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What's the highest player count you've had in a game?

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17 May 2018 14:27 #273508 by ChristopherMD
Not including short party games and stuff like Werewolf.

I've done 9-players of the Babylon 5 CCG back in the late 90's. They were all-day affairs and played more as a novelty than anything strategic with that many people. Done a few 6 player board games since but more than 4 at a table is rare nowadays. I know some of you are into minis games that easily allows more players. I would love to play in a giant Wings of War battle some day.

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17 May 2018 14:32 #273510 by lj1983
8 player Captain Sonar is awesome. We did 6 player StarCraft once, never again. Since then I've been invited to join 6-8 player games of Arkham Horror and Zombicide, but have had the better sense to decline.

we did a 10 player furball with X-wing on two mats, which was neat, if a little chaotic.
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17 May 2018 14:50 #273512 by SebastianBludd

lj1983 wrote: 8 player Captain Sonar is awesome. We did 6 player StarCraft once, never again.


I've done both of those. Captain Sonar is, indeed, awesome; and so satisfying when, as the captain, you fire a torpedo based only on the information from the navigator and you score a direct hit, sinking the other sub.

A couple years ago we played a six player game of Starcraft at a game day and it was a mess; at least two of the players were newbies and we were using the Brood War expansion. It took 5-6 hours and we never finished. The low point was when one of the players was eliminated, played a WH40K skirmish, returned, and the game was still going.
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17 May 2018 15:24 #273514 by the_jake_1973
8-player Twilight Imperium 2nd ed. Way too long for my taste. I have not gone back to the game.
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17 May 2018 15:29 #273515 by wkover
Sounds like the question needs to be changed to, "What the highest player count you've had in a game and still had fun?"

At this point in my gaming career, there are very few non-party games that I'd play with 6+ players. I've been in some large homebrew Baseball Highlights: 2045 tournaments - but those are just a series of 2p games, so don't really count.
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17 May 2018 15:52 #273525 by Sagrilarus

ChristopherMD wrote: I would love to play in a giant Wings of War battle some day.


I've done 23 with WW1, 21 with WW2. That's my highest player count by the way.

The WW2 game was brutal. Not a lot of room for error in the WW2 version of the game, and there were 10 planes looking to shoot at you, more or less from all directions.
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17 May 2018 15:56 #273526 by Michael Barnes
I purposefully avoid high player count games for the most part. They tend to not be fun.

The World Cup Game with 16 was fun a couple of times. At least for the folks who didn’t bomb out early.
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17 May 2018 16:26 #273530 by hotseatgames
I played in a 8 player Cosmic Encounter game at Gen Con one time, and that was a lot of fun.

6 player Captain Sonar and The Thing were also great.
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17 May 2018 18:14 #273547 by Shellhead
I love playing games with high player counts, except that sometimes a game does suffer. Not as often as you might think, as long as you avoid the dreaded Analysis Paralysis Guy. I have played a variety of games with 7 or 8 players. Sometimes I have played a game with one or two more players than the game is supposed to handle, by improvising extra play pieces. I put number of players in parentheses below:

Games that played just fine with many players: Werewolf (15 to 20), Nuclear War (9), Jyhad (8), Cosmic Encounter (8), Arkham Horror (8), Apples to Apples (8), Cards Against Humanity (8)

Games that were too long or slow-paced with many players: Legend of the Five Rings (8), Star Wars Epic Duels (8), Wiz-War (6)

Game that was completely amazing with a huge number of playes: Strategic Legend of the Five Rings (78. Yes, I said 78.)

People here have commented in the past that they have deliberately avoided Arkham Horror when there were going to be 7 or 8 players. That is a mistake. The game scales up just fine (though it doesn't scale well down to 1 or 2), and one of the fastest games of AH that I ever played was an 8-player game that lasted one hour.

Cosmic Encounter plays fine at 8, except for one extreme quirk that might bother some people. If you are the 7th or 8th player, there is a pretty good chance that you won't even get a turn before the game is over. That's not as bad as it sounds, as you could potentially win Cosmic Encounter without getting a turn.

