does damage causes Aggro back to yourself!
Luckily, each player has cards to manage Aggro; some cards (like Taunt above) will move Aggro around, and other cards will just discard it. Every Hero has a different way of dealing with Aggro; some move it around, some discard it, some avoid it as much as possible, and some have cards that help others! Each Hero has a different flavor of cards!
Interestingly, there are two different kinds of damage: yellow and orange (light and heavy damage, respectively).
To take out a boss, you have to do both all yellow and all orange damage. Punch-Bot (above) needs to take 10 light damage and 5 heavy damage to take him out.
If players can defeat the Boss before said boss does one-hit to anyone, the players win! If the boss does one-hit to anyone (and it can’t be blocked or avoided), all players lose! It’s a boss-battler!
Solo Play: Built-In Mode
The box is confusing; it implies there are no solo modes! 2-4 Players means no solo mode, right? Nope! There are actually two solo modes!
The first solo mode is described in the Hero Set-up on page 3 (see above). Basically, the solo mode is that the solo player has to alternate between two Heroes! The solo description (above) is simple and very functional; it’s all you need.
For my first solo game, I played Will and Edric against Punch-Bot from Episode 1! See above!
The game balance in this game is kept by having a Hero go, the Boss go, the next Hero go, and so on. Basically, heroes and the boss alternate, so you can “kinda” have any number of heroes.
From a game balance perspective, I always worry that you need to adjust the hit points for the number of players … but since each Hero has exactly 1 hit point, that’s not really a problem here, is it? Well, it didn’t seem to be: I was able to play all the way through Episode 1 (four boss battles) and I had a great time! It was close; strictly speaking, as I lost a battle at one point, but it’s very easy to reset and play again since the game is only 20 minutes per boss.
This solo mode emphasizes that characters must work together to keep Aggro under control; in order to survive, both players will be doing things to move and discard Aggro.
Solo Mode 2: Do66-0 Pack
The second Solo mode does NOT come with the game; you must purchase the D066-0 Hero Pack (see above).
There is a little discussion of the DO66-0 pack (and a link) in the back of the instruction book.
Basically, the DO66-0 mode is a companion that you play in solo mode INSTEAD of a second Hero.
It’s much easier to play with DOGG-0: DO66-0 gets a turn without having to provoke an extra Boss turn. But, he also can’t do much, as he has no cards to play! All he can really do is block and roll the damage dice … no cards.
In fact, it’s so easy to play, you can give DOGG-0 to younger players and have them play with you (that’s what Beginner Mode is).
I got to be honest, I didn’t enjoy DO66-O solo mode that much. DO66-0 does very little on his turn: “about” one damage per turn, depending on what you roll on the damage dice. (He does add new stuff once you start drafting, and that does make him a little better).
I actually think the better use of DO66-0 is to bring in younger kids so at least they can participate; he’s so simple to play and kids can feel like they are helping.
I prefer the base (original) solo mode; it’s two characters and is how the game as meant to be played. The base solo mode emphasizes how important the sharing and cooperation is in the game, especially to mitigate Aggro problems. This DO66-0 solo mode was “fine”, but I probably won’t come back to it.
Cooperative Mode: Casual Gamers
My first experience cooperatively was with some casual gamers: my nieces. We just played through a single boss: a 20-minute game.
The game was easy to explain to non-gamers! They got the gist of the game pretty quickly, but needed a few clarifications.
I think my nieces liked the game and appreciated how short it was. They did want to play again, but we ran out of time (it was like, Spring Break or something).
What I found: One-Hit Heroes is a pretty simple game to explain, even to non-gamers. The hardest part was explaining some of the text on the cards, but even that wasn’t so bad. My nieces like the game and would play again. They also appreciated how simple it was to learn and play.
Cooperative Play: Gamers
Me and a subset of my gaming group played through Episode 1 cooperatively.
One-Hit Heroes has a nice way of eliciting cooperation; you will lose if you don’t. 🙂 Maybe a better way to say that is that the game goes cause conversations to happen: “Uh oh! I am about to die! Can anyone save me? Should we do some stuff before the next villain?”
The cooperation seems to come out fairly organically; and thank goodness everything is open hand with full communications! There’s no “oh, I can’t show you this because of limited communication“. Nope! People talk, people realize they might die, so people cooperate to block, steal Aggro (in a good way!), and try figure out the best way to move forward.
And the ability to see what’s coming ALSO helps! By seeing the bad news coming up, but not actually here yet, seems to encourage discussion and cooperation.
Overall, the Episode 1 went well; we cooperated, we discussed, we planned, we had a good time.
Teresa was a 7/10, Andrew was a 6.5/10 (which is actually quite high for him).
Episodes
A single Boss battle is about 20 minutes. If that’s all this game were, I’d be a little down about it. Luckily, the Episode really fills out the game. An Episode is a series of 4-5 related bosses, with upgrading happening between bosses!
Episode 1 has four bosses: see above. All the bosses are all very different, and have very different arcs as you fight them.
Arguably the best part of this game are the upgrade decks! After you defeat each boss, players get a chance to draft and add two new cards to their deck!
Skip the next few pictures if you don’t want too many spoilers.
Basically, the players “draft” and each get two cards to upgrade their deck! This is basically deck-advancement like we saw in Adventure Tactics (see here): your deck gets better and better between games!
The decks are also labelled at the bottom right so you can separate them back to their original decks.
And after every boss, you get another 2 cards until you finish the episode!
I will say this: the game says to “draft” until you get two cards, but I think it might be more cooperative to just ‘decide as a group’ what you get. This is the House Rule we implemented: let me and my friends choose the paths we want our heroes to take! I understand why “drafting” works, because then you don’t have to worry about arguing over cards, Alpha Players telling people what to take, and so on. But, if you have anything of a reasonable group, I would suggest just choosing as a group the cards you each want. Caveat Emptor. If you have a slightly contentious group (or are playing at a convention where you don’t know anyone), maybe drafting is the better solution.
I’ll say this again: the upgrades are probably one of the funnest parts of the game. Unfortunately, your upgrades don’t travel with you between Episodes: you have to start fresh to a new Episode.
Things I Liked
Upgrades: Upgrading your deck is one of the more satisfying and fun parts of the game!
Arcs: Given how simple this game is, the arcs on the different types of Bosses are all very different! It’s actually quite impressive how differently each boss plays! And fun!
Components: The components are pretty nice and I like art. It’s comic-booky and attractive without being too “cute”.
Simple: This game is easy to teach and easy to learn. I found even casual gamers got into it pretty quickly.
What I Didn’t Like
Too Random: The game can be too random. I lost a few games because of one die roll. It’s not too big of a deal because it’s just 20 minutes per game, but it is frustrating that an entire game can go amiss because of one die roll!
Too shiny: It’s too hard to capture in pictures, but the game is too shiny. The cards aren’t linen-finished, so they tend to have glare, especially in harder light. And the plastic trays also have a lot of glare: I tried to capture some of that in the picture above. I think this game would be a lot better with duller, linen-finished cards and a tray that was less shiny. The glare was distracting enough that we had to point it out.
No Continuations? As cool as the Episodes are, and even thematic within, the game game doesn’t feel super thematic. While there is continuation within an episode as you keep getting upgrades, there’s no hook that keeps you vaulting into the next episode: remember, you lose ALL your upgrades between episodes, so you start fresh. That actually feels a little debilitating! I’d rather the episodes built on each other you felt the deck was YOUR CREATION … as it is, you start anew every episode. There’s no “hook”: your deck resets and you start over. Kind of a bummer? I just spent the episode building my deck … and now it’s gone.
Conclusion
One-Hit Heroes fits well into many groups; casual gamers, gamery gamers, and even solo gamers! The base game is easy to teach and play at 20 minutes, which makes it easy to bring out. My favorite part of the game, though, was upgrading my deck within an Episode! It’s fun to figure out how you want to advance your character!
The game looks great on the table and has a fun table presence!
My only real complaint is that I feel that there’s a theme or overriding reason to keep playing after I finish an Episode. I really like the upgrading my deck between Bosses in an Episode, and it’s sort of frustrating that you just “throw it all away” at the end of an Episode!
As a solo player, I’d probably give this a 7.5 or 8/10. The game is much more fun, I think, as a cooperative experience at an 8.5/10. It would actually give it a little higher score if the dice rolls didn’t make or break so many games! But, since the game is so quick at 20 minutes per game, it’s usually not a big deal.
Neat game. I think you’ll have fun with just about any group you bring it out to.
If you are like me, when you first heard the description of Infiltraitors, you thought, “Wait, What? Is this a cooperative traitor game?”
Look at the back of the box above! “Enemy Spies have infiltrated the Organization! It’s up to you to work together to expose and eliminate all the traitors before it’s too late…” That sounds like a cooperative traitor game, but the next line tells the real story: “Infiltrators is a cooperative deduction game for 2 to 5 players”.
Ah, it’s a deduction game! But it really has a feel of a traitor game like Avalon! Players are going on missions, deducing things about traitors … that sounds like the traitor game, Avalon, right?
I think the game’s title misspelled Infiltraitoron purpose to imply there are traitors in this game. The real spelling should be Infiltrator. I really think they did that on purpose to imply this is a cooperative traitor game … I think they mean it to replace something like Coup or Avalon. Does it?
Let’s take a look!
Unboxing and Gameplay
For a mostly card game, this has a surprising number of cardboard components! It’s also a pretty small box (about the size of Avalon or Coup maybe?) See Coke Can above for perspective.
The bullets are a limited resource for how many “guesses” you have to find the traitors! The gun is just a silly gimmick!
When you are ready to Eliminate a Traitor, you must physically pick up the Gun and a Bullet and “make a guess” what the traitor is (I used what instead of who … you’ll see why)! I think the idea is that you must be very clear that you are making a guess, and picking up that gun makes it very clear to everyone! If you are right, you eliminate that traitor and you are closer to winning! If you are wrong, … well, you have wasted a bullet … hopefully you have enough bullets left to take out the remaining traitors!
As clues come out to identify the traitors, players mark off the Clue Boards: see above. There will be one clue board per suspect.
The rest of the game is in the cards. There are (up to) 5 different suits, each with numbers 1-15.
