5 Real-Time Board Games Like Overcooked (Chaotic Co-ops You’ll Love)

5-Minute Dungeon

5-Minute Dungeon is exactly what it sounds like: a dungeon crawler that lasts only 5 minutes. For that to happen, the game’s got to be simple, and it is. All you have to do is collectively find the symbols in your cards to defeat each challenge card leading up to the boss, then defeat the boss. There are 5 possible symbols, plus a lot of different powers that allow you to recover cards, cycle your deck, or defeat challenges instantly.

In this game, each player chooses a classic RPG class as their character. Each character has their own board and deck, which come with different abilities and symbol distributions. Once the clock starts ticking (you can use the official app, too), you will face a deck of threats combining everyone’s symbols and abilities. You can only move to the next threat when the current one has been dealt with. But there are a lot of cards, so there’s really no time to strategize much. Hence, the chaos.

You can also find 5-Minute Dungeon in the form of 5-Minute Marvel, keeping the same core gameplay but giving it an extra flavor for Marvel fans.

Caos na Cozinha

This is a children’s game released in 2025 by Samba Estúdios, namely by Fel Barros, superstar Brazilian designer and developer, and his co-designer Henrique Garrigós. The background is important to explain why it’s not (yet) available everywhere in the world, but you will soon learn why it needed to be part of this list.

Caos na Cozinha is played in two teams of two players, each equipped with a set of pots and pans, a few dishes, and two plastic tongs. One player is the chef, who must pick up foam ingredients from the center of the play area using tongs and place them in the pots and pans. The other is the waiter, who must pick up ingredients from the pots and pans and place them on the dishes. Over the course of 5 minutes, each team will complete as many orders as they can from a deck, cooking and delivering dishes with the correct ingredients. The team that gets the most orders wins!

Kopi King

Kopi King is a competitive game, but other than that, it’s got a lot of that chaos we love.

There is a lot that is similar to Overcooked: you are racing against the clock to fulfill orders, sometimes incorrectly, and you have to pick up ingredients at the same time as everyone else. What is different about it, in addition to the competitive aspect, is how much it relies on memory to give you a competitive edge.

In Kopi King, you have a certain number of orders to fulfill, but all the ingredients are face-down cards arranged chaotically in the center of the play area. Once the chaos starts, you will be picking up cards, one at a time, looking at them, and then assigning them to a certain order or returning them face down to the play area. Completing an order allows you to pick up a new one. When someone has completed 5 orders, all players check if their completed orders are correct and tally up their points.

You can also find this game as Bubble King (bubble tea-themed) or Coffee Rush: Grab & Go (coffee rush-themed). The theme changes, but the gameplay is pretty much the same.

Magic Maze

If you like the idea of learning a game little by little, one element at a time, Magic Maze is a perfect example. This real-time cooperative game is set in a very confusing mall, where a mage, a warrior, an elf, and a dwarf find themselves after having all their possessions stolen. Now, before going on their next adventure, they are forced to rob the mall to find new weapons.

The game board that represents the mall is modular, and new tiles are revealed and placed while playing. Each tile contains elements like weapons, exits, alarms, portals, escalators, and extra time. And the game is written as a sort of campaign, introducing those elements gradually for a better learning curve. For example, all characters use the same exit tile to leave the mall, but after a few levels, each character has to leave the mall through a different exit.

The catch here is that, instead of each player being responsible for one character, everyone controls all characters—but each player may only move their pawns in one direction. This is why the game can be played by up to 8 people at a time. Oh, and you also can’t speak. The most you can do to call out a player who needs to make a move is place a giant red pawn (aptly named “do something pawn”) in front of them. Utter and complete chaos.

Pandemic: Rapid Response

One of the few Pandemic spin-offs that was not designed by the series’ genius creator, Matt Leacock (but by Kane Klenko, who has the cooking-themed real-time game Pressure Cooker in his portfolio as well), it still maintains the high level expected of the franchise. To be honest, this one is actually severely underrated.

Pandemic: Rapid Response is set inside a plane rushing to deliver supplies to cities in need. Each player has their own dice, which they must roll and assign to move their pawns, produce supplies, move the plane around the world, and deliver these supplies. There are 5 possible supplies, each produced in a different area of the plane and requiring a certain number of assigned dice. To win a match, you must get supplies to a certain number of cities, depending on the difficulty level, before all your time reserve runs out.

What gives it that extra adrenaline is how these turns work. While an hourglass is running, the active player may roll the dice up to three times, assign them to the best of their ability, and pass the turn to the next player, who will do the same. The game begins with a few time reserve markers that allow your team to restart the hourglass and keep playing—when those run out, watch out! You can recover markers every time you successfully deliver supplies to a city.

Part 2?

How many of these real-time board games were you already familiar with? And which ones would you add to the list? There’s more than enough material for a part 2!