A big year for cooperative dungeon-crawlers

Publishers are leaning hard into campaign-length co-op boxes this season. We break down which ones are worth the shelf space — and which are all cardboard, no dungeon.

Every season has a trend, and this one belongs to the co-op crawl. The big boxes are getting bigger: legacy campaigns, app-assisted dungeons, and enough minis to sink a goblin’s loot sack. It’s a good time to be the sort of table that likes to lose together.

But not all of it earns the shelf. We’ve been opening boxes on Thursday nights and sorting the genuinely great from the merely heavy. The short version: buy for the campaign, not the component count. The best of the bunch remember that a dungeon is a story first and a bag of tokens second.