Best 6 Player Board Games of 2024 – Review and Comparison

So your gaming group is pretty big and you are looking for some advice on the best six-player board games out there? Stick around, as you are up for a treat since we have just finished reviewing some of the top 6 player games of the year.

In fact, the challenge is trick as most board games are made for four players. There are also some that are specifically designed for two players or solo play. Unfortunately, not many games out there support larger groups, let alone be good at it.

Six player games can be considered borderline party games and if that sounds like a better fit for you, please check our top party board games review.

After analyzing hundreds of board games, we’ve shortlisted the top 10 6 player games that are worth your close look. Whether you are a newbie or a seasoned board gaming expert, there is definitely something for you in the list below.

Top 6 Player Games – Quick Summary

Top 10 Best Rated 6 Player Board Games – Our Picks

1. Most Epic – Twilight Imperium

Players take on roles of one of seventeen unique alien races competing for their influence in space and expending their galactic empires. Throughout the game, players get to colonize planets, research military technology, engage in space battles, sabotage the galactic senate to ultimately win the galactic throne, and become the emperor of space.

The board represents 27 to 35 hexagon tiles with Mecatol Rex, the galactic capital, located in the center of the map where the former seat of the empire is located. Other tiles may contain other planets, systems, wormholes, asteroid fields, supernovae, and many other space things.

Each player starts small with only a handful of technologies being available, basic spaceships, units, and modest special abilities. In addition, a unique secret objective is dealt to all players. Completing objectives earn victory points and the first player to reach 10 points wins the game.

There are four phases in each round – Strategy, Action, Status, and Agenda. The Strategy phase is the time when big decisions are made. Players have to pick one of eight cards that provides a unique role, power, or ability for the round. Each card has primary and secondary abilities.

The action phase is where the main interaction happens as players get to move, produce, invade, and engage in space combat with opponents. Additionally, this is the time to invoke your diplomacy skill and make some beneficial arrangements.

The status phase is the game’s upkeep phase where things are checked and some housecleaning is done. Lastly, the Agenda phase allows players to vote on shaping the galactic constitution by establishing new laws and changing the rules of the game on the fly. Voting can be lobbied or influenced by offering other players goods, services, or making promises in return for their votes.

Everything about Twilight Imperium feels grandiose, box, miniatures, game board, and the theme. The fourth edition has streamlined the gameplay, yet it remains complex, lengthy and involved.

The game manages to find a perfect balance between an extended strategic play and specific tactics that work in synergy. The epic feel, size and the weight of the game may give a perception that it has to be played with a sledgehammer approach. On the contrary, a careful and thought out tactical play requires a scalpel.

One of the great things about Twilight Imperium is how much flexibility it gives to the players to choose their style. If you like being a trouble-maker and engage in combats left, right and center – you can do it. Alternatively, if you are in favor of a more peaceful approach by using diplomacy, you can do so too.

2. Best Card Game – 7 Wonders

There are three rounds (called ages). In each age, you and your opponents draw cards in turns from a deck passed around the table. Throughout each age, the gameplay is similar. Each round, you have a chance to play six cards to develop your city the best way possible.

See your civilization begin to take shape during the game as you build infrastructure and weapons, and trade your knowledge and goods with interconnected cities. As you construct your wonder, you can use its abilities to become the greatest civilization in the world.

Some of the cards you play will help to upgrade your city immediately, while others are used for upgrades later in the game, such as giving you military strength to help conquer your opponents, providing discounts on future purchases, or giving you extra victory points.

After each age, every player then compares their military strength to neighboring cities to score military points. Those military points contribute to the overall points count at the end of the game. After the third age finishes, you score points based on your cards as well as any military conflicts which have occurred. The player with the most points is the winner.

During the game, there are several different strategies you can use to win. 7 Wonders is a fair game where luck does not have much of a factor over the outcome.

Card drafting keeps everyone alert as players anxiously await to see the card selection to choose from. Picking the cards is a challenge on its own, as most of the time you want to select multiple cards. Besides, you can clearly see the cards that would benefit your opponents and some times it is wise to pick the card only to prevent other players from getting it.

Even though the game is constantly changing, it is possible to develop long-term strategies to give you an edge over your opponents. The more times you play the game, the deeper you find yourself delving into the details of polishing your approach to perfection.

The game allows a multitude of different strategies to go for, and all are equally interesting and well balanced. Having played the game a dozen times, I am yet to run out of the gaming interest. However, in case you do, there are multiple expansion packs available for purchase.

3. Best 3D Components – Colt Express

Each card you draw, you can move up or along the train, shoot someone, fight someone, collect the loot. You can even move the sheriff, which forces anyone from the carriage he enters up to the roof.

The key to winning the game is long term planning. You must think your plan through to steal loot and fight other bandits to become the wealthiest bandit in your outlaw gang. You also need to run around the train to avoid your opponents and keep away from Marshal Ford.

To win, it is imperative to plot two or three steps ahead and try to counteract your opponents’ future moves. It may end up changing where you are on the train, moving the loot, or your location relative to the marshal.