There are a number of Suspects (face-down cards), depending on the Mission and number of players. The player’s job: use clues to find the identity of all the Suspects before you run out of bullets! If it isn’t clear, you are “eliminating” the infiltrators with bullets!
There are 20 missions described in the rulebook; they get harder and harder. (No state is saved between Missions; each Mission is a brand new game). The first mission, a tutorial, describes how the game works: see above!
Some number of cards are taken from the deck and turned FACE DOWN: these are the Suspects the players must cooperatively identify. (The first Mission has only 2 Suspects: see above).
One player becomes “responsible” for a suspect and will reveal information about the suspect as the game goes on.
Each player will have a hand of cards and use those to help reveal information about a Suspect.
To Eliminate a suspect, the players must guess the color and rank of the face-down Suspect!
How do you guess the Suspect’s color and rank? A player will place a card down; if the color matches OR the rank matches the number or factors or multiples, then it’s considered a match! All matches are turned up-and-down! The lack of a match turns the card sideways. See above as the guess yellow 10 is turned up-and-down! It’s a match! But does it match the color? Or maybe it matches the rank exactly? Or it’s a multiple of 2 or 5 or 10? This is where the deduction kicks in! You have to use the cards you have to try to slowly deduce what the Suspect is!
It takes a little getting used to matching the multiples and factors, but luckily every card in the game lists ALL the factors and multiples it uses! So, it seems harder than it is; once you get used to it, it flows quickly!
To be clear, one player knows who the suspect is, and all the other players are giving clues (placing cards) to help deduce! Nominally, each player tends to take responsibility for one or more Suspects, but it’s dynamic! Players can choose when to take a Suspect and become “responsible” for it as the game flows.
If you eliminate all Suspects, you win! If you run out of bullets, you lose! The Infiltraitors win!
Solo Game
There is no solo game! See above: this is only for 2-5 Players! However, this would be an interesting game to apply The Changing Perspectives idea to! See a link here for The Changing Perspectives Idea! Since all information is public (the clues are all public: there’s no implications or subtle innuendo), you can make deductions solely based on the information presented.
I leave this an exercise to the reader: I think you can play this solo if you want to! Much like Shipwreck Arcana (see review here), this is a deduction game where you can pretend to play both sides, using only public information for deduction. If you get to a point where you have to randomly choose something (you are out of cards, and only one one bullet left), you can always roll a dice to decide the outcome.
Cooperative Game
As a cooperative game, this went over pretty well. The first time we played, we played through the first three missions and had a blast!
It’s sort of ridiculous how much fun the gun and bullets were! It sort of drew us into the game!
The first few missions are pretty straight forward, just getting a little harder each time. You use more suits (which makes the color harder to guess) and more ranks (making the rank harder to guess).
This game came out two weeks in a row! For a little card game, it was surprisingly popular in my game groups! See above and below!
The cooperation worked really well; people would say “I know how to get that suspect! You work on the other one!” The fact that there are multiple suspects in play really also worked well—players could choose where to spend effort, both individually and cooperatively.
The Sticking Point
The game doesn’t quite explain matching rank very well … and it’s the most important part of the game! There are two basic interpretations, which the example (in the rulebook) DOES clarify. Consider the following example: Do these two cards below “match”? (Obviously, they don’t match in color, but what about rank?)
Interpretation 1: If the lists of numbers on both cards has some number in common, they match! Under that interpretation, the two cards above match! (6 has 2,3,6,12; 9 has 3,9: Both have a 3! They match!). (((TO BE CLEAR, this is the WRONG interpretation!!!!))) Interpretation 2: If the hidden card (on the right, say the 9) LISTS the other card, it’s a match! In this case, it’s NOT a match, as 6 is NOT in the list of number on 9: (3, 9). They DO NOT match!
If you go in with Interpretation 2, that seems to be the rule as clarified by the rulebook (see above). It took us a few games to “get” this rule. This is possibly the biggest bugaboo that may make people dislike the game … if you can’t get this rule about matching!! I think the best way to “explain” the match rule is via Interpretation 2 of the rules above:
“The Suspect card will list all the cards that it matches“.
With that simple explanation, the match rule goes from baroque to simple. And I think it will open it up to players who might be “scared away” by discussion of factors/multiples and math!!
Traitor Experience
After bringing this out at a second game night and playing through the game with a new group, we were able to solidify our thoughts: This feels like a traitor/social deduction game like Coup or Avalon because you are trying to deduce the identity of the traitor! That feeling of trying to deduce “Who is the Traitor?” is really captured by this game … without being a traitor game!
I don’t really like traitor games. They have the Disparity of Experience problem (see here) where people who have played more than you will have a distinct advantage. And I don’t want to lie, yell, scream, accuse with my friends. I just want to work with them and have fun! If you like the process of trying to find the traitor, that deduction process, I think Infiltraitors really captures that feeling! Granted, Infiltraitors replaces social deduction (which has its own flavor of play) with plain deduction, but I think Infiltraitors does a pretty good job of replicating that social deduction feeling in a purely cooperative game.
Conclusion
Does Infiltraitors (a fully cooperative game that’s nominally about traitors) replace Coup or Avalon (games with traitors?) Infiltraitors does a pretty job replicating the experience of finding traitors! It may not quite your cup of tea, as it replaces social deduction with plain deduction, but if you like the idea of finding traitors but don’t like all the social baggage of traitor games, Infiltraitors might be right for you!
I think me and my groups would give this an 8.5/10! We enjoyed it! It was easy to get out, easy to play a few games, and it was a fun experience working together!
BUT, if you pull this out, be very very clear explaining the match rule to new players or you might scare them away! The talk of factors and multiples may scare them away! Don’t explain it that way, and don’t even bring it up! Just explain the Suspect card lists all the numbers it matches; easy-peasy.
If you are looking for a game to replace Coup or Avalon, this might a really good possibility. It still feels like you are hunting traitors, but replaces the social deduction framework with a deduction framework, and it does so in a fully cooperative game.
If you said “They are all cooperative games“, well, you are mostly correct! (Comic Hunters isn’t cooperative by default, but there is an expansion that makes it cooperative! See here). This is a place where we talk about cooperative games, so that’s a good guess. But there’s something else they all have in common: none of their boards sit flat! See above and below!
You can really see it on Comic Hunters (above): that board just does NOT want to lay flat!
It’s weird, we never thought too much about boards not being flat enough, but we encountered this problem a number of times in the last few years: Comic Hunters, Plum Island Horror, and Dice Throne: Missions! These games really emphasized that sometimes a game board needs some flattening.
We’ll take a look at three different (cooperative) games and three different solutions to this problem! The games of interest all have boards that don’t lay flat! And they are all different sizes! See above!
The Board Butler is a product specifically designed for the problem of boards-that-don’t-lay-flat. I have seen advertisements on BGG, so I knew this existed. I ordered it from their web site and it arrived within a week. It was like $19.99 + taxes and some shipping (but for some reason I got free shipping).
These are basically little plastic piece you put at the edges to force the board flat.
See Comic Hunters with The Board Butler above. It only needs 4 of the 6 pieces.
It works pretty well and it was easy to put on: no issues on Comic Hunters.
The Board Butler pieces are small enough that I need 4 pieces for the Dice Throne:Missions board: one at each edge.
See above. The clear nature makes them relatively uninvasive.
They work well and keep the board flat. Arguably they could obscure the text at the very bottom, but they don’t seem to.
Finally, let’s look at Plum Island Horror!
For Plum Island Horror, we have to use all 6 of the pieces, which means I can’t put them on the long ends. This doesn’t strictly need another 2 pieces, but it might have been nice.
The Board Butler pieces work well: they hold the board down, and they don’t get in the way.
Basically, The Board Butler worked pretty well on all three games. The weakest was Dice Throne:Missions because the Missions boards are thin laminated boards, so they didn’t fit as tight. They fit securely (but not too tight) on Comic Hunters and Plum Island Horror.
Solution 2: Report Binding Bar
These Report Binding Bars are those little plastic sliders you put onto plastic report sheets. See above and below.
I found a thread on BoardGameGeek that recommended these: see thread here. You can order them here: I got 30 of them for $13.99 plus taxes and shipping. See above.
On Comic Hunters, they work great! They are actually being long enough to cover both edges!
The only real complaint is that they are tight. I was “worried” that by sliding them on, that they would TEAR the board! They did not, but I was also very careful! If you go with this solution, you may want to use your finger to “force” the bar open so it’s less tight:
See above as I jam my finger in there to “loosen” it up.
On Dice Throne: Missions, these are the best by far! They hold the board tight, and they even cover both edges with one piece! See above! I only needed 2 of the 30 pieces to hold this board together!
These just slip on easily (no chance of tearing since the boards are laminated) and hold the boards stiff and flat.
Finally, we use these for Plum Island Horror. We need 4 of them to hold the board down: see above. Again, like Comic Hunters, these were a little scary to use because it “felt like” they might tear the board as I put them on. So, I was very careful.
In all three cases, these held the board down and flat very tightly. They were the cheapest by far, at 30 for $13.99, so you could easily share the cost with friends. You probably only need to 6 each! Even with with Plum Island Horror, you could get by with only 4!!
UPDATE: After sliding these on again and again and again on the Dice Throne: Missions boards, they started to show “slide marks”. That is worrisome.
Solution 3: Giant Plastic Overlay
From the same thread on BGG where we got the Report Binding Bar, we also found a link for these giant pieces of plastic you can just “plop” on the board and force it down! See Amazon link here! You get TWO pieces, but it’s $37.99 plus shipping and tax.
You just put it over your board game and “smoosh” it flat!
It turns out it also has a pocket, so if your game fits, you can just put the board inside! See above as Comic Hunters fits!
It works, it keeps Comic Hunters flat, but the plastic overlay is a bit distracting. It’s especially shiny.
The Dice Throne: Missions boards fit in almost perfectly and look good and flat. See above.
Plum Island Horror is WAAAY to big for a single overlay. Luckily, when you order this, you get TWO sheets. Two sheets work:
The problem is you CANNOT fit this board inside the envelope (see above) , so they simply have to lay two of them on top. Since the Plum Island Horror board is so “hefty”, even this solution had trouble keeping the board flat.
