CoraQuest is a “family cooperative dungeon crawler” created by adorable dad-daughter duo Dan and Cora Hughes from Huddersfield, UK. Feeling the boredom of pandemic lockdown, Dan and Cora (8yo) decided to design a board game and put it on Kickstarter. I’ve wanted an easy “Dungeons and Dragons for Kids” game for a long time and this hits all the marks. It’s imaginative, tactile, visual, and it has a simple ruleset that kids can easily grok. I backed it the minute I saw it.
CoraQuest comes with ~9 or so premade adventures so parents can run a one-shot without much preparation. The dungeon is a stack of 9x9 tiles with special story cards mixed in that map to story beats in the premade adventure. I embellish a bit and give the bad guys names like “Gerald” and “Geoffrey”. Add some funny voices and it’s a guaranteed good time for kids. My son and his friends played for two hours the other day and the kids didn’t even think about devices. That is worth the price of admission alone.
There’s other aspects that make this game great like how you can upload drawings to design your own heroes and enemies, there’s narrated quests to offload that responsibility, but to me the best part is my kids love it and ask for it. The infectious laughter of Dan and Cora has infected our house and young Cora is a role model that I often point to and tell my kids they can make a cool game everyone loves if you set your mind to it. I love the game so much I’ve bought the expansion as well as a short story book that takes place in the CoraQuest fantasy universe.
If you’re looking for a game to play with your kids and their friends, I highly recommend CoraQuest.