What's a good game for six players? Many games can be played by 6 players, but suffer from a loss of pace, and long waits between turns. What games have parallel planning phases, or lots of interaction during turns?
Only one game per answer please (from now on) for voting purposes.
Hands down, Power Grid is fantastic. Whenever our gaming group has a game night, Power Grid gets played at some point. The nice thing is it comes with two different boards, and if you get tired of those, there are expansions for around $10-$15 that come with two new maps and rules. Once you get the rules down, even with six players, we've found it plays incredibly fast.
If you get the Inns & Cathedrals expansion for Carcassonne, you can play with six players, and Carcassonne is another personal favorite of mine. It's fun to watch people figure out how to sneak their meeples into a city or farmland for the first time.
If you want something lighthearted, sets from the Munckhin series such as The Good, the Bad and the Munchkin are fun for playing, and have plenty of interaction between players.
Players play bean farmers and try to harvest crops to collect coins. This scales up to 7 players and there is a lot of interplayer action on every turn. There is lots of trading between players and the game rewards those who pay attention even when it's not their turn.
While it's more of a card game Citadels offers strong player interaction. Each round, players do a character draft to determine who they'll be in the next round as they try and build up their city. The game actually plays better with more people, and can seat up to 8 people.
7 Wonders: Easy to teach. Plays in 30 to 40 minutes. Has a fun civ-building theme. Simultaneous play. Some interaction with the players to your left and right. Completely fits the bill for what you're looking for.
Catan has an Expansion that allows for two more players to join in on the fun. The rules have been adapted for intermediate building phases in between player turns, which helps prevent long downtimes.
Twilight Imperium (Although a pretty hardcore game) allows for 6 players out of the box (I believe). It also has a pretty cool action sequence system in play that makes all players make small moves one at a time, instead of one long turn. Downtime between turns is also minimal.
For the more lighthearted games : Koehandel (Don't know the english name), The big Dalmuti, Set and Jungle Speed are all 6+player games, which are also quick and fun!
Description from BGG:
Four different Roles are available, each with a unique victory condition:
A player's Role is kept secret, except for the Sheriff. Character cards are placed face-up on table, and also track strength (hand limit) in addition to special ability.
Age of Renaissance and Advanced Civilization are two oldies but goodies that play great with 6 players.
They take some time to finish, but it is worth it.
Age of Renaissance is about trading empires in the Mediterranean during the middle ages.
Advanced Civilization is about world building in the Mediterranean from the dawn of time up until the Roman republic.
Shadows over Camelot is one of my favourite 6 player games. Downtime between turns is minimised, because, as a co-operative game, you can always advise the active player, or plan for your next turn.
If you are a traitor, you can spend other people's turns giving subtly bad advice, too :)
Dominion and its expansions are fantastic with 6 players, although to support 6 you must own both Dominion and Dominion: Intrigue. Once all players have some experience wait times are very short, and with 6 players the competition for the best Kingdom cards is furious.
I think Arkham Horror is the great game for that purpose, especially if you add some expansions to it to make it a bit more harder (core set will be quite easy for so big group of Investigators). You don't wait too long between turns because players take actions in phases and these are resolved pretty quick. And the game is also tons of tun.
Betrayal at the House on the Hill is rather light and is fast-paced even at 6 players. You plays as a character exploring a haunted house, and your available option before the scenario is revealed is to move, turn up a new tile and draw a card. When a scenario starts, and the traitor is revealed, the turn could stretch longer because of combat, but it is still quite fluid.
A Song of Ice and Fire features simultaneous hidden orders. Aside from the analysis paralyze typical of the game and resolution, the hidden order feature makes the game faster than other war-games.
My old favourite, Diplomacy, isn't particularly fast paced (although the 'Gunboat' variant speeds things up considerably), but both the diplomacy and move planning phases take place in parallel. Only the actual moving of pieces is done one after the other.
The diplomacy stage, when you face any or all of your opponents face to face, in secret, or in the open, is of course as interactive as it can get!
Pictionary is always good for a laugh. Or you could also try Balderdash (or Absolute Balderdash).
Dutch Blitz, also known as "Ligretto" and a bunch of other names.
It plays 2-12 players very fast, since all play is simultaneous. I've heard it called "speed solitaire", and that's a pretty apt description.
All the player are trying to clear away their piles into a common area, so you have a lot of high-speed interaction, but of very brief length. Mostly in the nature of "hey, I was gonna do that!".
Rounds take between 2-10 minutes, and there's a downtime of about 1-2 minutes while the scores are tallied. Apart from that, all the players are playing all of the time.
The downside to the game is its speed. There's a lot to keep track of, and many beginners will get confused. It the job of the experienced player to get them to stay calm and focus on the basics, until they get familiar enough to "see everything". That only takes 1-2 rounds.
Battlestar Galactica The board game is fantastic.
Plays 6. Massive tension. Co-op game with hidden cylons. Find the Cylons before they wreck your day.
Downtime is not bad since each player only does 1 move + 1 action + 1 bad thing (flip over the crisis card) during his turn. I find games move fast once people know the rules. Interaction is key. "You're the cylon!!!!"
There are expansions out for it too.
It's a lot like Shadows over Camelot in some regards.
I'm the Boss is another Sid Sackson classic that plays best with 6. Every turn is about getting enough players together to make a deal. Everybody can participate or at least advise on every deal. When the "I'm the Boss" cards start flying it can get pretty hectic.
You didn't specify if you want complex or light games.
If light games are okay, I'd recommend Ave Caesar.
It's a light chariot-racing game. There's nearly no downtime (every player has three movement cards with values between 1 and 6 in his hand and must choose one, move his pawn and that's it), and there's interaction because the race track has narrow places where you can block your opponents.
It's really light, but with 6 players, it's fun (the box says 3 to 6 players, but IMO it's not that good with less players)
An interesting game that I'm pretty sure no one else will mention is a 1998 German game called Die Seidenstrasse. This is a sort of economic race game in which the players are merchants travelling along the Silk Road.
What makes it work so well with six players: On your turn, you can do one of two things: you play a card from your hand to the table in front of you, and apply its effect to you, or you play a card on the table on front of you, and apply its effect on another player. You can't play a card from your hand if you already have three cards on the table, so after the game gets under way, half the time you're compelled to move someone else on your turn. Also, you can't just move anyone; you have to move one of the two players who least recently moved.
This makes for a game that seems very chaotic, unless people have played it before and know the cards, in which case there's a surprising amount of strategy for a game where all you do on your turn is play a card.
We've played Tales Of The Arabian Nights quite successfully with a six player group; because you have lots of things to be looking up at any given time, the two books are passed around the table, with player 1 having their turn while player 3 reads the scenario and player 5 looks up the numbers. Because you're continually switching roles, you don't have to wait longer than a single player's turn with nothing to do.
Some bigger wargames can be played in teams as three-v-three games. World in Flames and A World at War come immediately to mind as monsters that play better with teams than one-on-one.
For a more competitive, individualistic game, I adore Republic of Rome.
I recommend Diplomacy (normally a seven player game). Make Italy a "neutral," and place single armies (that can be supported by other countries) to defend her cities. This corresponds with historical reality (Italy was a neutral country for a year in World War I.)
Italy is the country people enjoy playing LEAST. In this regard, you don't lose anything by eliminating it. And it actually speeds up the game by having one less player.
Diplomacy also has "parallel phases and lots of interaction between turns."
Junta. Better with 7 but still a lot of fun with 6. Games last 3 - 4 hours and like Diplomacy it's a lot of talking and then the turn occurs.