In general, this was the worst solution. It was the hardest to see, because it was so reflective, and it was by far the most expensive. And, for the largest board, it required TWO Sheets.
The only advantage of this solution is that you can WRITE ON THE PLASTIC with a dry-erase marker!! See above. If you want to “annotate” your boards, at least you can do that with the overlays.
Conclusion
Which solution you gravitate towards depends on what you want! The cheapest by far was the Report Binding Bar: it worked on all three boards well, except that it was tight on the thicker boards. You could order 30 of them and split them between your friends for $13.99! The best overall solution was The Board Butler; it worked on all boards well, even if it wasn’t “quite as tight” for the Dice Throne Missions board. The Board Butler was high-quality and I never felt like it was too tight. The Overlay was probably the weakest solution: it was the most expensive (as you needed two overlays for larger boards like Plum Island Horror), it was very reflective, and it is harder to store! The Overlay, however, did had the unique advantage that you could write on it if you needed to!
If I were only getting something to fix the Dice Throne: Missions boards, I might get the Report Binding Bars. If I wanted something more general, I would get the Board Butler. If I wanted to annotate my board with dry-erase markers or keep water off it, I might consider the overlay to help keep my board flat. It’s up to you.
UPDATE: After seeing the Report Binding Bars starts to leave skid marks on the Dice Throne: Missions board, I think I strongly prefer the Board Butler over the binding bar, even for Missions.
What’s a party game? A party game is usually a casual game you can pull out with a fairly large group of friends and jump right into! Many, if not most, of the cooperative party games we see are Cooperative Guessing games, where the players collectively guess something based on clues from a clue-giver!
Surprisingly, the year of 2024 produced quite a number of cooperative party games! That’s right; cooperative party games! And most are Cooperative Guessing games! We saw some really good party games on the Top 10 Cooperative Party Games list … and here’s 10 more below just from 2024!
Like many of the games on this year’s list, this is a Cooperative Guessing game! In this game, a clue-giver will give word clues to “guide” the others around the board, trying to get to a destination on the board!
This feels a lot like the cooperative word guessing games Mystic Paths or Landmarks (see below), as you use words to imply directions to travel. What makes this a little different is that the words you choose refer to tourist spots in the maps! There are 4 maps in the game for London, Paris, New York City, and Tokyo! See below for the map of London!
This is a real unique game and has some really neat idea in the crowded cooperative word guessing genre!
Landmarks is a cooperative word guessing game where one player gives word clues, trying to guide the rest of the playing (cooperatively guessing) to water, treasure, and finally the exit! This game is very similar to a game called Mystic Paths where players are moving across a map of hexes.
There’s also elements of Codenames in here, as the clue-giver has a hidden map as he tries to guide the players around the map!
We have played this game with several groups, and it seemed to go over pretty well! It takes a few plays to get the sense and spirit of the game, but once you do, it is fun. Some people didn’t love this (because sometimes it was just too vague or the map is wonky), which is why it’s lower on this list. The components are quite nice (with the cloth map and dry-erase hexes), and it was generally fun!
This looks like a role-playing adventure game (see picture above), but it’s actually a role-playing game PARTY game! It even says that on the cover!
It’s quite silly as a game; a player will have to do an activity and then roll a 20-sided die (secretly) behind their character shield (see above). The Berserker has to open the door; what does a “19” mean? The player then roll-plays what they do (based on the number they roll) and the other player have to “guess” what the roll was on based on what they roll played! It’s a silly game that just gets sillier as you play it!
In fact, it’s so simple to play this that the directions for how to play are summarized very well on the back of the box! See above. My friends and I had fun playing, pardon me, ROLL-PLAYING this silly adventure party game.
So, this is another cooperative word guessing game, but it has elements of math and it is quite thinky. I love this game because it’s so unique and interesting, but some people just bounced off it because of its weird blend of math and wordplay.
Players plays as two teams; a team of aliens trying to communicate with a team of humans! Teams communicate single words to each other to establish some ideas! What letters you use in your words matters, as well as what concepts/words you are trying to communicate! It’s great fun with lots of deduction … if you grok the game.
This is a great game that can play 2-8+ people, and you can pull it out casually … once everyone knows how to play. The biggest problem is that it takes some brainwork and time to figure out this game. This is probably the most thinky game on this list, and why some people might not classify this as a party game .. which is why this is only #7 on this list, despite how good a game it is. See our review of Message From The Stars here to see if you might enjoy this! (Remember, Codenames is classified as a party game, and it’s quite thinky too!)
Many of the games on this list as cooperative word guessing games; this is a number guessing game! This has a lot of deduction as players can either guess a card a player might be holding (like cooperative go-fish) or give a clue (which feels a little like The Crew).
This is basically a cooperative go-fish game with elements of deduction/clue-giving (ala The Crew). It’s probably the second most thinky game on this list (after Message From The Stars). But this is easy to pull out, quick to explain, and quick to play at only 15 minutes! It does take a few times to get the hang of it, but people seem to want to play again!
This is an odd duck of a game. Players take a bunch of black and white pictures and collectively classify them using only a few words, like “DA” and “BLUMP”. Basically, the group is coming up with a language for describing shared traits using a few very simple words. These few words are the ONLY communication that players are allowed!
In the first part of the game, the players collectively classify all the pictures together using only those few words (like “DA” and “BLUMP”) as they point and move pictures. In the second part of the game, new pictures are introduced and the players have to try and figure out, using only the new language of those few words, the new thing. As long as you have a group that doesn’t annoyingly repeat the weird little words ad naseum, this is a fun game … it’s almost a linguistics experiment!
It sounds like it can’t work, but my group really enjoyed it! This is one you might want to try before you pick it up; some people will be annoyed by it, some people won’t get it, but some people will love it! Our groups loved it! Maybe yours will too!
This is a game that I didn’t like as much as everyone else, but it was such a hit for everyone else, I had to put this on the list! One player (the Mayor) puts city Locations out, and the other players have to guess where he would place them based on the locality to other Locations in the game!
The Mayor rotates every turn, so a new player has to decide what Locations go where! It’s all about building the municipality, but with some real silly decisions!
My friend Kurt loves this game and we’ve played it a number of times when he has come to visit! If this sounds like fun, I suggest you give it a try! A bunch of people I know and like really like this game!
This is such a neat game! It’s a very simply premise as players search a shaded picture for certain figures, counting them up! Each player needs to find them independently on their own sheet! If they find “enough” together, they can stay ahead and win!
The sheer fun of this game is the clever sheets that are have darkened plastic. When you place a white surface underneath, the picture comes apparent! See the “fully darkened” picture above … and the picture with a white spotlight below!
There is no batteries or magic technology here; it’s just a white surface underneath making the plastic easily viewable!
This game has worked really well in so many situations! I have played with little kids (like 5 years old) and older adults, and big kids, and even though this “looks like a kid’s game”, people really love the Spotlight mechanism! It’s just so cool!
Wait, this is a cooperative memory match game? Yes, and it works surprisingly well! This is probably Sara’s favorite game of all the games on this list!
Players draw tiles from a bag and cooperatively “come up with a story” for the shape and place it in the warehouse.
After placing a bunch of tiles down, players must try to cooperatively remember what tile was what by trying to match other tiles to it! It’s wacky and the stories people come up are really funny! It’s surprisingly goofy, but it’s really easy to explain and jump into! See our review here to see see why Wilmot’s Warehouse is much better than you expect!
This was a bit of surprise as our #1 choice for the best cooperative party games of 2024, but it just kept coming to the table all this year! And we all loved it! Players get asked a silly question like: “What do you tell a vampire to get him to turn you?” (See back cover above for more questions) And then everyone gets 1 (or 2) cards from 1-10, and everyone has to answer that question so that 1 is least likely to get turned, and 10 is most likely! But without revealing their number! (Much like Adventure Party from earlier)
The guesser has to take all the answers and sort them from lowest to highest .. if they get them all in order, it counts as a point! (You can have upto one mistake)
Like all good party games, the points don’t matter, and you just keep playing, not really caring if you win or not! This is a mass market party game from The Exploding Kittens people; I picked it up at Target, so it’s really easy to find! Check it out! Hopefully you will enjoy it as much as we did!
This is a mouthful of a title: The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game. See the full title above! BoardGameGeek lists it as The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game. Whew! We’ll stay with the “shorter” title.
I ordered my copy directly from Asmodee, and it arrived mid January 2025. I tried VERY hard to get the game as soon as it came out! I was very excited for it!! I saw a TON of reviewers get it earlier in 2024, but as a plain-old boring paying customer, the earliest I could get my copy was straight from Asmodee’s web site in January 2025 (after pre-ordering it back in November (?) 2024).
So, what is this game? It’s a small-box game for 1-4 players, Ages 10+ with a “listed” playing time of 20 minutes. That time is reasonable accurate for describing a single game, but this is, at its heart, a campaign game! So, it’s a campaign of 18 chapters, and each chapter can have multiple games. So, a chapter is “not necessarily” one game, but many times is. (After you complete the campaign, there is a standalone mode so you can continue playing).
This game (you’ll notice I am staying away from saying the full name) is a cooperative trick-taking game! Players work together to take tricks, but under certain conditions! One of the biggest parts of the game is that it is a Limited Communication game: players are not allowed (in any way) to discuss the cards in their hands as they play. All they can do is deduce what other people have by what cards they played.
Those of you paying attention might say “Hey! That sounds like the Crew! That’s a cooperative trick-taking game too, right?” Yup! We liked The Crew quite a bit, as it made the #2 position on our Top 10 Cooperative Space Games! There’s a lot of similarities between the two: they both have ongoing campaigns that start easy and get harder, they both are smaller box games, and they both are Limited Communication games. The best description of Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking game is Lord of the Rings meets The Crew. But there are some interesting differences, which we will discuss!
Unboxing and Gameplay
This is almost exclusively a card game. There are 3 decks in the game: the intro deck (far left), Part I deck (first 12 chapters) and Part II deck (last 6 chapters).
So many cards. See above.
There are some tokens; the purple tokens are used to notate “required” characters: when you play, ever player must take a character, and certain characters are required for certain chapter. The big Ring card is used to denote when Rings have been played, and thus allow leading with them (see more discussion below).
