Can’t We All Just Get Along: Cooperative Gaming

Knucklebones: Final IssueThis is a reprint of an article written in October, 2007 for first publication in the March 2008 issue of Knucklebones magazine; it was the final issue. Because of its origins, this article is more introductory and (hopefully) more polished than many of my online writings. Despite the original source of this article, this blog is in no way associated with Jones Publishing or Knucklebones Magazine.

Since I wrote this article, I’ve spent much more time extensively analyzing co-op games. A series of co-op interviews talks with designers from the genre while a partial history of the genre begins to trace its evolution. I’ve also co-authored a complete but unpublished book on cooperative design with my friend Christopher Allen, which I hope will see print in 2015.


Most games are about competition. However, in the last twenty years, a small but increasing number of games have instead focused on the opposite type of gameplay: cooperation. There’s still competition in these games, but instead of working against each other, players tend to work against the game system (sometimes embodied by a singular player). They must either achieve victory together or else fall down ignobly to defeat.

Because of this unique cooperative play style, these games allow for a degree of socialization that’s unprecedented in most strategic games. Players talk together about the best way to overcome the challenges that they face. They pool their thoughts, their strategies, and sometimes even their resources in order to try and reach a shared victory.

Besides having unique gameplay, cooperative games usually can support more players than your typical strategy games, often allowing seven or more participants. This allows for even more socialization and cooperation, multiplying the fun of cooperative games.

Following is a discussion of many of the most popular and best designed cooperative games. They are divided into three types: those games where everyone cooperates; those games where everyone works against a single overlord; and those games where everyone works against a hidden traitor.

Core Cooperation

Basic cooperative games involve all the players working together to try and defeat the game system.

Arkham Horror (Fantasy Flight Games, $49.95). In its classic incarnation, published back in 1987, Arkham Horror was one of the earliest cooperative games. It placed players in the roles of investigators of H.P. Lovecraft’s horrific Cthulhu mythos. Strange interdimensional gates were opening across the witch-haunted city of Arkham, and unless they were closed in time, all of existence was endangered.

In 2005 Fantasy Flight Games brought Arkham Horror back, polished and up-to-date with the newest ideas in game design. Still, investigators must collect equipment, find spells, battle monsters, and carefully coordinate their actions to close the gates to other dimensions.

Arkham Horror is less social than much of the field because players often go off on their own to accomplish group goals; nonetheless ultimate victory only comes about when players work together. In addition, it’s a long game, taking 3-5 hours to play. On the plus side, Arkham Horror is colorful and evocative. It’s also been supplemented with three expansions—Curse of the Dark Pharaoh, Dunwich Horror, and The King in Yellow—with a fourth, Innsmouth Horror, due out around now. Max Players: 8.

Lord of the Rings (Fantasy Flight Games, $49.95): A cooperative game by master designer Reiner Knizia that tells the story of J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic fantasy novels can’t help but be great. In Lord of the Rings players work together to destroy the One Ring by traveling across Middle-earth, following the path of the trilogy of books. The core gameplay centers on the careful allocation and use of cards, which are required to move across the landscape.

Of the various cooperative games, this is both one of the most social and most brutal. Players are all constantly working together, with no room for a player to play solitaire. The game is also quite hard, with victory being all the sweeter for its rarity.

There have been three supplements released for the game, all of which integrate well with the original: Friends & Foes, Battlefields, and Sauron. The last notably allows a sixth player to enter the game, taking the “Overlord” role of Sauron and working against the other players. Max Players: 5 (or 6 with Sauron).

Against the Overlord

Lord of the Ring’s Sauron supplement isn’t alone in allowing one player to take on the role of an evil Overlord. A few other games have supported that type of play from the start. Despite the singular competition that this entails, the core gameplay of these releases still remains cooperative. In some ways the Overlord player takes on the role of the adversarial game systems of the basic cooperation games. He may not to get to win as much as the other players, but he still gets to enjoy doing his best to make them sweat.

Betrayal at House on the Hill (Wizards of the Coast, OOP): This horror game, where players investigate a haunted house, is very different from any other cooperative game because the play abruptly shifts halfway through the game. That’s when the “haunt” begins, and one of the players is randomly picked to begin working against the rest of the group.

These haunts are heavily thematic, providing lots of color for the game as mad scientists, aliens, mummies, and other monstrosities suddenly invade the house. The haunts are somewhat poorly balanced and of varying quality, but there’s enough variety to allow for a lot of fun sessions. This game is now officially out-of-print, as Wizards of the Coast remaindered it and many of their other board games in late 2006, but it still shows up very cheap on occasion at various stores. Max Players: 6.

Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Fantasy Flight Games, $79.95): In this fantasy game with thematic similarities to Dungeons & Dragons a single player takes on the role of a game master, laying out a dungeon dictated to him by a selected scenario. He also chooses how to move the monsters and what other surprises to spring upon the players. Meanwhile those players take on the role of a group of adventurers, all trying to fight through the dungeon to accomplish a specific goal.

Although a long game at 3-4 hours, Descent is surprisingly spry, with players constantly moving, while still coordinating their individual tactics into a strategic whole. It’s also expensive, but that’s because Descent comes with a huge set of cardboard dungeon tiles and plastic monsters, all of which provide for an evocative experience. As with many other Fantasy Flight Games, it’s been supplemented, with three additional sets of monsters and dungeons out to date. Max Players: 5. 

Fury of Dracula (Fantasy Flight Games, $49.95): In this classic vampire game one player takes on the role of Dracula while the others play the four investigators hunting him across Europe.

Uniquely among cooperative games, Fury of Dracula is a true investigative game. While Dracula secretly makes his way across Europe, the investigators must try and pick up his trail and slay the vampires that he leaves behind in his wake. Ultimately they must confront Dracula himself; if they can do so by day, they will likely find victory, but if instead Dracula comes upon them by night, all may be lost.

Although it supports 2-5 players, Fury of Dracula plays best with exactly five, so that each player only need take on one role. Max Players: 5.

The Traitor Within

A relatively new development among cooperative games is the idea that there’s an Overlord player who is trying to stop the rest from succeeding, but he’s hidden from sight: he could be anyone, and thus one of the players pretending to “cooperate” is actually trying instead to bring everyone down.

Some of these games even support two or three traitors, but they nonetheless still fall into the category of cooperative play for the type of gameplay that they mold. Although players always know that someone is working against their best interest, they still socialize and cooperate; they just do so with a suspicious eye toward everyone else.

Saboteur (Z-Man Games, $14.99): This is only marginally a cooperative game; the play is less social and more individual than most due to the possibility of there being up to three traitors. The good dwarves all try to mine for gold while keeping an eye out for saboteurs, while the saboteurs try and foil those attempts subtly—and then more explicitly when the good dwarves come too close to winning. Max Players: 10.

Shadows Over Camelot (Days of Wonder, $50.00): This is the game that really defines the genre of the “traitor within.” The players are together trying to save Camelot by completing a series of quests. However one player may be a traitor who tries to purposefully fail at quests.

Unmasking the traitor is an integral part of the gameplay and results in a constant suspicion underlying the cooperative advice and discussion. Of course, there’s nothing more embarrassing then losing the game due to a series of false accusations before learning that there wasn’t a traitor in the game at all. Max Players: 7.

Werewolf (Traditional): This is a widely-played traditional game with versions currently available from Asmodee (The Werewolves of Millers Hollow), Looney Labs (Are You a Werewolf?), Mayfair (Lupus in Tabula) and probably others. It’s also called “Mafia.” Two players in the game are secretly werewolves, and everyone else tries to find them out by lynching villagers one at a time.

There can be problems with players being eliminated early on, and Werewolf is much less a strategic game than anything else discussed here, but it’s nonetheless an interesting example of the cooperative genre that will appeal to many social game players. Uniquely it not only supports a large number of players, but in fact requires at least 7 or 8 to get going. Max Players: 15+.

Appendix I: Cooperative Origins

Cooperative games ultimately share a lot in common with adventure games, which themselves sprang from the roleplaying field. This overlap probably comes about due to similarities in the goals of the three types of games. They’re all about not just playing a game, but also sharing a social experience, where the whole group ultimately has fun together, absent any individual’s successes.

Two of the earliest professional cooperative games were also adventure games, further highlighting this shared ancestry. Chaosium’s Arkham Horror, produced in 1987, was based on their investigative roleplaying game, Call of Cthulhu. Similarly Games Workshop’s HeroQuest, first released in 1989 and now long out of print, was a Dungeons & Dragons style adventure game.

Today most cooperative games continue to be released in the classic adventure game genres: fantasy, science-fiction, and horror. By lucky coincidence, the last is a particularly good genre for cooperative games, because terrifying forces of evil are great foes for all the players to work against.

Among the cooperative games not covered in depth here that fall into these genres are: the small press game Vanished Planet (Vanished Planet Games, $29.95), a classic science-fiction game; Last Night on Earth (Flying Frog Productions, $49.95), a recently released horror game; and E.T.I. (Eye Level Entertainment, $36.96), a brand-new science-fiction game.

