Two’s a company, three’s a crowd, and four’s a party.
Sure, competition is fun, the joy you feel when you crush your friends at Catan or leave them destitute in Monopoly. But why not team up with a few friends and try these cooperative board games? After all, teamwork makes the dream work.
Although these games allow for four or more players, they’re best played with four to ensure everyone plays nice while still having room for unpredictability.
Here’s our list of the best 4-player cooperative board games for you to try!
Table of Contents
🏆 Our Top Picks for Best 4-Player Cooperative Board Games
In a hurry? Take a quick peek before you go.
Pandemic Legacy: Season One
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 60mins
Ages: 13+
Complexity: 2.75/5
There’s a virus more brutal than any other. Your team believes they can handle it, but what results is a year that’ll never be forgotten. You’ll do things, see things, live things — all for a chance to save humankind.
Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 is a unique and epic cooperative game perfect for 4 players. Beginning like any other game of Pandemic, the legacy game soon morphs into something entirely else while the days go by. An exciting component of this game is that some of your actions will carry over to future games.
With each month comes a new challenge and new rules. Your team will have to work together to unlock tools to reveal strategies for an array of deadly problems. Pandemic Legacy: Season One lets characters evolve as the diseases and experiences affect them, creating many paths they could follow.
Can your team make it through the year?
Legends of Andor
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 60-90mins
Ages: 10+
Complexity: 2.75/5
Band together, forge the fantasy, and live the legend.
The Land of Andor is in danger. Andor needs you! Advancing over mountains and through forests, enemies are closing in on the castle of old King Brandur. Fear not, you and your 3 bravest friends are on their way to defend the castle.
A cooperative game of heroes, Legends of Andor takes your band of heroes to the ever-encroaching enemy forces. In a campaign-style play, you’ll need to defend the castle, obtain medicinal herbs, help the prince repel evil, fight a dragon, as well as seek precious gemstones. The to-do list is lengthy.
There are also five additions to the base game to delve into the legendary tale. If your group of 4 enjoys campaigns, this is a fun game of the true heroes of Andor.
Dragonfire
Players: 2-6
Playing time: 60-90mins
Ages: 13+
Complexity: 3.25/5
Get together your favorite D&D players and venture into the Forgotten Realms.
Dragonfire is set within the world of the most fantastic roleplaying game, Dungeons & Dragons. Players choose from iconic fantasy races in this deck-building game, from elf to dwarf, humans, or orcs. You’ll be tasked with assuming the role of a fighter, wizard, cleric, or rogue.
The game begins along the infamous Sword Coast. With spells, magic items, and weapons, you’ll campaign across the Forgotten Realms while leveling up your characters. Dragonfire has loads of adventures and expansion packs to keep the game thrilling.
Maximum Apocalypse
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 45-90mins
Ages: 13+
Complexity: 2.25/5
The world is over. You’re just trying to survive what’s left.
Maximum Apocalypse is a roguelike adventure game. As survivors, you’ll explore the apocalyptic world, scavenging for resources, gaining equipment and weapons, and even battling roaming monsters. Players will work together to adventure through 4 apocalyptic scenarios.
Maximum Apocalypse is very strategic as you pick a unique survivor class within the group. Each player plans their strategy while learning about their fellow survivor’s strengths and weaknesses. These apocalyptic scenarios will please you if you’re a fan of zombies. They come in all deadly forms.
Time is running out. Can you survive the apocalypse?
The Mind
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 20mins
Ages: 8+
Complexity: 1/5
Meld minds with players and become one.
The Mind is an ingenious and addictive game where the rules are simple, and communication is limited. Eyes locked and cards in hand — you’ll try to figure out what’s in someone’s hand without speaking or gesturing.
How do you play with almost no communication? The Mind has a deck of cards 1-100. Playing in ascending order, players work together from low to high to play in order. More cards will be added at each level, only increasing the challenge.