This a trick-taking game, so there are suits. Rather than “boring” hearts, spades, diamonds, etc, the suits are thematic Shadows, Hills, Mountains, Rings, and Forest. See above.
Each player will assume the role of a Lord of the Rings character (you may assume multiple characters depending on the player count).
Each character has a win condition: in order to win a game, you (usually) hav to satisfy all characters’ winning conditions!!! Notice Frodo’s “win” condition: he must win 4 or more of the Rings cards in the tricks he wins.
Pippin’s win condition is to win the fewest tricks: see above. You’ll also note that at the start of the game, some characters are allowed to “exchange” cards with other characters. You can’t still talk about your cards in hand, but you can give away obvious cards. For example: you really don’t want Pippin to have too many high cards (since he has to lose most tricks), so you may give away an 8 of Hills.
An interesting rule of the game is that a player can’t lead with a Ring card unless a Ring has already been played into a previously won trick (by being sloughed off when a player couldn’t match the lead suit). The Ring token is on the black-and-white to show: “Nope: you can’t lead a trick with a Ring suit“.
Once at least one Ring has come out, then Ring cards may be lead! See the colorful side of the Ring above! It now means “Yep! You can lead tricks with Ring cards now!“.
There are lots of little special rules in the game. For example, after dealing out all the cards, one card is always “lost” (to make the math work, there is always one extra card). But Gandalf has a special rule that he can take the lost card into his hand!
Each character is dealt a hand of cards and uses those to play a trick-taking game! The holder of the 1 Ring always starts the game. Frodo is almost always in play, and he always starts with the 1 Ring: see above.
Players continue playing until all their win conditions are satisfied … and they win! If, at any point, the win conditions can’t be satisified, the game is lost. In the campaign, losing means you just play the same game again until you win (usually).
A winning game moves to the next … game. In the beginning of the campaign, that usually means the next Chapter: these are called “Short games” (see below).
Later in the campaign, you may have to play multiple games to advance to the next chapter. These are called “Long” games (see below).
If you can get through all 18 chapters of the campaign, you win!
Solo Play
There is a solo mode for the game! (Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!) Given that The Crew (the game that this will be compared to over and over) DID NOT have a solo mode, this is huge!
The solo mode has very different rules than the main cooperative game! During the main cooperative game, all cards are dealt out, and the players (cooperatively) make decisions about what to play based on what they see in their entire hand! See above as a cooperative player has a whole bunch of cards!
In the solo game, the solo player assumes the role of 4 of the characters, and only gets “part” of each hand (4 cards each to start)! See above as Chapter 1 has the solo player playing 4 characters with 4 cards each!
Each character gets 4 cards (see above) and will get a new cards after a trick is taken! So, the solo player has to decide how to play cards based on seeing ALL Characters cards, but not all cards per hand!
So, this is a solo mode which requires the solo player to operate 4 characters! Normally, I worry about the intellectual overload, the context-switching between characters, and general maintenance. But it’s really not an issue here! Each character is very simple to operate: they don’t have special powers, they simply have a special winning condition. It’s really easy to look at the board (see above) and get a sense what each character should play!!
The solo mode requires you to look at all the cards in all the hands of all the characters and make decisions to achieve their win goals. That sounds daunting, but it really isn’t. You know EXACTLY what each character will play; what you don’t know (for sure) is what card each character will get next. The randomness in the solo game is based on what card each player gets next round. I never found this randomness too debilitating. I had a few games where the cards went against me, but it was easy to replay that game … remember, this is a 20-minute game, so any randomness in the deals (even if it completely sucks), will be over soon and you can play another game.
Said another way, I didn’t think there was too much randomness in this game to make me dislike it.
To emphasize the point that this is an easy game to get into, let me tell you that I played through the entire 18-Chapter solo game when I was sick! I wasn’t at my best, but the LOTR trick-taking game is really easy to get into! Each game is “only” 20 minutes or so, so when I got tired when I was sick, I could go take a nap, and come back again!
Let’s be clear, even though the solo game is easy to pick-up, easy to play, and easy to keep coming back to, there’s still a lot of engaging decisions! Part of the reason I liked the solo game so much was that it was engaging and “distracted” me from being sick!
The amount of manintenance as you play the game is pretty minimal; it’s real easy to play solo. But there is a lot of maintenance between games: Honestly, the worst part of the game is the constant shuffling. You need to make sure you do a really good job shuffling the cards, because a bad shuffle may cause you to lose the game! So, I ended up doing a pile shuffle after every game just to make sure thing were shuffled!
As a solo game, this game is a huge win! It’s easy to learn, easy to play, and engaging enough to keep coming back to! Like I said, I played the entire 18-Chapter campaign solo when I was sick, and it was great! It’s easy enough to play when you are “distracted”, but fun enough to keep you engaged!
Major win for having a solo mode: What’s the score? The Crew: 0, Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 1.
I liked the solo game, and even though I have defeated the entire game, I will keep it in my collection to play again solo.
Cooperative Mode
So, there are actually several cooperative modes based on the number of players. It “feels like” the best way to play the game is 4-Players (or 3-Player). (The 2-Player game is really very different; I can’t comment on that as I never got a chance to play it. I have to admit the 2-Player mode looks very daunting).
My 4-Player group sat down and played though 12 games (8 chapters) in one night over 3 hours! They won most games pretty handily, but it kept getting harder and harder! By game 8, they had to replay it 3 times! Game 8 features Tom Bombadil pretty prominently, and the joke was that game 8 was just as annoying as Tom Bombadil!
The major differences between the solo and 4-Player cooperative game: 1) The solo player sees all hands, but only a limited number of cards 2) The cooperative player sees all cards in their hand, but only can see their hand
The Limited Communication rules are VERY Clear from the rulebook: you pretty much can’t talk about anything except public information, such as player’s winning conditions and special rules. Anything in your hand can’t be discussed AT ALL!
After playing through 8 Chapters, my friends basically said they liked this better than The Crewand it was more thematic! They liked the art, the cards, the character win goals.
The Crew: 0; Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 2 (theme, art)
I like to point out that the Crew has the “very limited communication” with the communication tokens. I actually prefer that part of the Crew: I don’t love that there is NO communication really in this game (but see below). Recall, in the Crew, every player “can communicate” once at a critical juncture with “highest card” or “lowest card” or “only card. There is no such mechanism in Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: the rules for limited communication are pretty brutal.
The Crew: 1 (has some critical communication); Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 2
One Ring To House Rule Them All
Let me tell you what happened in the 4-Player cooperative game: when choosing characters to play, my friends ended up talking a little about which characters to choose. “Oh, I should probably be Pippin, my hand sucks.” “Ya, I can be Tom Bombadil I guess”. Here’s the thing: the rules are VERY CLEAR that they can’t do that!
I read the rulebook aloud to my friends: this explicitly say they can’t do this … “During setup, players should not discuss character preferences, as this may reveal information”
My friends hated this rule! This is the one and only chance to really communicate on the game, and they felt like it made the game more fun! “Give us SOME choice! This is a house rule for us!”
I didn’t mention this, but I ended just watching and shepherding my friends through 8 chapters (I was the fifth wheel and didn’t play). And watching my friends “discuss” which characters to play seemed to engage them and made them talk! They REALLY had fun picking characters! I think it also gave them more “skin” in the game, as they weren’t just “saddled” with a character, they had a choice in the pick!
It’s very explicit in the rules that players can’t reveal any intent on characters, but I think that’s a mistake. I think the game is more engaging and more fun if players have some choice there! Honestly, this helps combat the problem I have with this game: there’s no “special communication” allowed (like The Crew!). Watching the game, it was VERY clear that allowing the players to help choose their characters was more fun, so we made it a house rule: “Players can communicate preferences for choosing characters, but just can’t reveal what’s in their hands”.
With the house rule: The Crew: 1; Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 3 (house rule) Without the house rule: The Crew: 1; Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 2 (no house rule)
The Campaign
The Campaign is … just the game getting harder and harder. The campaign follows the story in the book really well; one of my players is a big Lord of the Rings fan, and they noted how well the Chapters followed the book. But, at the end of the day, each game is pretty much independent of the previous game. There is no “levelling-up”, there are no major penalties for losing—each game just gets “harder”. Certain characters are “revealed” as you play, but generally the campaign is just harder and harder games. It’s a linear campaign.
If you were looking for a more operatic campaign with levelling-up, branching narrative, satisfying punishments, debilitating punishments, and state changing, this isn’t the game for you. But, if you want a bunch of games in a row that nominally follow the plot of the book The Fellowship of the Ring (without too much maintenance in between), this is a good game for you.
What Do You Do When The Campaign Is Over?
There are rules for playing the game after you finish the campaign: see rulebook above. Honestly, I would just rather play the campaign again; the campaign is easy to reset, and setting up games “post campaign” looks messy.
What I Liked
The art: This stained-glass art for the characters was very thematic and very appealing. The art on the Mountains, Rings, Shadows, etc. suits was also very thematic. The art and theme is much more appealing in this game than the Crew: The Crew: 1; Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 4(with house rule and art)
The Characters: The character art and win conditions were all very interesting. One of my players pointed out they liked that the win Conditions changed every time, but they followed the characters! The Crew is a little different in that the win conditions just a condition. I think it’s a win for the Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game that there are characters. Having characters makes the game a little more engaging! For my group at least.
The Crew: 1; Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game: 5(with house rule and art and characters)
Solo mode: The solo mode is good. It’s easy to get into, and it’s easy to start/stop it at any time. We’ve already noted that the Crew does NOT have a solo mode, whereas this does.
What I Didn’t Like
Communications too limited: I think the Crew has the major advantage by giving players “chances” to do communication at critical times: There is no such mechanism in this game. I don’t want to undersell this point: this is one of the major reasons I adore the Crew! The whole idea of communicating a critical piece of information at JUST THE RIGHT TIME is such an engaging and interesting mechanism in the Crew. There is nothing like that here.
I will say that the House Rule we proposed (allow characters to more interactively choose characters) goes a long way towards alleviating this issue.
So much shuffling! Just be aware how much shuffling there is … you may want to sleeve your cards. Since each game is only 20 minutes, these cards get touched and shuffled a lot. I currently don’t have my cards sleeved, but maybe I should.
