Player Count Comes First

Before theme, before weight, before whatever your group is currently obsessed with, one question decides what can hit the table: how many people showed up. A tense two-player duel is dead weight when six friends arrive. A six-player negotiation game with three people is a sad little math exercise.

BoardGameMenu applies that filter first. It reads the official minimum and maximum player counts for every owned game in your BGG collection and only suggests games that seat your group.

The official range deserves some skepticism, though. Boxes are optimistic. 7 Wonders claims 2 to 7, and the 2-player variant is a different game wearing the same clothes. Catan says 3 to 4 and means 4. Agricola technically plays solo, but nobody buying it for family night cares. BGG actually tracks this with "best at" community votes on each game page, which are worth checking when a suggestion feels off.

Some practical habits that help:

• Count seats, not RSVPs. If two people are a maybe, generate a menu for both counts and see which lineup you like better.
• Treat the menu as a shortlist. If it suggests a game your group has learned plays poorly at that count, reroll. You know your table better than the box does.
• Expansions are excluded automatically, so you won't get the Wingspan European expansion suggested as its own game.

Get the count right and the rest of the night mostly plans itself.