Board games for two players [closed]

Question

My wife and I enjoy playing board games (having gotten hooked on Settlers of Catan and expanded from there) but we don't often have the opportunity to play with other people. The question What cooperative board games are there that I could safely play with my wife? is similar but we're less concerned about avoiding conflict and more interested in gameplay. (The question Good board games for single player is also similar.) What board games are good for two players?

Edit: Having done a poor job in limiting the scope of my question, since there are clearly too many board games to list them all, let me try to clarify. I'm looking for games with similar scope, time requirements, cost, and complexity to Settlers of Catan that play well with two adult players. I'm not especially concerned by the level of cooperation or competition required, but I'd like to avoid anything especially blood-thirsty.

Answer 1

I'm a big fan of Carcassonne -- the game is better with more people, but you can certainly play it with two people, and since it's a tile-laying game, the board will always be different.

In my opinion, the game bogs down with expansions, but the core set (with or without the River Expansion), is a lot of fun.

Answer 2

I would suggest Agricola. A deep, strategic game, which excels as a two player contest. There is plenty of interaction in blocking your opponents moves, plus the card sets ensure no two games are exactly the same. Should make for some good cut and thrust gaming fun!

Answer 3

Besides a few mentioned above I like Dominion as a two player game as well as Ascension (so far).

Answer 4

I and my gf loves Race For The Galaxy. This game is still very interesting when playing 2, 3 or 4 persons.

Answer 5

My wife and I really enjoy Lost Cities.

It's a pretty simple card game, but there is a fair amount of depth to it, and only takes around 30 minutes to finish 3 rounds.

Answer 6

San Juan is a really fun game that works well with two players (although it plays up to 4). Puerto Rico is a very popular and highly acclaimed board game; San Juan is its card-driven little brother.

In short, you are responsible for developing the city of San Juan by growing crops and building buildings. There are many viable strategies, so the game changes from one play to the next, and it's a lot of fun to discover just what those viable strategies are.

There is not a whole lot of direct interaction with your opponent in the game, although the decisions you make are certainly heavily influenced by what your opponent is doing.

Answer 7

I'm a big fan of the Kosmos 2-player series; not all of the games are great, but most of them are solid, and they're all geared specifically for two players, they come in small and easily portable boxes, and they're generally reasonably light while having just enough strategic depth to keep them interesting.

My favorite is Kahuna, as I find the gameplay a bit more strategically interesting than most, and my girlfriend likes Odin's Ravens best. I've heard good things about Lost Cities, but never had a chance to play it. There are many good games in the series; you can try sorting them by rank on BoardGameGeek, and look through the first few pages to find the best ones.

Answer 8

My 'group' is almost always 2 players, here are some of our favorites:

As mentioned on the co-op question, my wife and I really enjoy Pandemic. It's quick to setup, quick to play, and co-operative.

The Munchkin games are also a lot of fun for two players. They're also really quick to set up, it's not too competitive and the tone of the game makes it a lot of fun.

A recent favorite has been Thunderstone, it's a deck building game similar to Dominion (as mentioned in other answers)

Through the Ages is a great resource management game, especially if you like the Civilization video games.

Finally if you're looking for something a bit more 'hard-core' I'd recommend Arkham Horror. It's tough, and it's brutal but we have a lot of fun with it two-player.

Answer 9

Hive is a great abstract game for two players.

The goal of the game is to completely surround your opponent's Queen Bee. There are several different types of pieces; each is a bug of some sort, and each has unique rules governing how it moves around the board. This game is very quick to teach, it's fast to play, and there is a world of depth to the game.

It's a good game for a couple to learn together, as they'll get to discover the best strategies and tactics as they play - each game evolves a bit based on what the players learned in the last game.

Answer 10

Small World

This is a game for 2-5 players and is very enjoyable at each size. Two player games go very quickly and I've been known to play several games of this in an evening. The gameplay rarely gets stale, too, because of the nature of the game.

Pandemic

This is a cooperative game for 2-4 players where each player assumes a role that grants them abilities throughout the game. Each game has the roles randomized, giving each player a chance at a different play style. A two player game is especially challenging, but still a very good time.