Conclusion
The Lord of the Rings Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game is a fantastic game that I think people will adore. I watched as my group just jumped in and played 3 hours, and they had a ball! I watched as I played solo over the entire campaign, and I had a ball!
The best description I have of this game is The Crew meets Lord of the Rings! It’s a very thematic co-op, at least moreso than The Crew. My friends all preferred this over the Crew … but only if they had the House Rule that they could talk more about character selection. Watching them play cooperatively, I would strongly recommend this House Rule: it really seemed to make the game more engaging for my friends!
The solo game was very engaging and I would play it again.
This is a very easy game to jump into, either cooperatively or solo, and it’s easy to play (with lots of fun decisions). I personally prefer The Crew over this (because of the critical communication rule), but my friends all preferred this game. If I want to play solo, I can’t play The Crew, but I can play this.
Great game. I will keep both The Crew and Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking game in my collection, but it appears my friends all prefer Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking game.
You might want to sleeve your game if you pick it up. My cards have started getting a little grody.
Unstoppable is a cooperative deck-building/card-crafting game! This was #4 on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Board and Card Games of 2025! This was on Kickstarter back in June 2024, and delivered to me Saturday January 17th, 2025! I backed it, expecting it to arrive later in 2025, but it actually delivered early! (It originally promised February 2025). Amazing!
This delivered with three playmats, the Tyrant’s End expansion, and the base game: see above.
So what is Unstoppable? The game describes itself as a Roguelike Momentum Deckbuilder … meh, that’s an okay description, but I’d prefer to call it a deck-building/card-crafting boss-battler instead (I think it’s just “hot” to call games “roguelike” at the moment).
Be clear that this game ONLY supports 1 to 2 players before you get too excited; this game reminds me of a more tightly-coupled Astro Knights (see our review of Astro Knightshere and here): Unstoppable still has that sci-fi feel, that deck-building feel, and that boss-battling feel … just like Astro Knights, but it also has some really different ideas. What do I mean by that? Let’s take a look below!
Unboxing
The Unstoppable base box is actually not that big; see Coke can for perspective above.
This is a deck-building game (and card-crafting: we’ll touch on that in a second) , so there are a ton of cards: See above.
There’s also some money tokens (credits, far right: I mean, this is a deck-building game, so you have to buy SOMETHING to upgrade your deck), hit point tokens (middle: you gotta do damage to take out minions on the way to the big bad boss), and some action point tokens (far left: yes, this game has action points too!).
There’s not THAT much in the base box; mostly cards and tokens and a few larger mats.
Playmats
I can hear some of you asking … “So Rich, why are there three playmats?” An excellent question.
The playmats are double-sided.
One side of the playmat is a single player mat. This is where one player’s cards, play board, threat, tokens, etc. goes. See above.
The other side of the playmat is where the main upgrades (this is a deck-building game, remember?), the core cards, and the big bad boss you battle lives. See above.
The reason there are three playmats is because the game is either 1-player or 2-players! Each player gets a mat (2 mats) and the big bad boss gets a mat (for up to 3 mats). See below for a 2-Player set-up:player 1 on left, player 2 on right, upgrades/boss on top.
So, to be clear, the playmats cost extra money; they don’t come with the game. Were they worth the extra money? So, I paid $100 for the base game, 3 mats, and one expansion. I like how they mats organize the game, but strictly speaking you don’t need them!
The rulebook DOES show how the game sets-up without the mats, so you don’t need them. But I liked them; much like the Aeon’s End: The Descent playmat was so useful, so too was the playmat for Unstoppable. But maybe you should see if you like the base game before you go investing all the $$$ for the playmats and expansion … keep reading …
Rulebook
I am a little grumbly with this rulebook. There are about 3 or 4 things that it could have EASILY done to make it SIGNIFICANTLY better.
The good news is that it gets an A- on the Chair Test.
It opens up and sits perfectly well on the chair next to me, making it easy to consult. So, they definitely did that right: see above.
The Components page (on the left above) is “okay”. The first real problem is … how do you set this up? There is a discussion (right side of the page) about “how you set-up and sleeve” the game, but THERE IS NOT A SINGLE PICTURE describing it! I was able to figure it out, but people who have no idea what card-crafting is or even deck-building will be completely lost with these directions (far right side of the page). A single picture might take this game from unplayable to playable for certain people. And a little picture would have made me happy; show me how the decks fit together. Please? I feel like the description above wasn’t quite enough.
The set-up was pretty good: see above.
The next place I had problems was the card anatomy. Here, the Defense and Bonus areas on the Threat Cards were poorly described. The problem is that most Threat Cards use the SKULL symbol, and it’s not clear what that means (the skull on the Threat Cards is a different color and/or outline than the reference card: we discuss more below). A simple example describing one combat would have helped that.
The rest of the rulebook is pretty good.
I also really wanted a game summary on the back; I ended up paging through the gameplay pages over and over as I played; it would have been nice had those been summarized on the back.
This rulebook was … ok. I just wanted a few more examples, a few more discriminators, and a few more pictures in the rulebook to help me get into the game. After a little trek onto BGG (see thread here), I feel like I got my questions answered, but the rulebook could have been better.
It worked. Mostly. Except for set-up. It could have been significantly better with a few extra pictures.
Storybook
There is a storybook for the game. You don’t need it to play the game. It’s just flavor text. I never read it, and I feel bad for not reading it?
Sleevening
Like I mentioned in the rulebook section, it was more work than I expected to get this game into playable shape. It took me about an hour or so? Basically, you have to “sleeven” the game and put a bunch of cards into sleeves.
Let’s be clear: the sleeves come with the game! Although this is “mostly” a deck-building game (you can build a deck, add better cards, and cull lesser cards: See our Top 10 Cooperative Deck-Building Games for more discussion of deck-building games), it is also a card-crafting game; this is a term that came into parlance with another of John D Clair’s Games: Mystic Vale (although this is a slightly different flavor of that idea). This game is built for you to put cards inside the sleeves, and have multiple cards together at the same time.
Once the cards get going, they will have two sides: a core side (above right: the GOOD side) and a Threat side (above left: the BAD side). There we actually two cards inside the sleeve! This basically allows the GOOD side and BAD side to vary independently.
The GOOD sides are what the characters can do in the game: deal damage, shield themselves, etc. See above.
The GOOD cards tell you which BAD cards they pair with; see the backs above (well, the intro cards do, once you start playing, you get random BAD cards).
The Threat cards (the other side) will be the bad guys that the players fight during the game. These cards, when defeated, will turn over and flow into the GOOD guys hand on the good side!
You might ask “Why do we have these weird rules and weird backs/fronts?” It’s to support UPGRADES (and allow the fronts and backs to vary independently, but that’s a complex discussion).
Probably the coolest part of Unstoppable is that you can UPGRADE a card: it stays attached to the card … in the sleeve! The reason these cards are so WEIRD-shaped is that the upgrades go into the right part of the card and basically stay attached/stay in the card sleeve so that card is better for the rest of the game!
See above as we try to choose between two UPGRADES: Do I want to making it Repeating or add a 2000w Arc Capacitor? The repeater gives me three separate shots, but the capacitor gives me one big shot!! Which do I want?
I choose the capacitor! See as I slide it in …
… and see as it augments my card! Pretty cool!
This is the core crafting mechanic of the game; this is the cool gimmick.
Gameplay
Each player chooses one character to play: see above.
The back of your card indicates which specialized cards you start with (and a little flavor text).
The player sets-up with their starting deck: three special cards and 7 standard “starting” cards. They set-up on the player side.
Your deck goes on the character mat, with Armor and Hit points being tracked.
You also set-up three Threats you must deal with in your personal space. You start with three cards in hand, three action points, and three Threats to deal with.
To play a card, you need to be able to pay the Action point cost (in the upper right corner). Playing Strike gives you a simple 1 hit point of damage.
You do damage to one of the three Threats: see above (more of them if they are FAST); if any of these Threats survive to the next round, they will do Damage to you!
If you take out a Threat, the card FLIPS to the GOOD side and comes into your hand! That’s right, you don’t really draw from your deck: the main way to get new cards in your hand is to take out Threats! That’s very interesting!
Of course, this is a deck-building game, so you have to get new cards somehow. Basically, every turn, you get to choose one of three (you draft) the three cards where the BLUE LEVEL marker is (see above). There are 6 levels of core cards, with higher levels being obviously better!
Every time you empty your deck, you level up and move the level marker up. (There are also ways to move the level marker up quicker, but only temporarily). Leveling-up is a fun time; you get to CULL a card, move the level marker up, and anticipate some new “better” cards!
This is a boss-battler, so you have to take out the BIG BAD BOSS; depending on which one you choose. See above. Interestingly, you can only do “boss damage” (see it blurred below) when you kill certain threats from your deck. These special threats get added every time you level up (and you usually start with 2 of these “boss threats”: see Below.)
There’s actually quite a bit more to the game, but that’s the basics.
Build a better deck and craft better cards! Take out local Threats on the way to taking out the Big Bad!
Solo Play
So, this game is definitely built for solo (thanks for following Saunders’ Law), with 2-Player being the secondary mode. See above: even the font hints at that disparity (SOLO is all big)!
I ended up playing about 10 games of the solo game in the first few days after I got this game! There are three bosses that come with the game, and I was able to defeat each one … after I lost a few times. (There are ways to up the difficulty, and there are 4 characters to play with to give the game more replayability)
It takes a little while to get into the “flow” of the game. There are a lot of rules, there are a lot sections, but there are a lot of decisions (in a good way) to make too.
For example, there are 4 factions in the game that all play VERY differently! If you have multiple cards of a faction, they can “support” the other cards and make them more powerful! I tended to get the Silver faction (the little diagonal raven) in my first few games. But there is also worth in getting multiple factions, especially with the UNITE keyword which gives you special on how many different factions you have in play/in hand!
My favorite decisions in the game came when I was stuck; it was pretty clear that I was going to die and lose, but if I could upgrade my cards JUST RIGHT before I went into battle, I could stay alive! The UPGRADES, and the fact that you can do them anytime on your turn, really make it so you can pivot and be smart! I really appreciated that I could feel clever. Deck-building games tend to have some randomness in them, but the UPGRADE mechanism is what kept me from being too grumpy with that randomness.
