The five that matter
Most of what a 60% board takes away is a key you press between matches. These five are not that.
- Fortnite — F1 to F5 are wall, floor, stairs, roof and trap. Building is the game; on a 60% board it has no keys unless you rebind first.
- Elden Ring — the arrow keys switch your right-hand weapon, left-hand weapon, spell and quick item. All four are mid-fight actions and all four are gone.
- Dota 2 — F1 selects your hero, F2 selects everything, F3 and F4 run the courier, F5 opens the shop. That is most of a laning phase.
- Baldur's Gate 3 — F1 to F4 pick a party member and F5 selects the whole party, with Home centring the camera. A four-character fight becomes a mouse hunt.
- League of Legends — F1 to F4 jump the camera to an ally. Losing them does not stop you playing; it stops you watching the map the way the game expects.
What the rest lose
Minecraft gives up the debug screen on F3 — which is where coordinates live — along with the perspective toggle, the HUD toggle and the screenshot key. Red Dead loses photo mode, Rust loses the console, Overwatch loses the hero information panel and GTA V loses the phone on the up arrow. Those are real losses, and none of them will cost you a round.
Nothing is lost on a TKL, a full-size board or a laptop
That is the whole answer for three of the five sizes: across all 55 games measured, a tenkeyless board, a full-size board and a laptop keyboard have every default key every game asks for. A 65% board keeps the arrows and so keeps Elden Ring playable, but still has no F-row.
Reach is not the same as having the key
A board can have a key and still put it out of the way. The second line on each tile counts the bindings that are present but need the left hand off A and D to press — the number row on Minecraft and Terraria, the ability row in Path of Exile 2. Those are a rebind away from being fine, which is exactly what the per-game reach check on each controls page is for.
How this is measured
Each board is modelled by the keys it physically has. Every default PC binding in this site's library is resolved to those keys and scored by distance from the left hand at rest on WASD; a binding that needs more than one key is scored by its furthest key, because a chord is only as reachable as the hardest part of it. A key the board does not have is not scored at all — it is reported as missing, which is the only honest answer.
