Three Player Games

I'm not willing to take my oath, but I would bet that three is the third most likely number of people you will find yourself in the company of. Why are the entertainment options for three people so limited? Let's do a survey:

1. You can do anything you like alone. You can play solitaire or just about any computer game, you can read a book or draw or write. You can entertain yourself super-easy when you're alone.
2. A lot of games are designed for two players. War is a classic two player card game. Chess, checkers, go, backgammon, mancala, twenty questions, Scrabble, arm wrestling, indian wrestling, normal wrestling. Tennis, badminton, squash, handball, jai alai and raquetball.There is no shortage of two player games
3. We'll come back to three.
4. There are quite a few four player games. There's bridge, of course. And its subsidiaries, hearts, setback, pinochle, and spades. Four is basically the minimum number to play Pit. There's Settlers of Catan which is a damn good board game and I don't care what they say. I think Risk can be played pretty well with four players right? If your taste inclines in that direction. Ditto Monopoly. You can play doubles tennis or -- really any of the two player games in doubles format.
   
5. Five is kind of a hard number to organize games for, I admit. If one of the five is a weak sister you can probably fit her into the doubles-game format. You can always play Risk or Trivial Pursuit or Monopoly or one of those telescoping games although I am not sure I would recommend it. What is it with board games that take a varying number of players? They're all so bad. Someone should get on it. You can play Pit of course which is really a lot of fun with five or more players. More importantly though, five is about the limit for game playing in crowds. With more than five people (or five, if they are stubborn people) it is really hard to convince everyone to do the same thing. They typically break off into little less-than-five groups of their own and commence animated conversations or drinking games or something I don't know. The point is, it is not important to find a game that five people can play.
6. Has anyone ever successfully played a whole game of Chinese checkers? I feel like by the time you can round up six (necessarily spineless) people, you have lost at least one of the marbles. It's too bad. Chinese checkers is the most aesthetically pleasing game, even if the strategy involved is nil when you get up to six players. It's a very random game.
7. I used to try to get people to play Diplomacy until I realized the point I mentioned in (5). It is not possible to get 7 people to play a board game that takes at least 5 hours, not unless you are blackmailing them somehow. I think the impossibility of playing Diplomacy suggests that it is not necessary to think of a game for seven or more people to play. If Diplomacy isn't good enough for people, what could be? You can always play pickup soccer or poker anyway if you are that kind of person.

Now then. Three. What good three player games are there? You can, of course, scale down Monopoly or Risk or Trivial Pursuit to three players, but these are dreary enough with four. You can scale Scrabble up to three players, but it is really ideal with two. You can play three player Chinese checkers, but there is remarkably little competition in that variant (nobody is moving to anybody's home spaces. All the players get the best results by ignoring one another).

I am told you can play three player setback. I'm not sure it would be much fun. Setback isn't much fun with four players, and it wouldn't be much better with three. You can play a depressing game of tag. I guess you could play golf, but that is not exactly a game you play against people. You just all play a game of golf, individually, and compare scores at the end. I think you can play some card games. Most of these are pretty poor fun though, not least because 3 does not divide 52. Three player poker is pretty boring, as is crazy eights.

I think part of the problem with three player games is that your (person A) actions are typically harmful most to person B. Person B, being harmed, is less able to harm person C. Person C is thus relatively strengthened, and is better able to harm you. Hence, the more "effective" your actions are, the worse you do. This perverse dynamic makes 3-player games unrewarding to play. Therefore, my suggestion to you game designers is to make games in which the order of play does not go in a circle. It could be free-for-all style play, or it could be A-B-C-B-A-C turn ordering. Or maybe the main problem with three player games is something that I haven't thought of. Do you know why there are so few three player games?