Dude! Take Your Turn!
A Gaming Life
Friday Night Shots – 5 Player Games
Two Fridays in a row!
Welcome back to the bar. I hope you’re enjoying the excessively wet evening out there.
Why not cozy up to the bar, get some heat going, along with a drink of some sort, and just have a chat?
I promised no fire jokes anymore, so I’m actually kind of out of material now.
Let me see if I can find something…
Nope, nothing there!
Oh well. Next week.
Anyway, let me turn down the music. I’m not sure how the Greatest Hits of the Brady Bunch got on there.
Go away!
Last week, I talked about favourite player count, and it was pointed out to me that I forgot to mention one of the really odd ducks in the whole player count space: 5-players.
This actually came up last week, as we ended up with only 5 people coming to our game day. One person cancelled to make it 4 because they didn’t want to deal with a 5-player day.
Which brings up the question…how do you deal with it when you end up with 5 players at your game day/night?
There are a number of games that play 5 players, but funnily enough many of the ones that I know are actually shorter games, like an hour or less. Maybe 90 minutes?
I ended up bringing Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria because it does play 5 players and it’s actually a fairly meaty game for that player count.
Though that’s still 90 minutes.
It also plays well at 4, so we ended up playing it anyway, and it was a lot of fun!
Other games also play well with 5 players and are longer too.
Hell, Garphill Games has…nope, not going to go there.
Hansa Teutonica actually does play 5, and it’s a very meaty game. Maybe it just doesn’t play great at 5?
The votes on Boardgame Geek seem to think 5 players is best, or at least 3-5.
The users of Boardgame Geek can’t be wrong!
Yeah, I know. I tried to keep that in.
Another one that would work, since it’s great at 4-6 and plays up to 9 (!) is Stationfall.
Though you do need players who don’t mind conflict, so maybe it wouldn’t work with all of our group.
Those are all longer games that can take up a fair chunk of a game day/night, but there are also options for shorter games.
I do love me some game days where we play 3-4 games, or even more!
Most trick-taking games play at least 5, though not all of course.
Games like 7 Wonders and Arcana Rising play 5-6 players really well, and they are quick (about an hour at most, I would say).
Both are fun, both are fairly quick, so you can get more games in!
In fact, depending on the people who come to our game day, I think 5 players creates some interesting possibilities.
Hell, the Garphill game I just got from Kickstarter…nope, not going to go there.
Depending on who comes to our game days, a banner day of short games is always a good thing.
Especially for my “games played in a year” stats!
Not to mention that if Abi comes, my “new to me game” stats will really go up that month as well.
The last thing I want to say about 5-player game days/night is the option that I sometimes offer (I just didn’t offer it fast enough last week).
There are some really great, longer, 2-player games that I’d really love to get to the table!
1960: The Making of a President, anybody?
That’s a 2-hour game, and playing one 2-player game leaves a 3-player game as an option for the other people.
Five-player crisis solved!
There are a ton of options if your game day happens to have 5 players show up.
It doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
What do you think?
How do you handle 5-player game days?
Let me know in the comments.
Tonight’s post brought to you by Crown Royal whiskey, the number 276, and the letters K & N.
Dude! Take Your Turn! 
5 is an awkward number, since ultimately almost every 5-player game is just a 4 player game that takes 25% longer to play. Wingspan, Agricola, and Tzolk’in (with expansion) are general go-tos for 5 player games. Lords of Waterdeep also plays well with 5.
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I’d forgotten LoW! Yeah, that’s not a bad one for 5 either. And it can be a game day cornerstone too.
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sometimes we split 2 and 3, but most often we end up playing something that works reasonably well at 5. Over the last year, my group’s go-to 5P games include:
We find that all of those play pretty well at 5, though Acquire needs someone quick on the draw with math to keep things flowing.
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Yep, all relatively quick games (except maybe Acquire?). They work really well for that.
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Yeah, five is a bit of an awkward number… cannot think of any game that plays five which is not just as good (or often better) with four or six.
I’d wager, though, that there are some historical games for which five is just the magic number – say, something about the five great powers of the Mediterranean in the 3rd century BCE or the pentarchy in the Age of Reason/Napoleonic times! GMT’s The Napoleonic Wars comes to mind, but I haven’t played it myself.
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Those sound like some intriguing possibilities!
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Had a look for BGG for games that needed 5 and only 5 players and of course there are not many, just Diplomacy variants. But there are games for 6 players that aren’t bad with 5, like Russian Civil War. I made Red Guard, a game on the Chinese Cultural Revolution, that has 6 factions in it but takes fewer players fine, as non-player factions fall in and out of the action.
It sticks in my head that Red Dust Rebellion might have started as a 5-faction COIN system game, but it’s not that way now.
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Oh, and John Prados’ SPIES! is fun with 5.
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All interesting sounding choices! Red Guard sounds especially intriguing
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Red Guard has a lot of randomness in it, and it’s quite offensively oriented, which does not sit well with some players who like control, or turtling, or both.
I purposely built a lot of chaos into the game to instil the mental atmosphere of chaos and uncertainty into players’ minds as with the people who endured the Cultural Revolution… my impression of the Cultural Revolution is that it was like a game of Musical Chairs played by several hundred million people – except that the lights were turned off, players were allowed to hit each other over the head with the chairs, and the martial music didn’t stop playing for ten years.
Oh, and Mao floats around on the top of everything like a god, stopping time and motion when he alights.
So yeah, I meant to do that.
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That sounds really intriguing, but probably something that my normal game group wouldn’t play. 🙂
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Yep, most groups won’t.
Solos OK though, optional hidden victory condition chits is the only hidden information.
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Five indeed is a problematic number. But there are games which thrive with it – Charioteer (also great with 6 players), Pax Pamir (really, one of the war/political games which truly works well with 5) or even Dominant Species. But indeed, this is not easy number to cope with!
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If you have time for it, Dominant Species is a great choice! Will definitely take up most of a game day 🙂
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The only game I owned that had a theoretical max of five players is Milton Bradley’s 1984 edition of “Axis & Allies,” which, of course, can be played by as few as two people. The MOST players I ever got to play A&A was four; back in the day, I didn’t know too many people who liked that game, so for me, “Axis & Allies” was more of a two-player situation.
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I think I played it once, maybe twice, back in the day. It was definitely two-player. I didn’t know any other gamers back then!
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