When I play an N-player game I want everyone to both:
Try to win
Win about 1/N of the time
This may be besides the point of your post, but: you can do even better than that, and without a need for handicapping, by playing co-op board games instead. Versus-style board games are just one type of game, and while you can modify their rules to come closer to equality of outcomes, that seems like a rather convoluted way of getting there. Like, in this situation, why play a zero-sum game when you could play a positive-sum game instead?[1]
Or if entirely co-op games don’t seem appealing, another option along this axis is to play team-based games; then you can balance team strengths by which and how many people you assign to each team.
Some co-op board game recommendations suitable even for groups of widely disparate skill levels: Letter Jam, Just One.
A co-op game for groups that want a challenge: Hanabi.
Some team-based board game recommendations: Codenames, Decrypto. I wrote about these two games here.
Speaking from my own experience, when I grew up I only knew versus board games, stuff like Monopoly or Settlers of Catan. But once I discovered co-op board games, I eventually realized that I had a lot more fun playing those with my siblings.
Many cooperative board games run into a problem where if there are people of differing skill levels on the same team than the strongest player ends up doing most of the playing. Hanabi is the only multiplayer game I’ve tried that successfully avoids this, where every player needs to be engaged and trying their best.
I know what you mean, and it used to absolutely be an issue in our group, especially with games like Eldritch Horror or Pandemic Legacy, i.e. multi-hour games where you have full information about everything every player is doing. That said, an obvious design which circumvents this problem is co-op games where every player has some private information: then other players can’t play for you and vice versa.
Incidentally, all the non-team co-op games I suggested above have this design.
Just One is a co-op party game where the active player must guess a word and each other player independently provides a word hint. Then the hint givers compare hints and eliminate all hints that were given multiple times (hence the title, “Just One”).
Resulting game flow: If everyone tries to give an “obvious” hint (e.g. giving the hint “metal” for the word “steel”), then multiple people will likely give the same hint, and as such this hint will be unavailable to the active player. Whereas if nobody gives obvious hints, there’s a higher chance that there are no duplicate hints to eliminate, so the active player can work with a lot of hints but might get misled by all hints being non-obvious. This makes it an interesting challenge for what kinds of hints to give and how to interpret the hints one receives.
Meanwhile Letter Jam is a bit like Hanabi: Every player has one letter card facing away from themselves, so everyone but themselves knows what it is. The goal is for everyone to guess their 4-7 letter cards in as few rounds as possible. Every round one player (chosen by the group) gives a word hint to the other players based on the letters they see.
E.g. suppose there are four players. Then I would see the letter cards of the three other players, plus 1-2 letters visible to everyone, plus finally a joker which can substitute for any one letter. And suppose I see the player letters P L A, and an open letter T. Then I could make the word hint PLANT (by using the joker for the N). This hint is given silently by placing numbered poker chips next to the letters I want to use, e.g. the 1-chip in front of the player with the letter P. Here’s how these hints look like to the other players: player 1 sees ?LA*T, player 2 P?A*T, player 3 PL?*T. Based on such hints, players try to narrow down what their own letter is.
The hint I gave involved the joker and thus doesn’t provide much info on the hidden letters, whereas one great hint can directly help multiple players guess their current letter and proceed to the next one. But even if one player is much better at giving hints, they still rely on others to also provide hints, since you cannot identify your own letters when you give a hint. And even if you could give 5 perfect hints and would then need 5 perfect hints yourself, that’s still much less efficient (i.e. it requires more rounds) than if each player can contribute a perfect hint.
This may be besides the point of your post, but: you can do even better than that, and without a need for handicapping, by playing co-op board games instead. Versus-style board games are just one type of game, and while you can modify their rules to come closer to equality of outcomes, that seems like a rather convoluted way of getting there. Like, in this situation, why play a zero-sum game when you could play a positive-sum game instead?[1]
Or if entirely co-op games don’t seem appealing, another option along this axis is to play team-based games; then you can balance team strengths by which and how many people you assign to each team.
Some co-op board game recommendations suitable even for groups of widely disparate skill levels: Letter Jam, Just One.
A co-op game for groups that want a challenge: Hanabi.
Some team-based board game recommendations: Codenames, Decrypto. I wrote about these two games here.
Speaking from my own experience, when I grew up I only knew versus board games, stuff like Monopoly or Settlers of Catan. But once I discovered co-op board games, I eventually realized that I had a lot more fun playing those with my siblings.
One of the reasons I tend to like playing zero-sum games rather than co-op games is that most other people seem to prefer:
Try to win
Win about 70% of the time
While I instead tend to prefer:
Try to win
Win about 20% of the time
Many cooperative board games run into a problem where if there are people of differing skill levels on the same team than the strongest player ends up doing most of the playing. Hanabi is the only multiplayer game I’ve tried that successfully avoids this, where every player needs to be engaged and trying their best.
I know what you mean, and it used to absolutely be an issue in our group, especially with games like Eldritch Horror or Pandemic Legacy, i.e. multi-hour games where you have full information about everything every player is doing. That said, an obvious design which circumvents this problem is co-op games where every player has some private information: then other players can’t play for you and vice versa.
Incidentally, all the non-team co-op games I suggested above have this design.
Just One is a co-op party game where the active player must guess a word and each other player independently provides a word hint. Then the hint givers compare hints and eliminate all hints that were given multiple times (hence the title, “Just One”).
Resulting game flow: If everyone tries to give an “obvious” hint (e.g. giving the hint “metal” for the word “steel”), then multiple people will likely give the same hint, and as such this hint will be unavailable to the active player. Whereas if nobody gives obvious hints, there’s a higher chance that there are no duplicate hints to eliminate, so the active player can work with a lot of hints but might get misled by all hints being non-obvious. This makes it an interesting challenge for what kinds of hints to give and how to interpret the hints one receives.
Meanwhile Letter Jam is a bit like Hanabi: Every player has one letter card facing away from themselves, so everyone but themselves knows what it is. The goal is for everyone to guess their 4-7 letter cards in as few rounds as possible. Every round one player (chosen by the group) gives a word hint to the other players based on the letters they see.
E.g. suppose there are four players. Then I would see the letter cards of the three other players, plus 1-2 letters visible to everyone, plus finally a joker which can substitute for any one letter. And suppose I see the player letters P L A, and an open letter T. Then I could make the word hint PLANT (by using the joker for the N). This hint is given silently by placing numbered poker chips next to the letters I want to use, e.g. the 1-chip in front of the player with the letter P. Here’s how these hints look like to the other players: player 1 sees ?LA*T, player 2 P?A*T, player 3 PL?*T. Based on such hints, players try to narrow down what their own letter is.
The hint I gave involved the joker and thus doesn’t provide much info on the hidden letters, whereas one great hint can directly help multiple players guess their current letter and proceed to the next one. But even if one player is much better at giving hints, they still rely on others to also provide hints, since you cannot identify your own letters when you give a hint. And even if you could give 5 perfect hints and would then need 5 perfect hints yourself, that’s still much less efficient (i.e. it requires more rounds) than if each player can contribute a perfect hint.