We made a lot of errors early, and played with 5 heroes. We played for 4 hours or so before losing about halfway into the second phase.
Suggestions for light, easy-to-teach game, preferably that can handle 5 payers?
I just set up my first game of Deep Madness They have a kickstarter re print but I could not wait 9-10 months so I bought a fairly more expensive copy off of ebay.
I always wanted a more involved Zombicide…more strategy and tactics and this looks like it might be that game.
How light? Love letter? Space Base?
I mean, this crowd’s favorite games are Cards Against Humanity and Guillotine.
Here are my recommendations:
We tried Dixit once and it was too abstract.
Isn’t Machi Koro similar to Valeria? I have Valeria.
Ooh, good question. 5 players is a weird player count, because it’s too many for the typical round-robin turn-structure. A lot of games support five players, but they don’t do it well. With more than four players, you’re often in the realm of social deduction/party games, but there are other options.
I’m sure someone in this thread will recommend 7 Wonders, but I don’t really care for 7 Wonders. So that’s on them.
We love Homeland, which is a traitor mechanic game, very interactive, very thematic, keeps everyone engaged because you want to watch what other players do on their turns to suss out their agenda, and it pays to draw your own conclusions and not share them with everyone else. In most traitor games, once you deduce who the traitor is, you want to convince others that you’re right. In Homeland, it’s information you want to keep to yourself. The mechanics are pretty simple and it doesn’t require any familiarity with the show. The player count easily goes up to six.
Jeeze, it’s only $16:
I have never seen Lovecraft Letter go over as anything but a big hit. Seiji Kanai’s Love Letter has a bunch of iterations, and the Lost Legacy games are all great, but I think they’re capped at four players. Lovecraft Letter, however, goes up to six because it has more cards. Really solid game, and super easy to teach and play through multiple rounds. Lots of twists and turns and gotchas, but all in a short period of time so everyone wants to immediately play “one more round”. One of my all-time favorites.
I don’t know that it’s light, but it’s pretty easy to teach. Fantasy Flight’s New Angeles seems at first glance like it’s a coop cyberpunk city management game in which each player is a corporation from the Netrunner universe. You have to deal with various crises in the city by voting on a measures proposed each turn. That means every turn involves you. It’s never not your turn. But it does go on a bit longer than it should.
I do, however, love how the victory conditions encourage cooperation and a different kind of interaction among the players. At the beginning of the game, everyone draws a card from a deck of each player’s corporation. Whichever player you draw is who you have to beat: you win if you have more points than that player. It doesn’t matter how everyone else is doing. You just have to beat that one person. So you truly don’t mind helping anyone else get points, so long as it keeps you ahead of your opponent. Of course, one of those other players has drawn you as their opponents…
The whole Machi Koro thing of everyone getting an action during each player’s die roll is a solid formula for keeping 4+ players engaged. But I feel Machi Koro is obsoleted by Space Base:
Reviewed here:
Which I’m starting to think might be obsoleted by Valeria: Card Kingdoms.
The problem with these Machi Koro style games is that they don’t have a lot of interaction. Space Base and Valeria are games where players tend to have their noses down on their own side of the table, not caring too much about what the other players are doing until it comes time to tally victory points. There’s a really good add-on for Valeria called Agents that puts out a deck of “gotcha” cards that adds more interaction to the game, but it’s a bit of a kludge, since it’s usually a hard choice whether to help yourself or hurt another player. Most of the time, players won’t attack other players at the expense of helping themselves.
I’ll be interested in seeing what other folks recommend. There are plenty of games you can play with five players, but not very many that manage it in such a way to keep all of them invested.
-Tom
Ok, Lovecraft Letter ordered.
And yeah, I finally got 7 wonders on iOS and didn’t like it at all compared to others like RftG or Age of Rivals
Bang the Dice Game is a fun light one that is good from 5 to 8 folks too.
Valeria is Machi Koro but good. Don’t buy Machi Koro. Don’t be that guy.
+1 King of Tokyo and Love Letter.
Oh, you mean Bang! The Dice Game. I was wonder what “Bang the Dice” was… Sounded a little, well, risque. :)
-Tom
Oh oops, I should’ve mentioned that the 5 to 8 people should be really comfortable with each other!
Tokaido plays up to five. It’s easy to teach, gently competitive and a real looker.
Codenames and Pictomania are pretty good for casuals. My friends are very casual. You’ll have to split 5 players into teams of 2 and 3.
Think we have the original codenames.
Pretty sure I have eyed Incan Gold at the FLGS. Might swing by there tomorrow to see if they have a copy.
Thanks all!
