Best Co-op and Multiplayer Games for Ubuntu – Play With Friends on Windows

A kitchen game where the kitchen keeps trying to kill you, built for four people shouting at one screen.

Nothing else gets people laughing this fast. You are chopping, frying and passing plates while the floor slides apart under you, and the game is built so that the arguing is the fun part. It runs natively on Linux, so there is no setup at all, and four of you can share one machine with controllers.

Note: Console players are on separate servers. If your friend is on Xbox or PlayStation, you cannot join them from this version.

You and your friends lay track in front of a train that never stops, chopping and mining as you go.

One of you mines, one of you chops, one of you lays rail, and the train keeps coming whether you are ready or not. Jobs sort themselves out within a minute of starting, which is rarer than it sounds. It arrived in June 2026 and already rates Platinum, and it plays on one screen or across the internet.

Floppy little people solving puzzles badly, which is the entire appeal.

Your character has the coordination of a wet towel, so carrying a plank becomes a two person job that ends in the sea. Levels are open enough that you will find your own daft way through. It is cheap, it runs on anything, and it is one of the easiest games to hand to somebody who does not play games.

Note: Cross-play here only links Xbox with the Microsoft Store version. A Steam copy plays with other Steam copies.

A deep role playing game you can play in split screen, where your friend can absolutely ruin your plans.

Most big role playing games politely wait for everyone to agree. This one lets your friend pickpocket the man you are negotiating with, then deals with the consequences properly. Fights are slow, tactical and genuinely hard. It is the biggest game on this page, and easily a hundred hours if you see it through.

A two player adventure that throws you between science fiction and fantasy, and never once repeats an idea.

Only one person has to own this. The Friend’s Pass sends a free copy to whoever you are playing with, and it works across Linux, Windows, PlayStation and Xbox, so nobody has to buy anything or match platforms. The game itself is relentlessly inventive, and the screen is always split so you can watch your friend failing in real time.

Note: It is also on our adventure games list, written up there as a story rather than as a way to get a friend playing tonight.

The co-op campaign is a separate story from the single player one, built entirely around two people and four portals.

Two robots, one test chamber, and puzzles that cannot be solved alone. The moment where you both work out the answer at the same time is the whole reason to play it. It is native on Linux, it runs on a laptop from a decade ago, and you can play it on the sofa or over the internet.

You are in separate rooms and can only talk to each other. Neither of you can see what the other is looking at.

This is a game about describing things badly under pressure. You see a set of symbols, your friend sees a set of levers, and the only thing connecting you is a radio. It finds out very quickly whether the two of you can explain yourselves. Play it with someone patient the first time.

You are chained to your friends and climbing out of hell. When one of you falls, everybody falls.

The whole game is one cruel idea done well. You climb together, and a single mistimed jump drags the group back down a long way. It is furious and very funny, it costs less than a coffee, and a run takes an evening rather than a season.

Six of you carry expensive, extremely fragile objects out of a haunted building without dropping them.

The joke is physics. The valuable thing needs two people to lift, the doorway is narrow, something is chasing you, and the vase is now in pieces. Voice chat gets quieter the further away you are, which does more for the atmosphere than any jump scare. It runs perfectly on Linux and it is cheap enough to talk five friends into.

Four of you climb a mountain with limited rope, limited stamina and no idea what you are doing.

You will spend most of the climb deciding who gets the last of the rope and who is being left on a ledge. It is short, it is brutal, and it rewards actually planning a route together. At four dollars it is the least risky thing on this page to get a group to try.

You collect scrap on hostile moons to hit a company quota, and the company does not care whether you come back.

One of you stays on the ship reading the monitors and shouting warnings, the rest go out into the dark. Being the person on the radio is as tense as being the one in the building. Proximity voice chat means you hear your friend panicking from two rooms away before you see why.

Four survivors, one route through the city, and a wall of zombies between you and the safe room.

Nothing since has matched how well this reads a group. Get separated and it punishes you, stay together and it throws something that splits you up. It is native on Linux, it runs on anything, people are still playing it, and a full campaign fits into one evening.

You investigate a haunted house with cameras and thermometers, work out what the ghost is, and leave before it objects.

It is a detective game wearing a horror costume. You are comparing readings and arguing about evidence, right up until the lights go out. Console players joined with full cross-play, so this is one of the few games here where a friend on a PlayStation can come along.

Four space dwarves mine a cave that can be dug through in any direction, then fight their way back to the drop pod.