Overall, unpredictability is the essence of this board game as it adds fun and excitement forcing players to perform unplanned or unwanted actions during the chaos and disrupt each other’s plans.

The game board is made up of a highly detailed 3D locomotive train and cars, which you get to assemble before starting the game.

Sometimes you may find yourself making a perfectly timed run across the train, and grabbing the loot. Other times you will be left shooting and punching at nobody, as everyone moves around you. Playing a game like this is like watching a movie – a lot happens, and you do not know what is coming next.

The game is made up of five rounds, with each round having two phases.

Phase 1: Schemin’
During the phase, each player has to play between 2 to 5 cards on a shared card pile. Depending on the type of round, the action cards are either placed face up or face down. However, a player can also draw three cards from the deck instead of playing a card.

Phase 2: Stealin’
Here is where the fun starts as the action cards get played out in the order they were placed in the pile. You get to see if your perfectly laid out plan is pulled off flawlessly, if you made a mistake, or if another player foiled your plans.

At the end of the fifth round, whoever has the most loot is the winner. Despite a simple objective, there are enough variations and twists in the game to keep it exciting and intriguing every time. However, if you ever feel it is getting repetitive, there are two expansions Stagecoach and Marshal & Prisoners that add extra variety into the gameplay.

4. Best Area Control – Mission: Red Planet

Amongst many things, astronauts can extract resources and minerals as well as create diversions by blowing up rockets before they launch into space.

The game revolves around two simple and well-known mechanics – area control and secret role card selection.

At the start of each round players secretly deploy character cards. Those cards specify which space ships astronauts intend to board and the actions they are planning to execute during the turn.

Each spaceship that is set to go to Mars lands in different areas of the red planet which are rich in various minerals. Part of the challenge is to try and guess your opponents’ plans and see if you can sabotage them.

Once on Mars, your team can collect valuable resources that gain player points. In addition, players have hidden side mission that can score bonus points and accelerate their race to the top.

Given the above, the rules of Mission: Red Planet may sound simple, and they truly are, but there is a small twist. In addition to picking the spaceship to board and the action to take, players also select a special role for the round that gives unique abilities. For example, you may select a Travel Agent who can board three astronauts into the rocket or someone like Explorer who can get your team to move around the titular planetoid.

Matching rockets, actions and hidden roles into powerful combos is the key to a successful Mars colonization campaign. Planning ahead and second-guessing your opponents is a load of hilarious fun and enjoyable interaction.

5. Best Team vs. Team – Codenames

Teammates then have to guess the right agents on the cards and avoid other team’s agents and the assassin, of course.

In Codenames, the cards are laid out in a five by five grid of 25 words. Each word represents the codename of a secret agent. Each team chooses a spymaster, and everyone else plays as the operatives of the spymaster.

To begin the game, spymasters draw one keycard that determines the map of which codenames on the grid belong to which teams and the location of the assassin.
Out of 25 characters on the board, there are eight agents from one team, nine agents from the other team, seven innocent bystanders and one deadly assassin.

If you play as an operative, your goal is to use the clues given by your spymaster to guess those characters on the board.

Each turn, the spymaster can say one word and one number. It represents the clue, and the number of cards the clue applies to on the board.

Now you need to get creative and decode the codeword to identify one or more of your agents on the board! If your team guessed correctly, they can keep guessing or pass. If you’ve picked an innocent bystander instead, nothing happens. Alternatively, if you have discovered an assassin, then your team instantly loses the game.

Teams go on guessing rounds until every card of one team has been revealed. Who gets to find all of their agents first wins the game, but it is a lot trickier, and fun than you may ever think it is.

6. Best Teamwork – Zombicide Season 2: Prison Outbreak

The game also introduces berserker zombies who are immune to ranged weapons, forcing you to quickly decide whether to engage in close melee combat or flee.

The game features several action-packed missions stitched into an overall campaign that adds a narrative and makes the gaming experience more thematic. The overall campaign objective is to convert a prison full of flesh-eating zombies into shelters for humans to survive the apocalypse.

Despite the narrative, Prison Outbreak still follows the traditions of the original Zombicide, which is all about killing loads of zombies in a brutal and entertaining way with whatever you can find handy.

The game comes with six unique survivors, each with unique abilities and skills. This time around the designers have made an additional emphasis on teamwork, so the survivors’ skills have been specifically designed to complement each other to create a better, stronger and more robust team overall.

Season 2 also introduces the concept of ‘Zombivivors’ which is a fancy way to say, zombie survivors. The idea is that when the zombies take your character down, it does not die, but instead retains memory and stays in a limbo state with a limited level of self-awareness. You get zombie powers, and an ability to take more damage and a couple of other perks.

Despite the rules that look lengthy, the game is highly accessible for almost anyone to enjoy. It allows you to increase the complexity if you feel you are getting along with the zombies too well.

