When I play an N-player game I want everyone to both:
- Try to win
- Win about 1/N of the time
With many games and groups of participants these are in conflict: if I play bridge against my kids I'm going to win all the time, but I'm not very good at the game so if I play against people who are serious about it I'm going to lose ~all the time.
One way some games handle this is by including a lot of luck. The more random the outcomes are, the more you'll approach 1/N regardless of player skill. Kid games where you make no choices, like Candyland or War, take this to the extreme.
Instead, I think handicapping is a much better approach. For example in Go the weaker player can start with several stones already on the board, which gives them an advantage while still keeping it interesting and without turning it into a different-feeling game. When I was little and playing Go with my dad I remember slowly reducing the number of handicaps I needed over months, which was really rewarding: each game was fun and challenging, and I could see my progress.
Other examples:
In Dominion, changing the ratio of coppers to estates that each player starts with.
In Settlers of Catan, allowing weaker players to place both of their settlements before stronger ones.
In Power Grid, Monopoly, Modern Art, or anything else financial, letting weaker players start with more money.
In Ticket to Ride, Thurn und Taxis, Settlers of Catan, or anything else with resource cards, letting weaker players start with more cards.
I like it when games are designed in a way that makes this kind of adjustment easy and granular. You can calibrate by removing a handicap after the weaker player wins some number of games in a row (I think three is about right though it depends on granularity) and vice versa.
I'm curious, though: why isn't this more common? It's very normal in Go, mostly of historical interest in chess, and in most game cultures I'm around it seems like the expectation is just that weaker players will just lose a lot or or stronger players will "go easy" on them? Is it that acknowleging that some players are stronger than others is awkward? Too hard to calculate for games with more than two players?
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.
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... (read more)