I have played 8-player Jyhad on multiple occasions, and the games tend to be shorter than a 5-player game (which is usually considered the optimal number of players. When players know that it will be a higher player count, the canny ones tend to play a political deck, because one of the most common and popular vote cards scales up in effect based on number of players. And the voting gets the whole table interacting more instead of the usual focus on the enemies sitting adjacent to you. Once we had an 8-player game that clocked in at about one hour.

My six-player game of Wiz-War was with a print-and-play set that I made during the long absence before the FFG edition. It was a chaotic and interesting game, but wore out its welcome during the third hour.

Zombies!!! is not a great game, because it lacks depth and players tend to play slowly because they get overwhelmed by the quantity of zombies when it comes time to choose which one to move at the end of the turn. I fixed that for our seven player game by breaking us into two teams. Each team had a separate turn marker, but played in the same overall game. That gave players an actual incentive to play quickly, and a reason to single out certain players for take-that cardplay. The uneven team sizes were balanced because the smaller team could play faster turns but the bigger team was dealing out more take-that cards. We finished in slightly more than an hour, and people were reasonably happy with the game.

Seven-player Silver Tower was possible because I bought two stripped (no minis) copies of the game on eBay, then made tokens for all the heroes and monsters. Much like the Zombies!!! game that I mentioned in the previous paragraph, I split us into two competing teams that were playing in separate turn sequences. The dungeon was a short layout of three identical but separate room cards for each team, followed by a fourth room connecting both sets of rooms, with an objective item in that fourth room. Again, this gave players an incentive to play faster turns, to get their team to the objective room before the other team could get there. Again, the uneven teams were balanced somewhat, because the smaller team was faster but the bigger team was bigger in case the two teams clashed. the small team got to the objective room and item first, but the big team did get to beat my character to death while my quicker teammates escaped for the win.

Strategic Legend of the Five Rings might be the most amazing gaming experience that I've ever had in this hobby. Thirteen teams of six players, representing the seven major clans of Rokugan, plus Mantis Clan, Toturi's Army (or whatever it was called circa GenCon 2002), Monks, Naga, Shadowlands, and Ninja. Each team had a Daimyo, a Karo (General), and four Warlords. The Daimyos stand off to one side, looming over a map of Rokugan that is divided up into many provinces. At the start of each turn, the Daimyos have write up orders for each of the Warlords, which are delivered (or not) by the Karos of each team. The Warlords are represented by tokens on the map of Rokugan, but each Warlord is a player with his own pre-made CCG deck for his faction. When a Warlord token is moved into a given province, that player takes his cards and sits at a table the represents that province. When Warlords from different teams are in the same province, they can start fighting, which is played out like a regular game of L5R, though paused after a limited number of card game turns so the Daimyos can take another turn. The Daimyos and Karos never play cards. The Daimyo and Karo of each team strategize together, and the Daimyos roleplay amongst themselves, negotiating alliances, warfare, treachery, and peace-making. Each team has a secret objective, and then there are also points awarded for holding key locations on the map, especially the capital. The experience was great though exhausting, because our start time got pushed back to 11:30 PM and some players on every team bailed early before the game ended and got scored at 5:30 AM.
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17 May 2018 18:37 - 17 May 2018 18:37 #273550 by Josh Look
8, and that goes only for The Thing, which really does need the full compliment of players.
Last edit: 17 May 2018 18:37 by Josh Look.
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17 May 2018 19:06 #273553 by birdman37
I've played Citadels with 8 players, a couple of times now. It did drag on a little, but in the context of a group of friends drinking, chatting and catching up, this wasn't a problem. I certainly wouldn't recommend it with a group of "serious" gamers. A word of advice (for those with the old version): use the Queen and not the Artist as the 9th character card, or you'll quickly run out of money.

Does Liars Dice count as a "party game"? Because I've played one game of that with around 20 people once. Liars Dice is one of the easiest and most enjoyable light games out there, and pretty damn elastic with player numbers, but that one time proved that an upper limit to player count does exist!
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18 May 2018 05:03 #273570 by Nodens
Around the millenium we regularly had 8-player RoboRally days. Ten hours play time at least, still among my favorite gaming memories.
When TI 3rd came out, we tried to switch over to that and played two or three times, but whoever was neighbors with 'the Destroyer', as he came to be known, wasn't there for the next match. It's not much fun if you're out in round two and have to go on for another five hours.
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