7. Best Space Civilization Building – Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy

To become the dominating interstellar civilization in the universe, players gather resources, explore new star systems, manage an economy, research new technologies, build space ships, and work on exercise their diplomatic skills to build the relationships with other major factions in the open space.

Despite being heavy, large, and grandiose, the main principles of Eclipse are relatively simple and easy to understand. There are eight rounds in the game with players alternating taking turns each round until no more turns can be taken. Some of the main player action include influence, exploration, upgrade, build, research or move.

You can take as many actions as you want in the given round, but the catch is that later, in the upkeep phase you are required to pay for the actions taken. Maintaining the balance is both fun and tense exercise as if you ever get to the point that you do not have enough money to pay for the actions, you may run your empire into bankruptcy.

As players defeat enemies, explore and colonize new planets, they gain victory points and the player with the most points by the end of the last round wins the game.

You do not need to crush your opponents to get victory points, there are plenty of other, more diplomatic venues to achieve the same outcome. The game encourages both gaming styles and allows players to pursue peace and scientific research as well as create havoc and become a space pirate.

8. Best Six Player War Game – A Game of Thrones: The Board Game

Well, this is not exactly true, as if you have played Diplomacy from 1959, this game feels similar.

Each player starts the game at the castle where their house is based. The setup is unique to all the houses as well as the cards that are used throughout the game. They have been tailored to thematically match the strength and weaknesses of each house and add some asynchronous yet balanced play. In addition, physical locations are different as some have strongholds nearby, resources, ports, access to the sea and are vastly different in size.

All the differences combined dictate a unique strategy for every house. It is important to understand each house’s particularities to play to their strengths which drastically improves your chances of success. For example, Lanisters have superior supplies and army support, Greyjoys are isolated from the rest of the world and have unmatched naval capabilities, Starks have the largest land area and the sphere of influence over adjacent territories, etc.

There are two ways to win in a Game of Thrones, you either need to control seven castles in the land of Westeros or sit on the Iron Throne when the game ends after the tenth round.

The kicker of the game is the Planning phase where all players get to choose the order and secretly assign it to each one of their units face down. While assigning order, you can talk to other players and explain your plans for the round and strike alliances.

Once done, the action phase starts where all the orders get flipped over, and the real intentions get revealed. This is the time when the words and actions are tested for alignment. It also happens to be the time when friendships are broken, and betrayals are made. It is this moment of flipping order tokens over that makes A Game of Thrones a remarkable board game of epic combat and deception.

Although the game can support three to six player, it only really works with six. Anything less than that creates a void on the map, feels clunky and somewhat unbalanced. It still works, but you are likely to miss out on the whole alliance forging and betrayal aspect which is what puts this game head and shoulders above the rest.

Despite the 28-page long rule book, the game is not as complicated as it may appear at first. Once you get a firm grasp on the main mechanics, the game starts to flow because they all make perfect sense, both thematically and logically.

9. Best Dice Rolling Fun – King of Tokyo

The game continues until someone earns 20 victory points or remains the last monster standing in the city.

To improve your chances of winning, there are many cool cards that get you the better battle outcome or let you earn points faster. Other than that, the strategy revolves around knowing when to enter or leave Tokyo, have a fight and when to heal. Not much for an in-depth strategic play, but more than enough for an ultra quick and enormously fun encounter.

You can help but feel that everything about King of Tokyo is fast-paced. It takes five minutes to learn the rules, each battle takes under one minute and rounds last no more than five minutes.

Component quality feels and looks good with dice being exceptionally pleasant to hold and roll due to their larger than usual size. In fact, only after playing this game I have realized that I like dice games and the difference an oversized, high-quality dice can make.

At the same time, the functionality of the board is questionable as despite having a theme, there is very little connection between the fights you are frequently having and the city of Tokyo. In other words, the theme feels abstract.

This is not necessarily a bad thing and did not prevent us from having a fantastic time fighting each other, but I wished there was a little bit more relevance to it.

10. Best Social Deduction – Deception: Murder in Hong Kong

Unlike other games that randomly deal cards, in Deception, the murderer gets to pick the weapon used for the murder and the evidence left behind. So, in summary, you have four investigators trying to crack the case, one murderer trying to mislead investigators and one scientist that knows everything, but can’t talk and uses tiles instead to give clues.

Playing the games with six players opens up access to two more roles, Accomplice and Witness. The Accomplice knows who the murderer is, the ‘means of murder’ and the ‘key evidence’ left behind. Witness, on the other hand, knows the Murderer and Accomplice but has no idea who is who. He also does not know how the crime happened and anything about the evidence.

Before starting the game, each player gets four ‘murder’ and four ‘clue’ cards which is enough to start the investigation and build your version of the crime.

Deception: Murder in Hong Kong delivers loads of fun and manages to keep all the players engaged. Games are short, and there is loads of replay value to be had if you want to try playing all roles to see what the experience is.

The rules are straightforward and only take two pages of text. Once the initial setup is done, and all the roles are assigned, all you need to do is to sit down and talk to other players. You would be surprised how much information and fun can come out of those discussions.

Frequently Asked Questions