Start with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe - then read the catch about the word "split-screen"
If you want one game that four people can play on a single Switch tonight, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the answer and has been for years. It is the pick for a household, for a group of friends who have never played together, and for anyone who does not want to spend twenty minutes explaining controls. Four players, one console, genuine split-screen, and everybody already understands it.
But there is a catch worth knowing before you spend money, and it is the reason this page exists separately from our PS5 and Xbox lists. The Switch is the best local-multiplayer console ever made and one of the weaker split-screen ones. Those are not contradictory statements, and once you see the difference you will stop being disappointed by store pages.
Split-screen, shared-screen, and party formats - three different things
Nintendo builds an enormous amount of local multiplayer, but most of it is not the divided viewport people picture when they type "split-screen". Three formats share the phrase in search results.
True split-screen divides the display into separate viewports, each following its own player with its own camera. On Switch this is mostly the racers: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe does it for up to four and Sonic Racing CrossWorlds does it for up to four locally. This is the format that costs a console real performance, because the machine has to render the scene more than once.
Shared-screen local co-op keeps one camera on one screen and asks everyone to stay in frame. This is the bulk of the Switch library, and it is what Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Overcooked! All You Can Eat, Rayman Legends and the LEGO games all do. It is not a lesser format - for a sofa full of people it is the better one, because everybody is looking at the same thing and laughing at the same moment. It is simply not split-screen.
Arena and turn-based party formats are the third group. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate puts up to eight players in one shared arena. Mario Party hands the screen round in turns. Nobody has their own viewport, and that is deliberate.
All three mean "we can play this together on one Switch", which is what you actually want. The local player count is flagged on every pick below, so you can tell which format you are buying before you pay for it.
The hardware question nobody warns you about
A Switch ships with two Joy-Cons, and two Joy-Cons is two players - sometimes. A single Joy-Con held sideways is a complete controller in Mario Kart, Mario Party and Switch Sports, so one console out of the box genuinely covers two people in those games. It does not cover two people in anything needing a full button layout - Smash, the LEGO games and most platformers want a proper pad per player. For three or four players you are buying controllers regardless, and our second controller guide covers which pads work on Switch and what the cheap third-party ones give up.
Docked, not handheld, for anything split-screen. Four-way split-screen on a 7-inch handheld screen is technically supported and practically unpleasant. If the plan is four players, the plan is the TV.
