Spirit island is my favorite game to play with a group. It has you trying to protect an island from colonists who damage the island with their expansions. Each player has different abilities that force you all the work together & requires a lot of teamwork to win especially some of the higher difficulties.

Here’s some great cooperative games that either have big groups working together OR have the whole groups:

Escape from the Dark Castle - a fun little dungeon crawler where you flip cards and roll against dangers as you try to overcome obstacles. Completely cooperative but mechanically simple.

Wavelength - the base way to play is technically a ‘competitive’ in that there are teams and points but it’s relatively chill and I’ve often played this at parties with large groups cooperatively cause it just makes for a great conversation starter.

Phantom Ink - two teams but the mechanics are very fun and the game overall has a great tone.

Ravine - cooperative game where you try to survive after a plane crash.

I would also maybe recommend looking into some light roleplaying games like The Zone or Fiasco. These are almost always gm-less or easy to run and focused on building a fun narrative together.

I really like Mysterium. It’s kinda cooperative, but players also work independently. The premise is that one player is a ghost, and the rest of the players are psychic detectives who have their own vision of how the murder happened. The ghost gives out clues using surreal, dream-like cards for the psychics to figure out their personal guess on what the weapon, location and murderer was. At the end the ghost gives clues to which psychic was right.

I personally like it because it isn’t just logic and strategic thinking, you have to use your creative/artistic part of your brain as well, if not moreso.

I guess it is better to go for games that are cooperative and where everyone can contribute how they can without pressure. So I would suggest strategy games where everyone decides together what to do and all the players are united against the game, but in a way that it’s harder to put the blame on someone if they fail to do what’s expected of them (Ex : Hanabi). Here are some of my favourites that corresponds to this :

Pandemic

Horrified

Forbidden Desert

Dead of Winter - The co-op variant of the game, without a traitor. Zombie apocalypse game.

Meeple Party - A co-op game about throwing a party and making sure personality types don’t clash. Perhaps on the nose for your group, but I still recommend it.

Mental Blocks - Once again, play the variant without a traitor. This is a game about solving a 3D puzzle from different perspectives with limited abilities to communicate or touch certain blocks.

Check out !boardgames@sopuli.xyz in case you’re not aware. Lots of discussion happening there.

Regarding your question, it’s hard to say since you don’t mention any mechanics, or complexity level, that you prefer. Based on the couple of examples you provide, you seem to like cooperative card games. If so, you should check out ‘The Crew’. It’s the most popular of that genre in my game club.

Ranked #1 in family games on bgg

You’ll never perfectly solve the “no pissing people off” issue because in competitive games you necessarily have people benefit at the expense of others and in cooperative games you’ll fall into the trap of backseat-driver players telling you what to do on your turn.

That being said, here are some of my favorites I’d like to suggest:

Cooperative:

• Time Stories (kinda like a time-travel themed mystery-solving role-playing game where the pre-built deck is your DM. 1-4 players. You can buy more decks, each with a different setting and story.).
• Pandemic (Stop COVID a deadly disease from killing off the planet. Work together to limit the spread and find the cure before it’s too late) (1-4 players)

Competitive:

• The Settlers of Catan (claim resources and land strategically to build the most prosperous kingdom) (2-4 players but there are expansions and spinoffs so this could be like 1-6 players)
• 7 Wonders (draft cards to build the most prosperous kingdom) (3-8 players IIRC)

In-Between:

• Betrayal in the House on the Hill (explore a haunted house until you find a dark secret that turns one of you into a villain the rest have to fight) (3-6 players)

In order to get good recommendations you’re going to need to provide additional information. How many people are playing? How complex can a game be? What games have you tried and loved? Is there a favorite mechanism? What is the game duration you’re going for? 10 min? 30? 3 hours? What’s your budget?

Generic recommendations based on my library:

• Just One - Favorite party game

• Brass Birmingham - My favorite; Beware it’s quite complex and lasts around 3 hours

• Blood Rage - Cool dude’s on a map game with very nice minis

• Turing Machine - Good puzzle game

• Slay The Spire - If you love slay the spire, you’ll love cooperative slay the spire as well

• Menara - Favorite dexterity game

boardgamegeek.com is the imdb of boardgames, check it out.

Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne for me. I play those with my wife and we don’t really get in each other’s way. She usually wins but I don’t care.

We love Wingspan. Meadow is pleasant.

Just One was a great game for 4 people. Three people have to get the fourth person to guess a particular word. They each write down a one-word hint. If any two (or more) players write the same word hint, they don’t get to show that word to the guesser. It’s a lot of fun when you see the different ways people interpret words to come up with hints and how two (or more) words can work together to make you think of the answer.

Mansions of Madness. It’s my wife’s new favorite game. The game has many different scenarios and they play out pretty differently each time. The game is almost all co-op, so it’s players VS. the game. I was actually against the need for an app at first but it simplifies a lot and helps keep track of a lot of the mundane stuff.

The pandemic board games, either one of them can give that feeling.

Betrayal at the House on the Hill has about 50 different scenarios so almost every playthrough is different. But it’s best to have at least 4 players to be more fun

I don’t know if I’d considered it a board game, but the Forbidden Island game (and the others like it) spring to mind. The idea is that you and the other players have to work together to gather everything you need including the treasure you came for before the island you’re on sinks into the ocean.

It’s fun working together and I always thought it did a good job of incentivising that.

Ok, if you are against hard feelings, cross off anything that is directly competitive, that would be any game where players directly and willfully interact with each other in a way where one gains while another loses as part of the core gameplay. To varying degrees things like blood rage, root, monopoly/solarquest, everdell, 7 wonders, clank, carcassonne, ticket to ride, dominion, etc.

If your group must have competition, you’ll need to stick to independent competitive games, this is anything where players are primarily taking actions in their own space and are progressing largely independent from each other. Example recommendations include things like Quacks of Quedlinburg, Shifting Stones, most roll and writes (welcome to series, cartographer with a minor exception), cascadia, verdant, etc

If you can do without competing with each other, cooperative games are definitely the way to go to minimize hard feelings (it’d only come up then if someone thought another player did something suboptimal causing a loss). The variety here is actually pretty large: simple trick taking games like The Crew series Information sharing games, like Mysterium “Combat” games of all complexities (generally ascending: Lord of the rings storybook, marvel united, D&D board games, Heroquest, Stuffed fables, Atlantis Rising, legends of andor, horrified, Arkham horror, marvel champions, mansions of madness 2nd edition, spirit island, Gloomhaven) Mystery/puzzle games (Adventure Games series, Exit The Game series, Animals of Baker Street)

I’d also like to call out 2 other games specifically: Stella, while it is a 1 winner competitive game where your score depends largely on other players, the push your luck and prisoner’s dilemma aspect of how you earn points I think largely removes the feel bad aspect of competition. Kitchen Rush: pure cooperative, but it’s also a real-time game where everyone is taking simultaneous actions to run a restaurant in 4 real time minutes stretches.