Decided to bold the most important sentences so you don't have to read the whole thing to get the gist because there's a whole lot of fluff in here, I think.
So I started typing up a different blog post and then one of the footnotes was growing too long with no sign of slowing down, so I decided to make it it's own blog post, haha. And then when I post the original blog post presumably next week, I'll just link this blog post as the footnote, haha. Granted, I realize now that I could probably do that with several different parts of said blog post, but for now here's this one.
I find it is frequently difficult to get the proper number of people for many board games. Specifically party games.
Many other games work just fine and dandy with 2-3, which is quite easy to obtain (well, depending on how much the people around you like board games, but that isn't the point of this post).
But, man, party games just have weird sweet spots that can be tough to hit exactly.
Now this is not to say the games listed below don't get to the table, they most certainly do. I'm just saying how sometimes needing a specific player count is tough and a little awkward. This fact is important for a small part of my next week's post and I've chosen to talk about it in-depth here.
Captain Sonar. Fantastic game, love it tons. It really does feel like you're in a submarine hunting another submarine. But you really want exactly 8. Two teams of 4 with each team member on a specific task is just prime. Any less than that and you start sacrificing. 6 is the second choice as two teams of 3 with one person on the two easiest tasks works just fine. 7 is a bit awkward because one team inherently gets an advantage. Anything less than 6 is just a no go.
Secret Hitler doesn't work well on odd player counts (I think every odd player count?) due to a silly bad guy exploit. If the bad guys kill a good guy, then half the players remaining are good and half are bad. Tied votes are considered failed. From there on out the bad guys just vote no over and over again, effectively flipping over the top policy over and over again. With an overwhelming number of bad guy policies, they are very likely to win. Of course, if no one knows this exploit than the game still functions.
On top of that, social deduction games similar to Secret Hitler really want higher player counts. 7+. Lower than that is just not prime. And with Secret Hitler needing to avoid odd player counts, that leaves 8 or 10. 10 could be argued to be too many, although does work just fine. So 8 or 10 players it is. 8 (or 10) players being the only actually good player count for Secret Hitler is kind of rough. Especially when the box says 5-10 players is possible. It looks so easy to get a group of 5-10 players, but really it's 8 or 10.
Just talked to my roommate about prime number of people in a game of Avalon and he said 7. He even went on to say that pretty much every other player count is arguably just not good. 8 is fine, he says, but can be rough due to some game balance issues, 9 would probably be his 2nd choice. And then 10 is just too many people with too few rounds. 5 and 6 are just not enough players.
Letter Jam you really want 5 or 6. Any less than that and it just doesn't work as well with so many letters not tied to peoples words.
Now perhaps it's not that big of a deal; even my more specified numbers are pretty feasible. It just makes it a tad more uncomfortable to get to the table sometimes, something that a party game definitely wants to avoid.
Of course, again, reiterating, that it's not that big of a deal. I've had great 3 or 4 player games of Letter Jam. Great games of Avalon and Secret Hitler with all player counts above 6. And Captain Sonar working just fine with 6-8 is honestly a pretty good range. So, yeah. Not big deals. But the point I'm trying to get across will hopefully make more sense in my next blog post.
Oh, and happy late 24th birthday to me, I suppose.
