Fraser McHarg: The perfect number or the perfect group
Last week my fellow Tuesday columnist Tom Rosen wrote about the problems he has when his perfect group of five turns into “a crowd of” six players. There was much discussion about splitting the six or what some good six player games are for various people.
My personal answer is that I have plenty of six player games that I will happily play with the right, or perfect, group, but if it is not the right group then a lot of them would get benched and we would opt for something else or even split the group.
This got me thinking about what games I do not play even if I have the right numbers because they are not the right the players, or if you will not the perfect group for the game. This then segued into the alternate question, what games I do not play with the X players because we always prefer to play some other game if we have that perfect number?
At my recently geographically challenged work sessions we have played a lot of Mystery Rummy over the last year or so. In fact, discounting the two player only Jekyll and Hyde, I have chalked up 137 plays as of this afternoon. Only one of these plays has been four player. Is it because the games are bad with four players? I don’t think so, although honestly I have no experience in which to judge that. The real reason is that if we have four players we will be playing Tichu instead, because for our lunchtime group this was the perfect game for the number four.
With six players the issue is more of who is playing. If there is an APer or two I somehow doubt that I will suggest bringing BattleStar Galactica or Talisman out. Interestingly enough I have found that Union Pacific copes well with AP prone players so it probably has a very good chance of hitting the table with six in this situation. I also have no horror recollections of Power Grid running ludicrously long, so it has a pretty good chance as well.
At lower player counts Traders of Genoa and Roads and Boats are ones to avoid with the wrong group. I remember just missing out on a game of Traders of Genoa at a games day. In the meantime I played a few games of Diamant, Princes of Florence and two games of Acquire before Traders of Genoa finished!
Are there games that you seem to miss out on with a certain player count because your group has a favourite with that number?
Also if you don’t have the perfect group there on the night, are there certain games that suddenly stay on the shelf?
© 2009 Fraser McHarg
Posted by Fraser McHarg on Mar 17, 2009 at 01:00 AM in Columnists, Fraser McHarg, Gone Gaming / 1145
Comments:
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Good article. I can’t comment meaningful to your questions, because I always play with the same group—family. True, we do play some four or five player games, when someone isn’t present to make up our usual six (or seven, when my granddaughter chooses to play), but the group is only a subset of the regular crowd. One thing we do is to designate in advance who will choose all the games for a game day. We rotate this in a strict order, so each person has the same chances to choose his/her favorite games. It works well for us. Posted by Gerald McDaniel on Mar 17, 2009 at 11:25 AM | #
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Gerald - Playing with the same group and pre-selecting games would make things much smoother. Posted by Fraser McHarg on Mar 17, 2009 at 06:03 PM | #
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I don’t think the issue is the right group for me as I generally play with the same set of people and have done for the last 18 years. The issue for me is the number of players I have. As I suggested in the earlier article, gaming evenings are very social affairs and splitting 6 into two 3’s is neither practicable nor desirable. The games that I play are therefore dictacted by the number of people. At larger gatherings, where there is more choice of numbers of people (=game selection), I find the cult of the new is the issue and as a founder member, this is pretty understandable. As I have a long weekend of gaming ahead of me, I find the lack of Nuremberg inspirational games the biggest change to previous years. Perhaps it is too close to see new games from Nuremberg, but I am far less excited about the crop of new games coming from this show. On the Mystery Rummy point, I rarely play with more than two for any of these games as they work so well with two. Posted by Alan How on Mar 18, 2009 at 03:59 PM | #
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For each game I’ve a ideal player count and with very rare exception I refuse to play a game at other than its ideal player count (exceptions are things like Stephenson’s Rocker or Chicago Express which plays equally well across multiple player counts (2-4 in SR’s case, 3-4 for CE) or games like Age of Steam where the choice of map dictates the player count). The player count we have dictates what will be considered for play. Once within that range I’m pretty flexible. There are a few games I’ll avoid with certain players, but that’s usually because they don’t like the game (but won’t refuse to play) or their weakness at the game renders the game uninteresting (eg right/left binding games). Posted by J C Lawrence on Mar 18, 2009 at 11:43 PM | #
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