If you’re looking for a 4-player co-op game, try The Mind. The communication limits will have you concentrating on trying to synchronize your minds.
The Grizzled
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 30mins
Ages: 14+
Complexity: 2/5
Can friendship be stronger than war?
The Grizzled has players take on a group of grizzled soldiers through their everyday lives down in the trenches. Can you coordinate your efforts to get through the devasting effects of the war?
Tasked to survive the prolific trenches of WWI, the mission leader will decide on the difficulty level of each round as you try to avoid untimely death. Winning or losing together, players must cooperate in striking the right balance between the individual and collective, all in the hopes of staying alive. Every play feels different with many cards like peace, monument, speech, and game aid.
Play together. Survive together. Win together.
Castle Panic
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 60mins
Ages: 6-12
Complexity: 1.75/5
Defend the castle. Survive the panic. Become the Master Slayer!
Castle Panic is a brilliant cooperative tower defense game. Players find themselves in a forest with all sorts of monsters. From orcs to goblins and even trolls, they are watching and waiting while you build your castle and train your soldiers.
The hordes of monsters have descended, and you’ll have to work with your friends to defend the castle, but in the end, only one player will become the Master Slayer. Castle Panic is easy to learn but nail-biting to play as you plan strategies together, slay monsters, and trade cards.
Can you defend your castle?
T.I.M.E Stories
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 90mins
Ages: 12+
Complexity: 2.5/5
Welcome Agents! The T.I.M.E agency needs you.
Having mastered time travel, faults and paradoxes are threatening the very fabric of the universe. As agents, your team will travel to different worlds and realities into receptacles (other beings’ bodies). To fulfill your mission, you’ll have to control them, fight, search, discuss, and be cunning to complete your mission as quickly as possible.
T.I.M.E Stories packs a lot of adventure into this cooperative strategy game. It’s also a game of “decksploration” allowing each character to live further through the story.
The Crew: Quest for Planet Nine
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 20mins
Ages: 10+
Complexity: 2/5
Astronauts wanted!
Scientists have uncovered a mysterious ninth planet located at the edge of our solar system. Join the space adventure and determine whether the theories are just science fiction or the truth.
The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine takes players on 50 missions of exciting stories as they travel across the solar system. You’ll need to communicate and cooperate with players to complete missions, each of them more complex than the next.
The game is fast-paced, with each mission only taking about 5 minutes, and it’s got a new twist on classic trick-taking card games. Although this game is very cooperative, there are also communication limits, so you’ll have to strategize and play wisely.
Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game
Players: 2-5
Playing time: 60-120mins
Ages: 13+
Complexity: 3/5
Survive the winter, survive the dead, survive each other.
Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game is the first game in the series. There’s only a small, weakened colony of survivors. The rest of the world is flesh-craving zombies.
Dead of Winter is a great cooperative game that takes you on a roller coaster of the psyche in an apocalyptic world. In this psychological survival game, players will work together toward one joint victory, but each must also complete their own personal secret objective. These can be reasonably harmless or become a dangerous obsession threatening the colony.
Play in the epic struggle for power and survival!
Wrap-Up
We hope you enjoyed our list of the best 4-player cooperative board games! Cooperative games are a great way to get new players into the hobby without all of the angst that comes from competition. Many cooperative games just work best with 4 players, so this list of games should keep your crew busy for a good while!
We hope you’ve found the perfect game for the ideal number of players! Drop us a comment below and let us know your thoughts. We’d love to hear from you!
Looking for more Coop board games to play? Check out our video round-up below:
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Kendra has always been a hardcore fantasy nerd. Growing up in the worlds of Tolkien, Sanderson, Jordan, and Abercrombie, DnD & board games just came naturally. She and her husband, Bryan, started GameCows.com in 2018 as a fun passion project that just took over their lives. An avid board gamer since childhood and chronic DnD chronicler for more than two decades, she loves to play, write, travel, and learn dead languages. She is also a professional content writer at SlashGear.com