Every cave can be destroyed, so the driller simply makes a tunnel and the engineer builds a platform to reach ore nobody else can get to. The four roles genuinely need each other, which is rare. The community is famously kind to new players, which matters if you are bringing someone along.

Note: Steam players play with Steam players. The Xbox and PlayStation versions run on separate services, so check which one your friend owns.

A free science fiction action game about ninjas in powered armour, with more than a decade of content already in it.

You can play the whole thing without spending anything, and the movement is superb once it opens up. Squads form automatically, so you are rarely waiting around. Full cross-play and cross-save mean a friend on any platform can join, and your account follows you wherever you play.

Note: It is also on our free games and role playing lists. It earns a place here because getting a friend in costs nothing at all.

Four soldiers drop onto a planet to spread democracy, mostly by calling in air strikes on each other by accident.

Friendly fire is always on and it is the funniest thing in the game, because your orbital strike does not care whose side anybody is on. It also links every player into one running war, so the planet you take tonight moves the map for everyone. It asks a fair bit of your machine, which is where streaming earns its keep.

Note: Also on our action games list, written there as a shooter rather than as a game to play with three friends.

You go to the surface for supplies, machines hunt you, other players want what you found, and you have to get back down.

Every trip is a decision about when to leave. Staying one minute longer for better loot is how people lose everything, and doing that with two friends talking you out of it is the whole experience. Meeting another team is frightening because fighting is usually the worse option.

A whole ship that needs a crew: someone on the wheel, someone on the sails, someone bailing water out of the hold.

Sailing a big ship properly takes four people and it never stops feeling like a real job. Then another ship appears on the horizon and everything becomes very loud. Cross-play covers PC, Xbox and PlayStation, and your progress follows your account across all of them.

A three player team shooter set in an arena where every wall, floor and ceiling can be blown apart.

You do not take the stairs, you take the floor out. Teams that think about the building beat teams that only think about aiming, and matches end with the arena in pieces. It is free, it has full cross-play, and it is a straightforward way to get two friends playing tonight.

Four survivors try to repair generators and escape. One player hunts them, and that player is another person.

Being chased by a person rather than a computer is a completely different feeling, and knowing your friend is the one chasing you is better still. Rounds are short, so nobody is committed for the whole evening. Full cross-play means the group can be spread across any platforms.

A submarine under the ice of a moon, crewed by people who are all making small mistakes at the same time.

Somebody has to run the reactor, somebody has to fix the flooding, and somebody is a traitor if you turn that on. Things go wrong in a chain, and watching a small error become a sinking ship is the appeal. It runs natively on Linux and handles a far bigger group than most games here.

A free wartime shooter where you do not control one soldier, you control a squad that follows you into the fight.

Losing a soldier does not end your round, you take over the next one in the squad, which keeps you in the battle instead of watching a timer. It runs natively on Linux, it costs nothing, and battles are big enough that a friend who is new to shooters will not feel exposed.

You and your friends build a hall, sail out to worse places, and come back with things that want to kill you.

The server keeps your world, so people can drop in whenever they are free and the hall you built last week is still standing. It looks rough on purpose and the lighting is lovely. It runs natively on Linux and asks very little of your hardware, which matters when one of the group has the older machine.

Catch creatures, then put them to work building your base while you go and find better ones.

Everyone finds a job. One person builds, one person catches, one person keeps disappearing to explore, and the base grows anyway because the creatures carry on working while you are gone. Version 1.0 arrived in July 2026, and it now supports cross-play with Xbox and PlayStation.

Note: Your character stays on the platform you made it on, so you cannot move a save from Linux to a console.

A zombie survival game that starts with the question of how you die, not whether you do.

Everything is slow and deliberate. You are boarding windows, rationing tins and arguing about whether that noise was worth it. Because it runs on a server, your group can leave a town half looted and come back next week. It is native on Linux and runs on very modest hardware.

Eight of you dig through an underground world, lighting it up and farming it as you go.

It is calm. There is no timer and no pressure, so people can potter about doing the bit they enjoy and the base still improves. Farming, mining and boss fights come in any order you like. It runs natively on Linux and works happily on a laptop.

Note: Cross-play works between PC stores. There is no cross-play between PC and consoles.

A hand drawn survival game where the first winter kills any group that did not plan for it.

Somebody has to farm, somebody has to gather wood, and if nobody built a fire pit before dark the whole camp is in trouble. It is harsh and very funny about it. Ten years of updates deep, native on Linux, and one of the cheapest ways to get six people into the same world.