Looking for something to play this Spring Break?

For those of you looking to add a little ludic spice to your Spring Break, USC Games has built up a “Best of” list of 15 co-op and party games to enjoy with your friends while you lounge around! Most of these games support up to four players or more for a variety of different player types and skill levels! There are cooperative games, competitive games, and we even threw in a couple board games as suggestions for quick, cheap fun!

Space Team

Space Team is a cooperative shouting game where 3-6 friends coordinate (or don’t) to repair your malfunctioning spaceship! It’s a fast-paced card game where success is always just out of reach! There is an app version available on iOS and Android, as well as a physical card game that is very high quality! This game is great for friends that like to play cooperative games with lots of laughs!

Coup

Lie and cheat your way to victory, if you can manage the bluff! In Coup, you are dealt a set of two cards, each depicting a certain character with certain abilities. You can use those abilities to do perform actions as you attempt to coup the other players and come out on top. The trick is that no one knows what cards you have, so you can claim to be the Baron, the Countess, or whatever you want! However, if you get caught, you’ll lose one of your two cards! It’s a great game that can be played in 2-5 minutes and each round will have you shouting to deal another! Best for those players that are hyper-competitive and don’t like to lose!

Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime

Anti-Love is kidnapping space-bunnies and making Spacetime overly dangerous! So hop with up to three friends into your colorful ship and get to shooting lasers, popping shields, and managing your thrusters as you work together to pilot one big ship! There aren’t enough hands to manage all the systems of the ship, so you’re in for a wild ride running around to fill all the important stations at all times! Meanwhile, you’ll have enemies on all sides and all sorts of blasters to dodge! This game is great for groups who like something with simple controls, but lots of deep engaging challenge!

Rayman Legends

Montpellier does it again with the latest entry in the hit franchise featuring your favorite man-with-no-limbs! Rayman Legends is a fun, character-filled romp with up to four players where you fight to save Teensies and stop the Magician once again! Rayman and his friends have been sleeping on the job for a century, and in that time the nightmares have grown in strength and numbers. Work with your friends to travel across the dozens of stages, including remixed and remastered levels! There are over 100 levels for your friends to tackle together!

Overcooked

There are too many cooks in the kitchen in this party game! Work with your friends to try collect ingredients, cook them up, and satisfy all the orders coming in! This is a four player game where you have to run back and forth, passing each other or passing ingredients between in order to bring things together. You’ll have to work in all sorts of conditions though! From moving rooms, to slippery ice floors, it’ll require you to all work together in order to succeed without burning all your ingredients! And quit hogging control of the bus!

You Don’t Know Jack (Jackbox Party Pack)

The Jackbox Party Pack is a collection of games that differ from volume to volume, but all include party games for all to enjoy! The first pack includes You Don’t Know Jack 2015, the classic “high culture meets pop culture” trivia game where you can literally use screws to screw your friends, forcing them to answer a quiz question they might not know the answer to! The party pack also includes Fibbage, a game where everyone answers the trivia question and you trick your friends into thinking yours is the correct one! The Jackbox Party Packs have something to offer to all sorts of groups. One of the aspects of these party packs that makes them so great is that they use your phone as the controller so everyone can join in!

Duck Game

Duck Game is Adult Swim’s sleeper hit party game, where you play as a ragtag group of ducks plowing into one another with “an irresponsible amount of weapons”! With costumes and crazy physics, this game is a showdown for the quickest and most callous of your friends. This is best for those friends that enjoy complex skill and competition as they plow into one another with grenades, shotguns and frying pans in a short, quick rounds.

Ultimate Chicken Horse

Do you like platformers and screwing your friends over? Enter Ultimate Chicken Horse, a game where you play as an assortment of cute, quirky farm animals who are racing to get from one side of the map to the other avoiding obstacles that are placed by your fellow players! After every round, everyone gets a chance to add something to the course, making new routes faster, and old routes impossible! This is great for any group of friends that enjoys egging each other on and racing against each other. Among the competitive games on this list, it’s more accessible than others as well, while still rewarding skill greatly!

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes

This competitive VR game is great for groups of players who like working against the clock yelling at their friends! One person wears a VR headset and works to defuse a bomb that is set to go off very soon! The only problem? They don’t have any of the instructions to actually defuse it! Everyone else in the room has the instructions and has to talk through the bomb with the defuser in order to successfully solve each puzzle! The puzzles range from cutting the correct wire to decoding Morse code! Work with your friends and hopefully come out alive! It’s a great game to be able to give everyone a chance to use VR, passing the headset around, while still giving everyone the opportunity to participate in the game.

Rocket League

Ever played soccer with an RC car? Now you can with Rocket League, a competitive 3v3 game where you drive at high speeds, and jump to knock the giant ball into the opposing team’s goal! This game is a hit classic for a reason, because it’s incredible fun and satisfying to watch the ball fly into the goal after a great aerial jump, or just barely inch into the goal after struggling to score for so long. The game has a high skill cap, but is certainly fun to play for players of all skill levels!

Gang Beasts

Gang up on each other in this colorful rag-doll fighting game! Gang Beasts has you and up to three friends playing as… gang beasts? These colorful Play Doh-looking creatures wear all sorts of costumes and colors who you will play as in a variety of gang modes – most requiring you to throw your friends off rooftops or moving vehicles! It’s a game where each player bumbles about, trying to beat down, pick up and throw all their friends! A truly great game that induces quite a bit of laughter as you struggle to get up while your friend carries you to your doom!

Magicka 2

The second installment in the co-op action adventure game series. Magicka 2 places you in the role of a group of four wizards out to rid the world of evil – if they can manage to quit killing one another! In this game friendly fire is always enabled, so you can always hurt your fellow wizards! Using an assortment of crazy spells that combine with one another to create new effects, players will “work together” to defeat foes and “accidentally” kill one another! Great for groups of friends that don’t mind the hectic nature of the game and just want to run around and have a laugh or two!

Scribblenauts Showdown

Scribblenauts Showdown is the latest game in the Scribblenauts franchise, having just released this month! However, unlike the other games in the series, this one is a party game for up to four players! Face off in over 25 mini games where you work to one-up one another! This word-based summoning game has always been a favorite of players of all types, being imaginative, fun, and creatively challenging!

TowerFall Ascension

In this hit archery combat game, up to four players will bound about the arena, skewering each other to attain victory! This is a highly intense competitive game where players use the simple mechanics to dodge, shoot, and outplay their opponents! There are all sorts of game-changing power-ups, a variety of dungeon maps, and plenty of ways to kill one another! TowerFall is the kind of game that will have your friends screaming at the screen when the match was so close before forcing them to watch a replay of their hilarious defeat!

Runbow

Runbow is a curious and colorful game where you race to the finish with up to 9 players! A crazy platformer where the background color changes frequently, altering the platforms and obstacles that are in your way! If you jump to a green platform, but the background changes to green, then all of a sudden, you’re left scrambling to recover from falling below a platform that no longer exists! It’s like an alternative timeline version of Chanbara! It’s a great game to play with players of all sorts of skill levels because it’s fast, frantic, and there are lots of opportunities to succeed!