Village board game amazon

Cooperative board games bring players together as they work to achieve a common victory against a threat. Typically but not always , cooperative games have some sort of AI or automa systems that players struggle to fight off. There are many benefits to cooperative games, such as the fact that they can be easier to teach than competitive games due to the fact that information is shared.

While the theme of a pandemic may not seem appealing given the current global crisis, the game Pandemic offers the chance to save humanity and fight against diseases that are quickly spreading around the globe.

Pandemic is easily one of the most popular cooperative board games available, having won multiple awards. While there are multiple iterations of the Pandemic game system — including the notable Pandemic Legacy series — we will focus on the core base game here as it will give you an idea for its main mechanisms. The main idea of the game is that players, each equipped with special abilities, take turns moving around the board, removing disease cubes, building research stations, discovering cures for diseases by discarding 4 matching cards of a color, and then attempting to eradicate the diseases by removing all disease cubes from the board.

A really interesting aspect of Pandemic is the way that disease cubes spread around the board. For each card drawn, disease cubes are placed on the indicated city on the board. If a cube needs to be placed on a city where there are already 3 disease cubes present, then an outbreak occurs in which an additional disease cube is placed on each adjacent city. This can cause large-scale chain reactions that can suddenly change the game, and that tension feels very thematic indeed.

Pandemic is a game that could potentially work well as a gateway-style game for people who have never played games before. There are multiple expansions available for the game that can change things up, and if you are looking for an extra-unique experience, then Pandemic Legacy may be worth looking into.

If you prefer a game that is similar in terms of mechanisms but even more light-weight and accessible and better-suited for children , then the next game on the list, Forbidden Island, may be a good choice for you.

With an ancient curse cast onto the island, your presence is causing it to sink. Will you be able to snag all four artifacts and get everyone back to the helicopter pad safely and in time before the island, or a path to escape, vanishes into the oceanic void? In a game of Forbidden Island, designed by Matt Leacock, players each take on the unique role of adventurers, each equipped with special abilities to help them and their teammates along the journey.

Over the course of the game, players take turns moving around island tiles, collecting treasure cards, sharing treasure cards with other players, capturing treasures by discarding four matching treasure cards, and shoring up island tiles.

Players also have to draw flood cards at the end of their turn equal to the current water meter level, which cause island tiles to flood. If a flood card is ever drawn for a tile that is currently flooded, that tile is removed from the game permanently.

Forbidden Island is definitely on the light-end of the game weight spectrum, with a weight rating of 1. Being designed by the same designer as Pandemic, the game shares many of the same mechanisms, and has often been referred to as a light version of Pandemic. For this reason, Forbidden Island works very well as a good introduction to the world of modern board games for players who have not played many games.

But what about gamers who are looking for a game that is deep, decently-heavy, and challenging? If this sounds like what you are currently looking for, then Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island , designed by Ignacy Trzewiczek, may be one to pay attention to. As survivors on an island, players in Robinson Crusoe must work together and use their unique player abilities to survive the harsh elements, cruel twists of fate, and declining morale among the group.

They must build tools and shelter, find food, hunt, and explore the island as they try work toward completing the objective required by their current game scenario. With many threats to deal with, players struggle throughout the game to maintain health, and if one player dies, all players lose the game. One really interesting mechanism found in the game Robinson Crusoe are the adventure cards.

When drawn, adventure cards give the players a scenario and then ask players to make a decision — whether to discard the card, or to gain a benefit and then shuffle the card into the event card deck. When that adventure card is drawn later on, the players read the bottom half of the card, which is a consequence for the decision they made earlier in the game.

Robinson Crusoe, while very thematic, has a fairly complicated set of rules. That being said, it can offer a very memorable gaming experience, and one that you will likely talk about with your friends for some time to come.

In Ghost Stories, designed by Antoine Bauza, players take on the role of Taoist priests as they ward off the forces of evil from crossing over into their beloved village. Life in the village for much time now has been nothing more than an illusion of peace, for the villagers have long-forgotten that buried within cemetery is an urn containing the cursed ashes of the Lord of the Nine Hells — Wu Feng.

Equipped with special abilities, players in Ghost Stories must fight the continual onslaught of maleficent entities. The ultimate goal as a group is to survive a deck of ghost cards, and ultimately defeat the Wu Feng incantation randomly selected for the current game when he appears toward the end of the ghost deck.

Players take turns in the game moving around the village, using special abilities of village tiles, and performing combat against ghosts that continuously move closer to the village.

If a ghost ever reaches the village, then the adjacent village tile is flipped over and players lose access to its special ability. Players lose the game if all characters are dead, three village tiles become haunted, or the last ghost card is drawn when Wu Feng remains undefeated.

Here the focus is on building whole campaigns and escapades, developing your character, the threats against them, the best ways for you to confront whatever menace approaches.

You can use pre-constructed decks or build your own as you begin to learn all the little nuances of the system, and when you do get the chance to play with a friend, it'll add a whole new flavour to the game! As a tabletop adaptation of a video game, it should come as little surprise that This War of Mine: The Board Game works well with a single player.

But what makes it really stand out is the stark boldness of its theme, where you have to manage actions, workers and resources to survive in the rubble-strewn heart of a modern-day war zone.

The survivor of a shipwreck, you need to carefully plan out your actions to eke out some kind of life on a desert island, having to find shelter and food, while fighting the fauna and the elements, and also exploring, drawing from a reassuringly thick event deck to find out what unexpected boon or hindrance lies behind the next palm frond. It benefits from a strategic depth which justifies its complexity, but be warned: it can get pretty brutal, and will likely take several attempts before your score your first win.

Despite its theme of rivalry in the 17th-century scientific community, the pleasingly intricate Newton is a relatively gentle engine-builder, with very little player interaction. Which means it translates smoothly and painlessly to a single-player mode, with barely any rulebook exceptions.

With so many routes to success enshrined in its sprawling boards, and a pleasing mix of puzzles, which combine point-to-point movement, tile placing, deckbuilding and judicious hand management, it proves to be a tight, neat and engrossing solitaire experience. Although it's not actually based on the film, so it doesn't quite qualify as one of the best movie board games that are actually good.

Having been rudely awoken from hibernation, you must race against time — and combat deadly, slimy extra-terrestrials — to complete a solo-calibrated objective, trying to move around the ship as carefully and silently as possible, as noise attracts the nasties.

Buy Nemesis from Zatu Board Games. Upcoming board games 11 board game releases you should play this year. Critical Role animated series gets new trailer, premiere airs later this month. Jack into a dirty and demonic alternate reality in upcoming RPG Cybermetal If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission.

Read our editorial policy. Star Wars Marvel. Filed under: Shopping Tabletop Games Gaming. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email.

Loading comments The Latest. Share this story Twitter Facebook.