I will say that the solo player doesn’t have to do too much work once the game is going, but the set-up and ESPECIALLY the tear-down is a lot of work! Going through your entire deck and separating the core cards and threat cards is so much work. Besides the “unsleevening” (which was a sub-optimal experience), the tear-down is one of the biggest “oofs: that’s a lot of work” in the game. See above as I tear apart the decks!
There are a lot of rules, a lot of Icons, a lot of factions. I appreciated that, by playing this solo, I could learn the game and take whatever time I wanted. I could then teach my friend. Not friends, because the cooperative mode is ONLY 2-Players.
Cooperative Mode
Yes! Thank you! Unstoppable has a cooperative mode with NO Communications Restrictions! I get so tired of having some obscure rules to obscure the communication when playing cooperatively with my friends! I said this in Everdell Duo (see review from a few weeks ago) and I’ll say it now: let me and my friend(s) talk! We play games to play, laugh, talk, strategize, and have fun together! I am so glad we don’t have to worry about any Communications Restrictions as we work together! Thank you Unstoppable for allowing full communication!
The rules for 2-Player are in 1.5 pages (pages 13 and 14: see above); the idea is pretty straight-forward: each player is playing multi-player solitaire for the most part. The BIG BAD BOSS has twice as many hit points (for scaling to 2 players), so both players still have to do “about” the same amount of damage and play “about” the same amount of game.
Most of the 2-Player cooperative game proceeds simultaneously, as both players play out their turns at the same time. (This helps keep the game flowing quickly). The only times where the two players must worry about the order they play is (1) when drafting the new card (players are allowed to choose who drafts first), and then (2) in the Main Phase, the game uses Player Selected Turn Order (one of our favorite mechanisms), where players can intersperse their plays however they want! This is fantastic! Me and my friend can decide the best way to take out Threats together! The only prerequisite is that the entire action must “finish” before the next one. (We found we could even do the Main Phase simulataneously many times as well!)
Although the players can talk through how to play together, the only way they can help each other is to eliminate Threats (by attacking their battlefield) for each other … and that’s it! There’s no sharing of any resources (credits, cards, armor) or anything else. So, this is very much multi-player solitaire.
In my first two-player game, I lost because my friend has a bad draw and couldn’t recover … if I just could have given him a few credits, he would have survived! So, although you can talk and strategize together, you can’t help each other out THAT much. The game is balanced pretty well for the solo player, so it’s rare you can actually “eliminate a threat” from your friend without screwing yourself, at least in my experience.
I liked the 2-Player cooperative mode, but I wish there was a little more cooperation: this is generally a multiplayer solitaire experience. Even sharing credits might have made this feel just a touch more cooperative without changing the gameplay too much … it’s even thematic! “I’ll wire you some credits!” This is a minor house rule that would I suggest to make the game just a little more cooperative.
Things To Look Out For
As I played a bunch of games, I ran into some issues that I feel I should point out; maybe I can make your experience better.
What does the Skull mean? When you see the SKULL on the Threat (MONSTER) card (see above), that means “use the current level number on the BIG BAD Boss card“. You might miss this the first time through because the Reference cards have the SKULL as a black on white, but every single Threat card has the SKULL as white on grey like the example above (or white on orange) … so you don’t correlate that they are the same symbol because the colors don’t match!
…Even more confusing, the marker on the BIG BAD BOSS map is red. So, these symbols don’t color-coordinate at all! When the RED token is on the 1, it means “1” (for the Defense of the Monster above). There was never a clear example of this in the Rulebook, and the lack of color-coordination can can be confusing, so just be aware of the issue. Once you know this, it’s easy.
Boss Cards Shuffle Weirdly: Because the Boss Damage cards (see above) don’t ever have a Core (GOOD card) inserted in with it, they shuffle weirdly. I tended to get all the BIG BAD BOSS cards at the front or back of the deck because they are just “lighter” and shuffle differently in your deck. Go out of your way to make sure you shuffle your deck well (maybe a pile-shuffle) so that you don’t have all these cards clump together. (You DO NOT want these cards to clump together)
You can put the cards in backwards! See above as the Viren card is in the sleeve upside down. You know this because the card next to it is correct with the Core card extruding out the top. If you put a core card in here, it won’t line-up correctly.
…Have the opening on the Threat cards on the TOP so the Core cards can just slide in; see above.
Multiple Attacks vs. Adding: It’s still not clear if each Orange Swirl is considered a separate attack or just additive. If I add the Repeating, does each attack get the addition of the card it augments? Probably not? Also, since there is (currently) no notion of damage reduction in the game, 3 single attacks of 1 and 1 single attack of 3 will be the same against one opponent, but the Repeating will obviously be better IF if it really is 3 separate attacks (which is probably why it’s more expensive). I am using deduction (based on what I know about the game) to figure this out, rather than having the rules tell me. That frustrated me a little.
When Defeated: What does it mean when the “When Defeated” shows the Attack icon for the Boss Threat cards? See above! Does the Boss Threat have a Death Curse and do 4 Damage to you as it dies? Or do you get to do 4 Damage to another threat? It’s not clear. After playing about 10 games, I am pretty confident it’s a true bonus for the player: because the Boss Threats don’t come back into your hand (they do Boss Damage), they don’t help you with other threats, so you need the Bonus damage to be a HELPER! So, it’s a true bonus; you can do 4 damage to something else! If it were the other way around (with the Threat doing 4 damage to you), this game would be called Unbeatable instead of Unstoppable because it would be so hard!
What I Liked
Factions: The factions in this game really added a lot of flavor to the game. I mean, this is a deck-building game, which we’ve seen tons of. The four different factions really added some new flavor to this genre.
Threat and Core: The fact that the core cards and the Threat cards are tightly coupled was really interesting! Granted, this is the core gimmick (pun not intended) that makes this stand out (with the card-crafting), but it does work.
UPGRADES: At the end of the day, the UPGRADE system worked so well; this is the fundamental reason this game stands out. You can upgrade your cards independently, and that’s a really interesting decision! Adding the UPGRADES on an ad-hoc basis saved me many times, and it really makes you feel clever when you upgrade and turn a 3-Action Point card into 1-Action Point card!
Looks: The game looks good. And the playmats really do help.
What I Didn’t Like
The Introductory Experience: The introduction to this game and the “sleevening” weren’t great experiences. I am very worried they would turn off a less-experienced player to the point of abandoning the game. It reminded me a little of my first experience with Marvel Legendary many years ago … if a friend hadn’t helped me with my first game, I may have given up on it! Just a few more pictures and explanations, please? (Another game I really liked from last year, Union City Alliance (a co-op deck-builder) had this same problem: see here).
Tear-down: The game moves quickly as you play, but tear-down in this game is a lot of work: you have to separate many many cards from their sleeves.
Ambiguities: There were just enough ambiguities in the game that I was frustrated a few times. Again, I wish the rulebook had a few more examples, a few more pictures, a few more discussions, maybe even an index. In this review, I tried to point out problem areas so hopefully they won’t trip you up.
Theme and Comparison to Astro Knights
How much theme is here? There’s about as much theme here as in the base Astro Knights game; although I think I would give it to Astro Knights for feeling just slightly more thematic.
Although, If we were comparing it to Astro Knights: Eternity, I would definitely say Eternity is more thematic … mostly.
Although the thematic element depends on which BIG BAD BOSS you fight! In your first few Unstoppable games, you should fight The Harbinger then The Triumvirate (in that order). Those games teach you the technical mechanisms of the game. The final boss (Duomo’s Menace: see above) actually has a little story and some choices! See below!!
There is a deck of 21 cards (see above) and you make decisions (like a Choose Your Own Adventure story) as it takes you through different parts of the deck!
Minor spoiler above (that’s why it’s sideways), but it’s the first decision you would come to … see above. These decisions take you through different parts of different stories!
There’s a bunch of different endings (don’t look too closely above) for that adventure! The final boss Duomo’s Menace has quite a bit of theme and feels like a little adventure!
Would I recommend Astro Knights or Unstoppable? They are both great sci-fi cooperative deck-builders, but it depends on what you want! Astro Knights is a little simpler and plays more people (at 1-4 players). Unstoppable is more difficult and plays fewer people (1-2 players). Astro Knights, especially if you are playing the Eternity expansion, feels more thematic, but, Unstoppable has slightly better gameplay with its card-crafting mechanic …and it does have a thematic adventure for the final boss!! As a cooperative experience, I would give the edge to Astro Knights because it feels more interactive. In the end, I have both and like both!
Conclusion
Yes, I liked Unstoppable! Quite a bit! It’s definitely staying in my collection for the solo game, but I can see it being ideal for playing 2-Player with my friend Joe!
The deck-building and card-crafting aspects of this game are unique and this brings some new ideas to that genre: upgrades, defeating cards to draw them, special boss damage … to name a few! To be clear, the main gimmick of this game (the card-crafting) DOES WORK and it works well.
I really did like the playmats and would recommend them, but they do make the game more expensive; strictly speaking, you don’t need them.
Overall, I’d have to give this a 8.5/10. I want to give it more, but the “unsleevening” experience and the rulebook could have been a little better.
What makes a good solo game? I find them when I typically start playing solo games to learn that game cooperatively for my friends. If a game starts to enchant me and I can’t stop playing it solo … there’s something to it! All the games on this list were games I played solo to teach my friends … but then I kept playing! Some of these games will end up on either my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024, some but of them will end up on my Top Cooperative Expansions of 2024, but one things for sure … they are all great solo!
Honorable Mention: Solo Project PEGASUS Campaign for Marvel United
After getting Marvel United MultiverseSeason 3 with all of its content, I was very taken with the Campaign Decks (see below and see review here), but I was saddened to learn there was no campaign for the Project PEGASUS saga (see above)!
So I spent many many weeks developing my own campaign using all of the Marvel United content! This is a print-and-play campaign for Marvel United! I played this campaign solo over and over and over again (multi-handed with 2, 3, and 4 characters) as I playtested all the the different combinations of characters! There is no game I played more solo this year than the Marvel United: Project PEGASUS campaign!
