I used to play a lot of co-operative board games like Arkham Horror, Pandemic, and Space Alert, where it's you and your friends against the board. They're great, because instead of playing a board game for an hour or more and then having your friends be cross at you for thrashing them, the board wins and you all get to feel equally bad instead.
The board would usually win because we don't allow backseat driving, or quarterbacking—that's when the player with the most experience takes over for newbies, basically puppeteering them instead of letting them make their own mistakes. It's always a problem with co-op games, which can be super easy if you play at maximum efficiency but super hard if you just muddle through and react to situations as they happen.
