More than 6 players??


Homebrew and House Rules


Hey all,

Just a quick question. I'm thinking of trying to get some friends together to play a few games. My only question is, if the whole group of us got together (around 7-8 of us) would it be possible to play a version of the game with that many players?....just wondering if anyone has tried it before?

Thank you all!


Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path, Lost Omens, PF Special Edition, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

You’d be firmly into house rule territory. Here are some things you’d need:
1. Increase the size of the blessings deck so that everyone gets 5 turns (35 or 40 cards)
2. Add an extra location per player (you’d have 9-10 locations).
3. There won’t be enough henchman, so you will need to either add in some different henchmen or use proxies
4. There won’t be enough boons, mix in one class deck per extra player
5. You may need to scale up check difficulties to account for the extra help, if you’re finding things too easy.

And here are some alternatives:
1. Run two games. Half the group plays out of one box while the other half plays out of the other. The games don’t have to both be PACG if you don’t have two base sets. Like you could do PACG on one table and Sentinels of the Multiverse on another (as an example).
2. Play something else that supports that many players.


Yes we did, although I would recommend if you are 8+ to do two tables.

That said, you need to do quite a bit of adaptation before the game to prepare for a 7+ game. I won't go into all details on how we do (took a few tries but we get it right now), especially as there is no straightforward adaptation. Some scenarios / characters scale much easier than others. I would advice to take into consideration the following.

A) Anyway there will be a lot of downtime so make sure players are ready for it.

B) You want to play at least 5 turns each, so the blessing deck must grow.

C) Support characters won't be able to support everyone - or they won't be able to play their own turn having empty all resources during others turns.

D) More characters means on the average you must increase difficulty. I mean you must increase it MORE than just adding 1 location per character. There are many reasons for that (more turns played, better coverage of skills by large party, better chance to always have a handy blessing in the group, possibility by playing many blessings to reach überuniterestning results...).

E) Some specific challenges have to be adapted. Take WotR for example, cards like Arboreal Blight, Demonic Horde, Armies.... totally change in terms of impact.

F) More generally powers (from cards or characters) that affect all characters or all characters in a location may kill the game's interest if not adapted.

G) At the end of the scenario, there will be a lot of spare boons to distribute, and lots of choices, so characters will have very good deck very fast. You may want to mitigate that too.

H) One way to avoid an over-powered party is select characters in such a way that they "duplicate" certain desires for certain boons' types rather than having all case covered.
I mean in a smaller party, there is usually one type of boon at least that is not of great interest for anyone. Try to keep it that way. With 8 players, if you let spread the "class", then any melee/range/arcane/divine/blablabla loot will become very powerful in the hand of at least one character... so you may want to avoid that optimization for balance's sake. It's more fun to have 3 melee fighters arguing around a single greatsword and finaly having one who has to use a crossbow. That is a way to keep the whole game challenging and create fun roleplay discussions.

And so on...


Cheers thanks peeps! I'll see how it works!


Even at 6 players this game can take a while to make it around the table. I get not wanting to split up the group, but the game experience would likely be better with tables of 3 and 4.


My brother, sons and I have a lot of fun playing this together with a total that sometimes reaches 7. It's easily adaptable to be played by larger groups.
Absolutely love this game.


Using pathfinder society character decks to each player and playing two games at the same time would be the best option...


We have occasionally tried 7 players. We didn't add locations; instead we shuffled a random monster into each location to balance for having more resources.

Another thought I had was to divide the 8 locations for 6 players into 2 groups. pick a location from each group to be part of a "gate" that you have to go through to get to any location in the other group. Then flip two blessings each turn and have a player in each location take their turn at the same time. Maybe restrict helping at another location to your half of the locations (maybe the gate locations are adjacent too). Villains could still escape anywhere (they're fiendish like that). Dunno, but it's an idea to cut time waiting for your turn.


I know this is an annoying answer to give but my honest advice is don't do the thing you're trying to do.

You can do more than 6, but before you do, consider the fact that the game is best designed for groups of 3 or 4, and that 6 player groups are already quite degenerate in a number of ways.

With 6, you need to spend all your available blessings + allies exploring just to find the villain in time, but when you do find them they're a total cakewalk. A number of scenarios scale very poorly to 6 players. And the total number of turns per player and the time between one turn and another is way, way too long, especially for characters with few party-relevant powers.

If you have 7 people then you have enough people to have two optimally sized groups of 3 and 4. You can play two groups at the same time from the same box with what would be quite close to the same level of inconvenience as house-ruling for a 7+ player party. All you should basically need to do is proxy the villain and any unique henchmen, and just put the location cards in the middle with a deck for each party on either side.

Community / Forums / Pathfinder / Pathfinder Adventure Card Game / Homebrew and House Rules / More than 6 players?? All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.
Recent threads in Homebrew and House Rules