It’s awkward to put this on our list since I developed it, but I had so much fun playtesting it solo over and over for weeks and weeks, I had to acknowledge how much time and how much fun I had with this! If you liked the Marvel United Campaign Decks and wanted more, check out the free Project PEGASUS Campaign here!
10. Skytear Horde: Monoliths
Now, Skytear Horde: Monoliths is a standalone expansion in the Skytear Horde universe! This is a great little solo and cooperative tower defense game! But you might ask: “Why isn’t this on the Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024instead of this solo list?” That’s a very good question! It’s because, although this is a really good expansion with great components and cards, the game really works best as a solo game.
We tried it cooperatively (see our review here), and it was just okay. It’s significantly better as a solo game! It feels like most of the balance and playtesting was done as a solo game, so it can’t really go on our Top 10 Cooperative Expansions of 2024 list … because it really is best as a solo game.
It’s got some great components and some really great art! Take a look at our review here to see if this is something you might like!
9. Batman: Gotham City Chronicles + Solo/Cooperative Expansion
So, you can’t play Batman: Gotham City Chronicles solo without both the base game (which came out years ago) and the Solo/Cooperative Expansion (which came out this year)! In order to get to the cooperative game, I had to wade through learning the original base one vs. many game, then learn the solo game, to finally learn the cooperative game! Whew!
Now the cover of the Solo/Cooperative Expansion looks great! See above!
But there were some major production issues with the expansions as: 1) The English translation still had some scenarios in French! And 2) The binding on the solo/cooperative rulebook is terrible! It’s impossible to hold open! See above as I came up with a kludgy workaround for that! Objectively, I feel like I had to give this game a 5.5/10 since the production had issues!
This might strike you as an odd pick: A Medical Mystery game! I picked this up at Target and really enjoyed playing through the mysteries of the game! Instead of solving a boring old murder mystery (sarcasm here: I loved my murder mysteries), you are doing research, asking questions, running tests, and trying correctly to diagnose a patient!
There’s only a limited number of mysteries per box (see the envelopes above), but if you ever wanted to play a medical mystery and diagnose like Gregory House, this is the game for you!
I love my murder mysteries (remember: Suspects made the #1 spot on my Top 10 Solo Games of 2023), and this was a great spin on that genre! See our review here to see if it’s something you may like!
7. Everdell: Duo
I wasn’t expecting to like Everdell: Duo as much as a I did! My first playthroughs were a bit “clunky”, as the game has some fiddly bits and documentation issues you have to get through. But once you “get” how the game works, it’s quite fun! (I also never played the original Everdell)
To play solo, you have to man both the tortoise and the hare as they build their respective cities! See above! There’s a lot of thought about when you share, when you place workers, when you buy, and when you draw cards! You are looking for the combos to help both the tortoise and the hare! It might “seem” like both the hare and tortoise are playing multiplayer solitaire games, but as the game opens up to you, there’s more collaboration between the two than you might think!
That delicious (solo) collaboration plus the beautiful components and the cute vibe of the game put this on my solo list! I am just as surprised as you are that this made my solo list! My only concern (which is why it’s at #7) is that can be at the whim of the card draws, but most of the time there are so many ways to pivot around that! See our review here to see if this might be something you like!
6. Rise of the Unfolders: Tidal Blades 2
I didn’t know a lot about the original Tidal Blades when I backed this, but Tidal Blades 2 looked like a fun little cooperative dungeon crawler. Holy Cow! I was blown away about how good the gameplay were and how great the components were!
As silly as it sounds, they did such a great correlating the colors, giving bases for the monsters, and generally making the cards very readable!
But the coup de grace was the card system where you could choose a card, a row or a column, activating everything there! This was such a unique and different combat system, it really made this game stand out. The game is better with more people, but I had such fun playing through (most) of the campaign solo!
This is an odd duck of an entry; the Collector’s Edition of Robinson Crusoe arrived this years (3 years late, which made a lot of people angry) and had some amazing minis and components … for a worker placement game that probably doesn’t need them!
See above for one of the Sundrop worker placement tokens!! Did I really need this? Nah! But did I love it? Ya!
In the end, the reason this made the list (besides how stupidly nice it looks) was because of the Introductory Campaign Scenario Book! I love Robinson Crusoe, but I hadn’t played it in 5 years! The Introductory Campaign gave me an excuse to enjoy a nice 5-Game campaign in the world of Robinson Crusoe! Over about a month, I’d play a scenario on a weekend and just have a good old time in this world. Good times! It reminded why I like Robinson Crusoe so much! Check out our review of the Collector’s Edition of Robinson Crusoe to see if this might be something you might like!
4. Marvel United: Campaign Deck. Dark Phoenix Saga
The Campaign Decks (see above) came with Season 3 of Marvel United: Multiverse. These decks takes all your Marvel United content (and I mean ALL of it) and gives you some “stories” or campaigns to run through.
The Dark Phoenix Saga is a campaign centered on the X-Men from issues #131-137 back in the Byrne/Austin/Claremont days. This campaign takes you through a story, lasting 5 battles (or more) as the X-Men fight the Hellfire club, others, and (spoiler!) deal with Jean Grey turning into Dark Phoenix.
This was a heart-breaking, soul-wrenching campaign as I played through one of my favorite Marvel X-Men stories! I can’t share too much, but it was a great solo experience over a number of days.
This one was a late comer and almost didn’t make our list! It came in late late November, just before Thanksgiving! I ended up playing cooperatively with my friends and had a grand old time, but the solo experience was truly phenomenal!
First of all, Aeon’s End: The Descent has true solo play (which makes it a lot easier to jump into)! And all the new Mages and ideas it adds to the system were … surprisingly fresh! Even after 8 years, this standalone expansion breathed new life into the Aeon’s End system!
But, at the end of the day, it was the new module called Friends and Foes that made this stand out so much! This new module adds new ways of winning and losing with some interesting ideas, but what it does best for me was mitigate the problems with Variable Turn Order!
Playing through the four Chapters of this narrative campaign was a thrill! The story was pretty good (once you got into it), and the new ideas generated throughout were fantastic. I played a different mage in every chapter and just had a ball figuring out how to play each new mage! Sure, you can play this campaign with many people, but I really enjoyed unravelling this story as a solo play. See our review here ofAeon’s End: The Descent to see if this might be something you enjoy!
2. Sammu-Ramat
Any other year, this probably would have been my #1 game of the year! I went back and forth a number of times, so this could easily be my #1! Sammu-Ramat is basically a cooperative euro-puzzle game; it immerses the players into Queen Sammu-ramat’s rule of Assyria in 9th century BC, as guided by her advisors.
It’s kind of a war game, as you fend off invaders, but it’s also a euro game gathering-resources games, but it’s also a logistics puzzle as you try to balance keeping the kingdom defended and fed!
You can play either a one-shot (which is a great way to jump in), but it really shines as a 5-game campaign where you leave the game state as set-up for the next game! This game was such a great surprise! I adored playing it solo, especially through a campaign (although it needs a little house-ruling). I really wish it could have made my #1 spot because it was so good. See out review ofSammu-Ramat here to see if this is something you might like!
1. Set A Watch: Doomed Run
This game has no right to be the #1 spot; this is a giant campaign game in the Set A Watch Universe. First of all, of the Full 7 Game Campaign games I played, I ended up playing two of them cooperatively! So, that means I only played 5 of the games solo!
And to play the campaign, you must have ALL The Set A Watch Content! And I mean all!! (Including the Outriders deck)! This means: Set A Watch, Set A Watch: Swords of the Coins, and Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles!!! See how it takes up one half of my table just to separate the different games above?
And Set A Watch also has the solo problem that “you must play 4 characters”, so that’s not ideal either: see above as I try to operate 4 characters!
Despite all that, this game spent 11 days taking over my table, and I had a ball playing through it mostly solo! Once you know Set A Watch, especially solo, it’s such a fun game! I know, this really has no right even being my favorite solo game of 2024, but I had so much fun playing it (mostly) solo, it has to be #1. See our review here to see if Set A Watch: Doomed Run might be something you enjoy!
As we look forward, we also look back! It’s fun to look ahead at the cooperative games coming up in 2025!!! We’ve been looking ahead since 2021 (see our Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2021), but it’s always interesting to see the state of games from those previous years. Believe it or not, we still are waiting some games from 2021! Let’s take a look at some backlog!
2021:
Onimaru: There have been some pictures of pallets of boxes from the Warehouse, but we still haven’t see this yet. Maybe we’ll see this, maybe we won’t. I don’t know. It’s been since 2019 when this all this started (6+ years!!). As of now, this is the only outstanding game from our 2021 list.
Arydia: The Paths We Dare Tread: It’s been a while for this, but we did see a copy arrive at the Dice Tower, so we know that this is imminent. Based on everything from the Kickstarter, we should see this in early 2025. UPDATE: It arrived! December 30th, 2024! It’s a big mama! Look for a review coming soon!
Rat Queens To The Slaughter: There’s been some drama here as the original creator took the game back from the people who have failed to deliver! It’s unclear what happens next, but the creator wants to take charge of this himself … which is great, but it’s still really unclear when we’ll see this!
Union City Alliance: Huzzah! Union City Alliance finally arrived! And it was good! We liked it so much it made our Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2024! See our review here of Union City Alliance to see if you might like it!
2023:
Dark Quarter: Promised Oct 2023. It is frustrating we haven’t seen this yet, but there has been lots of activity on the Kickstarter threads, so we believe we will see this early 2025. This is the only game still undelivered from our 2023 list.
Hacktivity: This delivered in June 2024 this year! And it was pretty good. It didn’t make any Top 10 lists this year, but I still liked it. See our review here of Hacktivity to see if you might like this!
Defenders of the Wild: This arrived August 2024, on time. There was a lot to like in this game, but it just didn’t land for me or any of my groups. Take a look at our review here!
Santorini Deluxe and Co-op expanion: Promised delivery May 2024. Still haven’t seen too much activity. Hopefully it will arrive in 2025.
Weirdwood Manor: This delivered in June 2024 and was generally very well received by my game groups! See our review here to see if this might be something you might like!
