Survival is the most fundamental goal of all living things. If you are to accomplish anything else—do good in the world, find success, find love, obtain victory, you must first survive. Yet, simply to continue existing 🌱is a struggle. All but the most privileged of us work every day simply to acquire the resources we need to survive, and all of us, without exception, will꧙ one day fail at this goal.

It is no surprise that such a fundamental element꧅ of our existence should make its way into the games we play. Within the struggle to survive, there is an engaging tension, a thrill in facing dangers that are real and brutal, and in triumphing over those dangers. If you’re looking for such an experience, here are some excellent survival games for you to check out.

Because survival is a universal 🐼aspect of lifeꦐ, there are an enormous variety of situations in which survival gameplay can occur. Dead of Winter gives us survival in a zombie apocalypse.

This game casts the players as zombie apocalypse survivors, and charges them with maintaining and defending their colony. Each one of the many playable scenarios comes with a main objective, but what’s so special abou🤪t this game is that each player also has their own personal objectives, and there’s a high (but not certain!) possibility that one player’s private objective is contrary to the group’s main objective. This forces everyone to weigh their interests, those of the group, and the need to ward off suspicion as they manage the social deduction game nested inside this zombie survival game.

Some would protest the inclusion of this game on a list of surviv🔯al games. It’s true that Betrayal doesn’t have a lot of resource management mechanics, but the game is still very much about managing what you have and surviving a difficult situatio♊n.

Betrayal casts you as a group of rubes who have foolishly decided to explore the local haunted mansion. You will explore for a while, before eventually triggering a haunt, at which point one player will become the traitor and one of several dozen horror scenarios will play out. These scenarios are not just slightly different from each other. They’re effectively different games built on Betrayal’s foundation, meaning this game will give you a completely fresh experience every time you play. If you want more horror experiences, check out our list of the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Best Horror TTRPGs.

Space is the most hostile environment known to man. The harshest environments oꦬn earth are a breeze compared to the instant death that awaits any who enter the black void unprepared. The characters in this game aren’t completely unprepared—they do have a starship—but that ship is constantly on the verge of fatal malfunction, and it has been invaded by somᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚething alien.

This game is heavily inspired by the Alien franchise, though it isn’t officially associated with it. If you want to play out a space horror survival scenario 🌼that has you struggling to mඣaintain the systems keeping everyone alive as an alien horror stalks you, this game has you covered.

For more games in space, check out our list of the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:best science fiction games!

Compared to the supernatural terrors in the above games, one could be forgiven for thinking tha🐻t a mere wilderness, devoid of paranormal terrors, would have to be a sinch by comparison, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Part of a series of “Forbidden” survival games by Gamewright, Forbidden Desert tasks players with surviving after crash-landing their aircraft in a remote desert. Though there’s a bit of steampunk flavor to this game, the threat to the players is entirely natural. Their objectives are hidden in ever-shifting sands. A storm wanders around the board. The beating sun carries the ever-present threat ♊of dehydration, and even if they survive all of that, taking too long will cause them to r💧un out of time and lose anyway.

The 7th Continent is a cooperative exploration and survival game. In it, each player takes on the role of a different explorer who has been cursed, ✃and must find a way to break this curse on the eponymous 7th Continent.

This is an incredibly rich game, achieving almost as much complexity as a full-on RPG. There are hundreds of cards that allow different things to happen throughout your journey, and hundreds of items that allow you to iꦍnteract with the game in countless ways. You choose a different scenario at the beginning of every playthrough. That means what you’ll ultimately need to do to lift your curse is different every playthrough, and you don’t know from the outset what that method will be!

Robinson Cruso: Adventures On The Cursed Island is a brutally difficult cooperative worker placement survival game that casts the players as a group of castaways who have becom⛦e stranded on a mysterious, cursed island. There are a number of unique scenarios tꦛo play through here, each offering different a different win condition.

If you&r🔯squo;re going to last long enough to meet that condition, you’re going to have to play smart as you accomplish a variety of tasks and deal with the 📖ceaseless dangers the island presents. You must choose which risks to take, what resources to expend, and how to use your character’s unique abilities, and if you make the wrong decisions, you aren’t going to survive.

For more nature-themed games with beautiful art, check out this list of the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Most Beautiful Board Games!

If you like the idea of playing a survivor on a desert island, but are looking for something a little less hardcore, this is likely the game for you. Mind you, it’s not easy. There’s still a hurrican🐟e approaching✃ your island, after all.

That hurricane is your time limit for this game, and it’s what gives this game much of its tension as your survivors work to build a raft and escape the island before the storm arrives and wipes them out. The mechanics by which they do so are simpler, but running low on resources can still force you to elimi💃nate players, so you’re going to have to work extra hard if you want everyone to survive.

Not everyone finds themselves in a survival situation through misadventure. Some people choose to forge a path through an uncharted, such as the explorers that star in this game. This game is a rဣetelling of some of the most famous expeditions in human history: the search for the lost city of El Dorado.

Unlike the actual Amazon, this dangerous jungle🎃 really does have an El Dorado for you to find, and it’ll be up to you to use your abilities to survive as you trek your way toward it. You can play this game cooperatively, or you can have multiple teams racing to be the first to find the hidden city.

FAQ

What is the most complex survival game?

That depends on how you define complexity. In one sense, Bet🐻rayal At The House On The Hill’s dozens of scenarios make it the most complex—that’s technically hundreds of pages of rules—but The 7th Continent probably offers the most comp🐻lex moment-to-moment gameplay experience on this list.

What is the funnest survival game?

There’s no single objective answer to this question. Of the games on this list, Dead of Winter, Nemesis, and Betrayal at House on the Hill are probably the most acclaimed. Hopefully, we’v💦e described these games vividly enough that you&r𒈔squo;ll be able to tell from our descriptions which one will best suit your tastes.