The five best board games for four players

Four is the number most designers optimise for, and every game here requires all four — so none of them is a smaller game stretched to fit. If you can reliably get four people to a table, this is your shelf.

It is also where the trade-off between depth and downtime starts to bite. At four, a heavy game means real waiting between your turns, so weigh complexity against how patient your table actually is.

How this list is chosen

These five come from the same query that powers the finder, run with one filter pre-set. Expansions are excluded, so everything here is a game you can buy and play on its own, and only games with at least a hundred ratings are eligible.

Ranking is by community rating adjusted for how many people voted, not by raw average — otherwise a game rated 9.0 by a hundred devotees would outrank a classic rated 8.6 by forty thousand. The full method is here, and you can set your own filters to narrow this further by age, complexity or player count.