I am trying to find the best cooperative no expansion games that require two or more players and are generally easy to setup and play and are resistant to quarterbacking. Here's the ones I found.
There are tens of thousands of board games now. Luckily there is a great website, BoardGameGeek, to find new board games. However, while this website has decent options for searching, I was searching for games of a particular variety where the website did not quite help me.
"Quarterbacking" is the phenomenon where whoever has the best knowledge of the game drives the game, transmuting a cooperative game into a solo game that the others watch. I want to make sure that the two+ players need to make independent decisions to pursue the common goal. Also, I would like to know which games can be played without spending 20 minutes to learn the rules (I sometimes play in a cafe where you pay by the hour). And the game should be fun!
Since BoardGameGeek does not have a search button for finding these types of games, I pulled the data from BoardGameGeek and made a quick search with my criteria (no expansions, min players > 1, easy setup, high scoring). The code is on GitHub. Some of the games I expected (Hanabi) but there are plenty more that I don't know, that I am excited to try. The search seems to work since the typical quaterbacking problem games are left off (Pandemic, Forbidden Desert).
Here are the top 25 easy to play, non expansion cooperative games sorted by their user ratings. The full ranked list is included with the code.
Top 25 easy to play cooperative games
The ranked list is included with the code on GitHub.
I also went ahead and found the hardest to play cooperative games for fun. Here the top 25 hardest to play cooperative games:Top 25 hard to play cooperative games
The ranked list is included with the code on GitHub.
I went ahead and generated the top 25 *best games* for games that require at least two players as well. Here are those, sorted from best to worst:Top 25 non cooperative easy to play games
The ranked list is included with the code on GitHub.
Top 25 non cooperative hard to play games
The ranked list is included with the code on GitHub.
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