Survival board games give us a chance to experience the harshest of conditions in the comfort of our own homes. If you enjoy board games with exploration, adventure, war, and (of course) zombies, you’ll love our list.
Put your survival skills to the test and try one of these best survival board games!
Table of Contents
🏆 Our Top Picks for Best Survival Board Games
In a hurry? Take a quick peek before you go.
This War of Mine
Players: 1–6
Playing time: 45-120mins
Ages: 18+
Complexity: 3.5/5
Tensions and fear are high around Pogoren. Civilians are just trying to survive another day.
This War of Mine is a board game adaptation of the award-winning video game about a group of civilians surviving a war-torn city. The board game centers around the experiences of surviving the merciless war.
Some struggles you’ll face are a lack of food and medical supplies, snipers, hostile scavengers, and the psychological torment of constantly living in fear. In this cooperative board game, you’ll be trying to gather supplies and keep everyone healthy while avoiding dangers.
You can play with multiple players or a solo variant, and every game is different and unpredictable, allowing you to play every time differently.
City of Horror
Players: 3-6
Playing time: 90mins
Ages: 13+
Complexity: 2.5/5
Ever wonder how your friends would act in a zombie apocalypse? Would they come together or turn against each other in the name of survival? City of Horror is a backstabbing zombie game that’ll give you answers.
Survival and negotiation are vital skills you’ll need as you’ll play as a group of humans faced with a zombie invasion. The struggle for the group to survive is important, but saving yourself is even more. You’ll have to negotiate, form alliances and betray your companions to ensure you don’t become a zombie’s dinner. The game is played in turns, each turn representing an hour of time before reinforcements arrive.
City of Horror is a brilliant immersive game with high replayability. Give this board game a go if you’re looking for a horrific zombie scenario.
Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60mins
Ages: 14+
Complexity: 4/5
Survive the cursed island and live! Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island is the ultimate survival board game.
Cooperation is a necessity as you are castaways on a desert island. Players will need to work together to ward off dangers and survive against all odds. You’ll be exploring the island, setting up camp, and uncovering secrets while you face different challenges. You can also play solo if you’re more of a loner wolf survivor.
Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island has seven different scenarios with different goals. In the box, you can play as castaways, rescue beautiful Jenny and escape the island, fight against cannibals, raise a family, track King Kong, just to name a few. Each mission is challenging and allows players to develop a unique story-telling experience.
Friday
Players: 1
Playing time: 25mins
Ages: 13+
Complexity: 2/5
The character, Robinson, has come ashore on a deserted island. With hazardous conditions and no survival skills, you’ll have to help him fight for his life and survive. Your cards will play as Robinson, and you’ll need to help improve his habits, but the island works to exhaust people, so he’ll also become more clumsy.
Friday is a solitaire deck-building game in which you try to optimize your deck of fight cards to defeat the hazards and brutal pirates. Once defeated, Robinson Crusoe can escape the island.
If you’re looking for a game specifically designed for a solo survival adventure, Friday will be a perfect choice.
Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game
Players: 2–5
Playing time: 60-120mins
Ages: 13+
Complexity: 3/5
An epic war of struggle, power, and survival.
Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game is a story-centric game about survival through a harsh winter in an apocalyptic world. You’ll be trying to survive while dealing with your own psychological troubles, as well as others. Work together, and the colony may have a chance of survival.
In this cooperative strategy game, players must work together to collect supplies, fight off threats and resolve crises within the colony. Players will have to make difficult decisions between what actions are best for the colony and what is best for themselves.
Dead of WInter has dozens of unique characters, so if you’re looking for a survival board game with a psychological component, this game will immerse you into the psyche of an apocalyptic survivor.
First Martians: Adventures on the Red Planet
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-90mins
Ages: 10+
Complexity: 4.25/5
Set off to a new world. Explore and try to survive.
Built on the award-winning game Robinson Crusoe Adventures on the Cursed Island, First Martians: Adventures on the Red Plant puts players on another planet where they’ll have to survive the hostile Martian environment.
Essentially a worker placement game, players will place a worker to different locations to solve any problems, stopping potential dangers. You’ll be repairing buildings, studying specimens, and collecting supplies. The game is story-driven, so if you ignore an issue, the game changes, and you’ll have to deal with a much bigger problem.
The board game also comes with an integrated app to further immerse players into the experience. Bring your A-game, because First Martians: Adventures on the Red Planet can be deceptively challenging.
Zpocalypse
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 100mins
Ages: 13+
Complexity: 3.5/5
Set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Zpocalypse is a zombie survival game with a brilliant transformable board.
Players start out in a fallout shelter and have to make their way to a base location running through sewer graters and underground tunnels. Survivors try to make it day-by-day while the walking dead take over. Players will need to collect the usual survival kit items, food, guns, ammo, medical supplies, and much more.
While scavenging for what’s left, each player controls a squad working to fortify the base, but the barbed wire won’t hold out for much longer. Your character needs to earn victory points by defending, defeating, and completing goals to win the game.
Who will be soldiering the best quad across the wasteland?
Forbidden Island / Desert / Sky
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 30mins
Ages: 10+
Complexity: 2/5
Forbidden Island, Forbidden Desert, and Forbidden Sky will take you on an epic adventure… if you dare?
In Forbidden Island, you’ll be joining a team of daring adventurers on a do-or-die mission. You’ll be discovering new locations venturing further into the island, working together every step of the way. Can you collect all the treasure before you are swallowed into the abyss?
Forbidden Desert has a similar premise: cooperate and survive. It takes you to an ancient desert city where you’ll need to recover a legendary flying machine. Can you escape before you became permanent artifacts left in the ancient ruins?
All three of these games challenge you as they pit you against hazardous and relentless conditions while you try to explore or escape.
Survive! Escape from Atlantis
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 45-60mins
Ages: 8+
Complexity: 1.75/5
Who will manage to reach dry land?
Survive! Escape from Atlantis is set in the early 20th century, a time of exploration. Atlantis has been discovered, and there are rumors of riches. Having collected the treasure, you’re ready to head home; that’s when the city of Atlantis begins to sink.
Players will try to avoid their terrible fate by fighting sea serpents, whales, and sharks, ready to attack. Survive! Escape from Atlantis is an excellent light-strategy game that’s great for a family to play.
Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game
Players: 2-6
Playing time: 60-90mins
Ages: 12+
Complexity: 2.25/5
Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game is a hero vs. zombie showdown.
In this fast-paced game, small-town heroes will fight to survive brain-eating zombies. Players take on the roles of heroes, coming together to make it through the night. Featuring a modular board and eight heroes to choose from, you can play several different scenarios, which could all be your last night on Earth.
Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game is made to be a sort of B-movie zombie film so expect typical sheriff, jock, and cheerleader characters that give the game a cinematic horror movie feel.
Wrap-Up
We hope you enjoyed our list of the best survival board games! Would you survive these scary scenarios? Have you tried any of the games on this list? Drop us a comment below and let us know which survival board game is your favorite (or which ones we missed). We look forward to hearing from you!
Looking for similar games to these? Check out our best Adventure Board Games video below:
Ready Player Christine. Since my first D&D game, which took a turn for the weird and wacky (probably my influence), the world of board and tabletop games came alive. Now today, I get to write about these fantastical, fictional, and downright fun worlds.