Appendix II: The Boundaries of Cooperation

So what makes a cooperative game cooperative? The boundaries, as with any definition, are somewhat fuzzy. Herein cooperative games are considered to be those that encourage a very social, talkative gameplay where all the players work together against some foe. This explicitly excludes a few closely related sorts of games:

Pure social games are those where there is no competitive gameplay at all, not even working against a game system. This is a pretty rare type of game that includes The Ungame and Family Pastimes’ “talkie” games, all of which feature as their main goal just talking and learning about other players.

In partnership games players work together, usually in two groups of two. This is a common play style for traditional card games with Bridge being the most notable example. Although bidding and card play can allow for some messages to be sent between players by standard conventions, that communication is constrained enough for them not to be truly social games.

Team games are games of all other sorts where players work together, but their primary goal is to defeat other teams of players. This category includes most party games. One type of team game, the “traitor within” is, however, considered a cooperative game because of the specific gameplay it engenders, as noted previously.

Appendix III: Company Profile: Fantasy Flight Games

Minnesota-based Fantasy Flight Games gets an unbalanced amount of attention in this article not because of any personal preference, but because they’re one of the biggest publishers of cooperative games.

The company originally grew out founder Christian Petersen’s love for European comics, and thus it’s not surprising that when Fantasy Flight turned to board games they began publishing many titles in the genres of fantasy, science-fiction, and horror — the same genres that naturally led to cooperative games.

Fantasy Flight Games has reinvented cooperative games for the mass-market by mining the rich grounds initially uncovered by roleplaying companies such as Chaosium and Games Workshop in the 1980s. They’ve republished Chaosium’s Arkham Horror and Games Workshop’s Fury of Dracula, as well as producing Descent, effectively an heir to Games Workshop’s HeroQuest.

Ultimately, however, it’s fantasy, science-fiction, and horror which are Fantasy Flight’s biggest focus, with cooperative games being a byproduct of that. Besides the games mentioned herein they’ve published non-cooperative genre games of all sorts including Marvel Heroes, A Game of Thrones, and War of the Ring.

Appendix IV: Company Profiles: Family Pastimes

Although most designers and publishers seem to see cooperative games as merely one of many possibilities, Jim Deacove of Canadian publisher Family Pastimes approaches the medium with a singular zeal. He strongly believes in the benefits of cooperation over competition, stating, “Success doesn’t require someone else’s failure.”

Deacove goes further than other cooperative game designers by making his games pure cooperation, where players all work together to manage the problems presented by the gaming system, with no opportunity for singular glory. He contrasts his own games to the field by saying that other games “always offer a compromise, as if the inventors were afraid to give us a fully cooperative play experience.” Indeed, both Lord of the Rings and Arkham Horror have some rules to declare a singular winner, while Deacove notes that the traitor in Shadows over Camelot can “intensify/spoil the coop play experience.”

All told Family Pastimes has produced almost 100 cooperative games. Their best sellers are games for children or families, including The Secret Door, a Concentration-like game where players must discover which cards are missing from the set before time runs out, and Search & Rescue, a logistical game of saving park visitors before a storm descends. They also have a few more serious strategy games, such as Power Blackout and Diplo Mission.

Family Pastime games are generally simply produced — with their offset press, table saws, and other equipment all being in house — a fact which is reflected by the games’ low prices, most of which run just $10-$15. They aren’t available through some distributors, and thus if you can’t find them at your local shop, you should visit the company’s website .

Family Pastime’s games will appeal most to families who are looking for cooperative experiences to enjoy together.


I still use these general categories to classify co-op games, but I’ve added a fourth one “hunter games”, for those games like The Fury of Dracula, where the “overlord” is playing a more symmetrical role to the other players. The co-op book also excludes Saboteur from its co-op definition, defining it as a game that exists on the boundary, but which leans toward a variant of partnership play. —SA, 12/14/14.

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1 thought on “Can’t We All Just Get Along: Cooperative Gaming

  1. I think you should add at least one earlier game to your analysis. An older Parker Bros. Game from the UK called Escape from Colditz presents an early form of cooperative play with an asymmetric player role method. One player plays the role of the German Commandant and the other players play the inmates (airmen in WWII). Inmate victory requires cooperation but only one can win; commandant victory is to prevent inmate victory.

    I think that this is probably the first cooperative game to my mind. It was the model for a game in the 80’s from Mayfair, The Keep (which died a rapid death from a bad license).

    I am interested in your thoughts.

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