Our Favorite Cooperative Board Games

Peaceable Kingdom Hoot Owl Hoot - Cooperative Matching Game For Kids

This is a cooperative preschool game but it's actually challenging enough to play with older kids who are not experienced in playing board games. Each player gets three cards that they place face up so that the other players can advise them on which card to use. You choose a color to move the owls around the board but you can choose whether to make one owl progress further or move each owl little by little. You can modify the game by using less owls, or, what I like to do is remove some of the sun cards. When you draw a sun card you automatically have to use that and move the sun. If the sun reaches the sunrise then the game is over.

The game looks really simple but I find that kids who are not used to playing board games do not understand the strategy but I personally love the concept! Sometimes, to make the game go quicker, I just have them draw one card and then I have them practice saying the color and that becomes the main focus of the game. It is also hard for kids to grasp that they aren't a particular owl but that they need to work as a team to get ALL the owls home. I really like this concept and it's adorable!




Gamewright Outfoxed! A Cooperative Whodunit Board Game for Kids 5+, Multi-colored, Standard, Model Number: 418

I got this recently and Owen LOVES it. It is super unique and fun to play. I this Otis is still too young for it because he has a very short attention span but Owen can play it over and over again and he really wants to play it until all of the different foxes have been a thief.

What I like about it is that the game board design allows for you to be able to reach a clue each turn and it's pretty easy to win this game as a team because the fox doesn't progress too quickly (unlike the sun in Hoot Owl, Hoot). It exercises your memory and deduction skills, and all of the components are really well made. Owen loves the clue slider! It is super fun to insert the clue tile and slide the gadget to see if the suspect has that item or not. For ESL purposes, you can practice a lot of vocabulary because each clue is a different clothing accessory! This game has a lot of replay-ability, which makes it a great value.




My First Castle Panic

I got this recently from Prime Day (along with Outfoxed!) and both of my kids love it! It's super simple and short but I think the theme and the artwork are super appealing to my kids. We love to be really dramatic when we send the goblins into the dungeon! We jokingly like to catcall the goblins as we throw them into the dungeon (think Home Alone but a little more rated G).

The main focus of this is to match colors and shapes to see where you progress on the board but, unlike Hoot Owl, Hoot!, you are not given as many cards to choose from and because the deck is so small, we found that it is almost impossible to win sometimes because we just don't draw the right cards to move forward. However, because this is such a quick game, as soon as we realize we will lose we can just start over. For an ESL classroom, this is a great game to have because it is fast to set up and it is short!