Luddite: Promised delivery December 2024. There has been progress, but we probably won’t see this until 2025.
Once Upon A Line: The Butterfly’s Breath: Promised delivery May 2024. They are still doing a lot of work (per the Kickstarter updates), but it’s not done yet, even from a development perspective, let alone manufacturing. We may see this at the end of 2025, but we suspect we won’t see it until 2026.
Marvel X-Men Dice Throne + Co-op Missions! This promised delivery in Aug 2024. We still don’t have it. It looks like some people might get it before the end of 2024, but most people will be getting this in early 2025.
Platform: Kickstarter Floe Promised Delivery: June 2025 Summary: FLOE is an adventure-strategy game where players embark on heroic quests across an icy landscape. You’ll discover long-lost secrets on uncharted icebergs, sail the seas to find adventure and sunken treasure and delve into perilous caves to find precious crystals and battle fearsome monsters. Despite the dangers ahead, you won’t be alone in your travels. Always at your side, your loyal familiar may help gather resources or jump into the fray to turn the tide of battle. During their travels, heroes will also gain helpful allies, powerful abilities, and rare items. In time, heroes may also build shrines across the map, ensuring their legacy will be long remembered. However, always beware of the cold. Venturing into the icy wasteland is perilous: almost everything heroes do outside the safety of the village will cost them warmth. From time to time, they will need to return to the village to warm up, improve their homestead, purchase upgrades, and prepare for their next big adventure. Will you be the boldest explorer of them all?
So, the base game looks amazing! But this game isn’t a co-op by default, which has us a little worried. But with the Monsters Unleased expansion, this will be co-op! This is #10 on our list because its unclear how good the co-op will be! Given the quality of everything else, we expect great things!
9. Fable Fury
Platform: Kickstarter Fable Fury Promised Delivery: Oct 2025 Summary: As unlikely heroes, you must explore unknown lands, fight unconventional enemies, dodge silly traps, and collect monster runes hidden within ancient shrines scattered across the realms. Once you have collected the 3 runes, unlock the portal to face the monstrous threat!
Choose your heroes and set out as a team to find the runes hidden in Shrines across three realms. Grab your coins, stock up on items at the Gift Shop, and jump into your first realm.
The tag line of this game is Ridiculous strategic cooperative, rogue-like dungeon crawler: The art is very cute, and the game seems to have a sense of humor. We had such a good time with Slay The Spirethis last year that maybe this will scratch the same itch! We are very much looking forward to this! I love the art! And the sense of humor!
8. Horror On The Orient Express
Platform: Gamefound Horror On The Orient Express Promised Delivery: August 2025 Summary: Horror on the Orient Express: The Board Game lures you into the luxurious Orient Express in the 1920s, taking you on a dangerous train ride into the realm of the Dreamlands. Everything is against you, from monsters attacking the train to murderous cults hiding among the passengers. Worst of all, an eldritch, blood-thirsty vampire hunting down everything that moves. Can you solve the dark secrets of the Orient Express before time runs out?
In this cooperative game, you and the other investigators try to survive on the doomed train. To win, you must hunt out the cultists to stop them from performing a hideous ritual and ensure the train reaches its destination. Each of you controls a character who can develop new skills, gather items, talk to the passengers, discover clues, and, ultimately, decide the train’s fate. You may even learn a spell or two!
Horror on the Orient Express: The Board Game brings the award-winning Call of Cthulhu horror and mystery TTRPG into the board gaming world. Special rules, ongoing character development, and awesome play pieces provide a challenging and exciting gaming experience. Your journey on the Orient Express will be something to remember!
This games looks gorgeous and lures me back into the Horror/Cthulu mythos by being a little bit of a mystery too! Cthulu and a mystery? And a train? What more could you want!? And, let’s be honest, this looks gorgeous on the table!
7. Aetherspire
Platform: Kickstarter Aetherspire Promised Delivery: Jan 2025 Summary: The realm of Elementis, once a harmonious balance of earth, air, fire, and water, is now under siege. Elemental Aetherfiends have dispatched waves of invaders to drain our aethercore, the realm’s lifeblood, causing chaos to reign. You and your companions must build powerful elemental spires to lure away and defeat these invaders. As each spire grows stronger, it will unleash a devastating resurgence against the Aetherfiends. Can you restore balance before it’s too late?
Aetherspire is a cooperative 3D tile placement and tower defense game for 1-4 players. Build elemental spires and defend the realm in this stunning 3D strategy game!
A 3-D Tile placement games and tower defense game? Sign me up! And I really like how it looks! I am excited to see how this comes to the table!
6. One-Hit Heroes
Platform: Kickstarter One-Hit Heroes Promised Delivery: March 2025 Summary: Pick a hero and fight for your life! One-Hit Heroes is a co-operative boss rush game where your team must defeat the boss without getting hit even once. The more bosses you defeat, the more your Armory improves as you unlock more card variety each time you play an Episode.
Each boss has a custom deck of moves to try and land hits on your team, but each of you have a unique hero deck with your own tools for blocking, dodging and damaging the boss.
Defeat bosses to be rewarded with card packs that you can tear open and draft from. Each card pack will let you power up and specialize your hero further for the rest of the Episode. But in order to defeat the final boss of each Episode, you’ll need more than just a refined deck – you’ll need to play your cards carefully and work as a team to survive long enough to win.
This is a solo or co-op boss battler; it’s a card game about fighting, but avoid getting hit … as you only have one hit point! How do avoid all the damage but still manage to win? Rahdo really raved about this, and I too am excited for it!
5. Invincible: The Card Game
Platform: Kickstarter Invincible: The Card Game Promised Delivery: Jan 2025 Summary: Invincible: The Card Game puts you in the role of young superheroes as they struggle to become the new Guardians of the Globe. Working together as a team, each player gets to control an iconic character from the Invincible comic universe as you battle to protect Earth from escalating encounters with the series’ many supervillains.
In each battle, you start with a character-specific deck of cards and a unique special ability, then it’s up to you to build up your deck, charge your power, and choose your strategy wisely. Your enemy won’t be taking it easy on you, unleashing hordes of minions to take you down, launching attacks to destroy the city around you, and forcing you to adapt to their unique special abilities. How hard could it be? Well, all you have to do is stay alive, protect Earth, and defeat the universe’s most powerful villains.
We loved Invincible: The Hero-Building game (see review here) and we love the Astro Knights games (see reviews here and here), so adding Invincible IP to the Astro Knights system seems like a good match! Astro Knights has the comicy feel and seems like a natural fit. It was somewhat surprising this Kickstarter didn’t do better: this only may made $111K, which seems small for a larger IP like Invincible. Still, we look forward to a cooperative deck-builder with Invincible!
4. Unstoppable
Platform: Kickstarter Unstoppable Promised Delivery: February 2025 Summary: On the city-planet of Ceres II, every alleyway invites a quick and quiet death. In the lush forests of Virenos, a single misstep could land you in the belly of a beast. The harsh wasteland of Mithras holds both grave danger and a great treasure for those who search its stacks of discarded rubbish. Amidst this chaos, you find yourself thriving, learning, and growing — a child of rank, touched by fate — but a new danger shadows the future of all three worlds. Gather your allies and sharpen your skills, for the darkest days are yet to come.
Unstoppable is a solo or co-operative roguelike, momentum deck-building game. Use card crafting and deck building wisely in the face of unlimited threats, maintaining action and card-draw momentum to become unstoppable!
This looks like such an interesting idea: a cooperative card-crafting game! It’s cooperative mode is limited to 2 people, so perhaps this will be best solo, but it looks really nice! I know some people actually backed out of the kickstarter (I am looking at you, Mike H.) because it was fairly expensive for what you got, but I was fascinated by this game and its premise, so I stayed in. Hopefully it will be good!
3. DCeased: A Zombicide Game
Platform: Kickstarter DCeased: A Zombicide Game Promised Delivery: April 2025 Summary: DCeased – A Zombicide Game is a cooperative game were 1 to 6 players control the last uninfected Super Heroes facing off against Zombie Heroes and the zombie hordes controlled by the game itself.
DCeased: A Zombicide Game is the DC Universe’s answer to Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance and X-Men: Heroes’ Resistance. See our review of the Marvel version of those here and here! But basically, we really liked those games! So, we are very excited to be able play the DC Universe version of the same game! Let’s be clear: you are playing the DC Heroes fighting off the Zombie hordes! Some versions of Marvel Zombies actually have the zombified heroes fighting the good guys—that’s not what this is. Or at least, that’s not what I am looking forward to.
2. LA-1
Platform: Kickstarter LA-1 Promised Delivery: Aug 2025 Summary: Most detective work done in the city of LA-1 takes place under the perpetual dark clouds that still linger from the bombs. Even so, you plan to work together to gather clues, interrogate suspects, and go on stakeouts in a world that is divided by class and dominated by status. Use your skills to solve the case before the all-consuming darkness closes in forever.
In the story-driven, co-operative adventure game LA-1, you take on the role of detectives working for Mace & Doyle Investigations who are helping one another to resolve cases in the post-apocalyptic city that was once Los Angeles. Each case can be played individually or as part of a campaign. Because of the multiple cards that can send investigations in different directions, it’s possible to play each case more than one time, having different situations and outcomes each time. But cases must be solved before the Darkness closes in on all the investigators.
Here’s another Richard Lanius game that has me very excited! I love my cooperative detective games (see our Top 10 Cooperative Detective Games), and this post-apocalyptic detective game sounds really interesting! It’s story-driven and promises some really cool stuff. I also typically love Richard Lanius games (despite being so disappointed by Freedom Five), so I am super excited for this!
1. DC Super Heroes United
Platform: Gamefound DC Super Heroes United Promised Delivery: Aug 2025 Summary: The greatest Heroes in the DC universe unite to thwart the Villains’ plans in this fast-paced, family-friendly cooperative game with amazing figures!
This is the DC version of Marvel United that we’ve come to love so much! We already know that we love this system so much, and it will be so much fun to delve into the DC Universe! And the crazy thing will be when we play with Spider-Man and Super-Man! Batman and Daredevil! Crossovers galore! CMON has a very good track record for getting the Marvel United stuff to us, so we think it’s likely we will see this in Aug 2025!
coopgestalt 