I’ll talk more about England tomorrow; today I’m thinking about games, and specifically about game scalability.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am a big raging game geek, who loves playing games of all kinds (mostly boardgames, but I’ll play anything). I have a good group of friends who are also game players, and we get together as often as we can, but here’s the catch–the size of the group is variable from day to day depending on who can come. Some of our favorite games play great with X number of players, and horrible with Y, so the number of people who show up for game night totally changes what we can and can’t play. This has gotten me thinking about the games I like, and specifically about the group size for the games I like, and being a highly list-oriented individual I’ve decided to compile those thoughts into a list. Without further ado:

My Favorite Games, Based on How Players I Have:

1 Player
What do I play when I’m alone? I’m not big on solitaire games, but I do like to use this time preparing for other games nights; I told you I was a huge geek. If I have a new game I’ll set it up and play through a few turns, running all sides, to see how it works. If I don’t have anything new, I’ll spend my game time sifting through my old collectible card games (things like Magic: The Gathering and Lord of the Rings) and put decks together. Once the kids are asleep and the day’s work is done, you can usually find me hauling out my cards and building decks in front of the TV.
Winner: Magic: The Gathering

2 Players
I used to play 2-player games all the time, because I grew up playing with my brother and we were pretty much all we had. These days I rarely ever get a group smaller than 4, so a 2-player game is a luxury that I’m only just now starting to get back into. I have a couple of new ones that seem awesome so far–Age of Napoleon and Horus Heresy are both fantastic–but time will tell if they stand up to the greatness that is Twilight Struggle. The problem with 2-player games is that the ones I like tend to be very complex, which means I often fall back on something like Memoir ’44 just for the sake of ease.
Winner: Twilight Struggle

3 Players
When do I ever have three players? Very rarely. But when I do, something like Small World or Carcassonne is usually the game of choice. This is also the stage at which more complex multiplayer games become feasible, like Runewars and History of the World, but most of those play better with at least four. I think the winner here is Pandemic, which works really well with groups as big as five or six, but scales perfectly down to three players and is always a big hit.
Winner: Pandemic

4 Players
This is the hardest slot to pin down, since so many games are designed for four players. This is also the sweet spot for most territory control games (that means “games like Risk” for those of you who aren’t hardcore gamers); any fewer and there’s not enough complexity, any more and the game becomes too unwieldy or downright too long. Our favorites with four players are Age of Conan, Chaos in the Old World, and Runewars in the war category, and Acquire, Vegas Showdown, and Hollywood Blockbuster in the economic category. If I’m playing with my kids (three plus me), this is also the perfect slot for Incan Gold.
Winner: I can’t possibly choose. It’s a tie between Chaos in the World and Runewars.

5 Players
Five players gets you into social-game territory, where things like Cosmic Encounter really start to get fun. Vegas Showdown probably works better with five than with four, and Pandemic is also a strong contender with five. Five is also the slot that seems to work best for story-based boardgames like Last Night On Earth and Descent (the former is one of our groups favorites; the latter used to be but has recently fallen out of favor due to imbalance). Overall, though, I have to choose my all-time favorite boardgame, Battlestar Galactica, which is okay with four and still fun with six or seven, but honed to killing edge of awesomeness with five. If you take only one recommendation from this post, take this one.
Winner: Battlestar Galactica

6 Players
Six is a big group, but a very common one for us. Descent can handle six, but there’s that balance issue to deal with. Galactica is great with six, but only if you have the expansion. History of the World is better with six than with any other number, but it can get very long and my group is rarely interested. RoboRally, on the other hand, doesn’t really slow down no matter how many players you add, and Memoir ’44: Operation Overlord is perfectly designed for large groups. Honestly, when our group gets this big we tend to fall back on short “filler” games, like Tsuro and Cthulhu 500.
Winner: Another tie, since depending on our moods we could easily lean toward either simple (Cthulhu 500) or chaotic (RoboRally).

7 Players and Up
Once again, the only games that really work at this size are the one designed for it: RoboRally, Memoir ’44: Operation Overlord, and so on. We’ve made Galactica work with as many as nine players, but newbies should learn the game at a smaller size before trying something that big. Party games are also great with huge groups, so things like Say Anything hit the table a lot. Honestly, though, for our group’s tastes, I don’t think you can beat Operation Overlord for the perfect mix of hugeness and simplicity. It’s a big investment, but with our game group getting bigger and bigger it was well worth it.
Winner: Memoir ’44: Operation Overlord

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