The five best party board games

Party games are judged on a different axis from everything else. Rules have to survive being explained once, over noise, to someone holding a drink, and the game has to stay fun with people drifting in and out.

The best of them get their tension from the other players rather than from the board, which is why they scale to numbers that would break a strategy game.

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.