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Defenders of the Realm is 2-4 player co-op, meant for 4. It's fairly fun. You don't get to level up like Talisman but quest cards can boost your guy (re-rolls, more movement). It's also pretty difficult but the difficulty is sorta random.
Basic overview, you fight off orcs(green, 3+ to kill) undead(black 4+) dragonkin(blue 5+) demons(red 4+) and their respective bosses to keep them from getting into the city in the middle, or from just overrunning the map in general. At the end of each persons turn you draw a 'darkness spreads' card, which range from nothing(if you get REALLY lucky) to completely screwing you over in the most horrible way(most of the time). It shows two locations with 1-2 enemies on them meaning you place them as shown. If you get too many enemies (4, 3 is the max number of monsters in an area) in one area, it becomes overrun and you put a guy in every connected area (which can overrun them). Plus that area gets a tainted crystal in it every time it's overrun (could be the next persons turn if they draw that area again). You only have 12 in the box. If you need to put down a 13th crystal, you fail, you gotta go remove them but trust me they'll be back. If you run out of any color of monster models, you fail, you have to prune down numbers so no one gets too hefty. Each darkness spreads card has a boss moving on the bottom. The bosses follow a linear path to the city. If the card shows them moving to the next city on their path they move, if it's backward or skips a city, they don't. If the bosses get to the middle city, you fail. If you can't tell from the picture each boss is a mere four moves from ending your game in failure.
Fighting bosses is particularly tricky in that you have to use cards to attack them. Every turn you get two cards that you can spend on random things, some are special, some are basic, but they all have one of the colors and show you which boss you can spend this card to attack. You have a maximum of 10 of these, so if Sapphire the blue dragon is getting close to Monarch city you better start stocking blue cards and discarding the others when you have to. Say you try to take on Sapphire alone with a full compliment of 10 blue cards? With 4hp (the white boxes on it's card) and taking 5+'s to hit, good luck. Oh you lost? Well on top of death penalties, kiss your cards goodbye and there's no chance of it not having full health by the time you see it next so GG.
It's not like the game is impossible, with people working together you can break even with some bad DS cards drawn and you can definitely take down bosses. If you kill a boss you start drawing two DS cards per turn and when one boss is left you draw three... it never really lets up.