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Top 5

The five best board games for five players

Games that need five or more — the ones worth saving for the evening when everybody actually turns up.

  1. 1

    The Resistance: Avalon (2012)

    👥 5–10 players ⏰ 30 min 🎂 Age 13+ ⚖ Weight 1.7/5
    7.5avg rating
  2. 2

    Secret Hitler (2016)

    👥 5–10 players ⏰ 45 min 🎂 Age 13+ ⚖ Weight 1.7/5
    7.5avg rating
  3. 3

    Feed the Kraken (2022)

    👥 5–11 players ⏰ 90 min 🎂 Age 12+ ⚖ Weight 2.1/5
    7.8avg rating
  4. 4

    The Resistance (2009)

    👥 5–10 players ⏰ 30 min 🎂 Age 13+ ⚖ Weight 1.6/5
    7.2avg rating
  5. 5

    A Fake Artist Goes to New York (2011)

    👥 5–10 players ⏰ 20 min 🎂 Age 8+ ⚖ Weight 1.1/5
    7.1avg rating

These are games with five as their own minimum, which is a small and distinctive shelf: designs that simply do not function with fewer people, usually because hidden roles, teams or negotiation need a crowd to work at all.

Social and negotiation games tend to improve at this count rather than suffer, because more players means more to read and more to bargain with.

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.

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