Answer 11

Two variants of games that are originally better suited to 3+ people:

• Ticket to Ride: Switzerland brings a board that is far tighter than the original (or the European variant).
• Carcassonne: The Castle is explicitly a two-player game in which the building the courtyard of the castle is constricted by the walls.

Answer 12

No one mentioned the great Project GIPF series yet.
It's a series of six abstract games for two players. I played three of them, we own two of them (DVONN and TZAAR) and they are our favorite two-player games. We play them a lot.

Answer 13

I happen to love Memoir '44 and the Battlelore system by Days of Wonder. Now Fantasy Flight owns the rights to Battlelore and has also released a Westeros version based off George RR Martins A Song of Ice and Fire series. It's pretty quick and easy to set up and the system itself is very versatile. With many different games/scenarios/expansions using roughly the same rules you can pick and choose the setting and the exact game in the set that's right for you. The basic premise involves two players coordinating small units in a single battle on a hex grid based map.

I'm also a fan of classic card games including cribbage, which is played with a board, but probably not what you were going for.

Answer 14

Ta Yü is one of my favorite 2 player games. It is a tile placing game.

The first player plays a tile in the middle of a large square gridded board. The tiles are 2x1 blocks that have a river section on them with 3-4 outlets on each tile. Each player in turn plays tiles which have to match the river flow. The object is to direct river outlets to opposite sides of the board. One player controls the top and bottom of the board, the other controls the left and right.

The score at the end is the product of the number of river outflows on each side. This forces each player to work in two directions for themselves while frustrating their opponent on two directions as well.

Nearly anyone can pick up the basics of the game quickly and it rewards repeated play.

There is also a really good three player version, but it requires that all 3 people have some experience with the game first as the players need to bid at the start of the game.

Answer 15

I'd suggest Ticket to Ride. (BoardGameGeek link) The rules are simple, and the game can move fairly quickly with two experienced players. Since your trying to get to different destinations each time you play, it also provides diversity when playing with two people.

Answer 16

OGRE can be a good two player game. One player gets an army, the other gets a giant cyborg-tank. It's a pretty even match-up. There are some strategies that are pretty quick to learn, but you can use a variety of scenarios too.

Answer 17

I'm going to recommend Puerto Rico. My wife and I play the 2-player variant (official variant from the designer) all the time and find it quite satisfactory. Since it's the top rated game on BGG, I think it will probably appeal to both of you.

We also have been enjoying Dungeon Lords lately. It is quite a bit more complex than PR, though.

We love Roll Through the Ages, though admittedly, we have both only ever played the version on the iPhone. The full-on Through the Ages is a great game, but it's a long one. You'll spend your whole afternoon on anything but the introductory version of the game.

As far as games designed expressly for two players, I recently traded in a couple of games that were fairly highly rated, Dracula and Mr. Jack, because neither of us particularly liked them.

The game I put the proceeds towards is Claustrophobia. It's a 2-player asymmetrical game built on direct conflict and interaction between the players. Tons of fun though, we both like it more than the two we sold put together!

Answer 18

(I posted this on another question about 2-player boardgames which was closed as a duplicate. I appreciate that someone has already suggested Lost Cities to this question, but my answer does go into some extra detail, so I hope you won't begrudge me reposting it here!)

Lost Cities

I bought this game for my wife for Valentine's Day and totally got away with it - she loves it!

It's not to be confused with the Lost Cities boardgame - I'm talking about the 2 player card game. Essentially players are archaeologists setting out to discover the Lost Cities of the title. There are 5 different Lost Cities (each of a different colour), and the deck contains cards from 2-10 in each colour, and three multiplier cards. You can play a card to an "expedition" or discard one to a central pile, and then pick one up from the deck or from a central pile; the problem is, once you play a numeric card to an expedition you can no longer play a multiplier, and you can never play a lower number onto a higher one. At the end you total the value of each expedition, subtract 20, and times by the number of multiplier cards plus one (plus there's a bonus for an impressive 8-cards+ expedition).

Obviously you can lose mad points as well as gain them from starting an expedition you can't follow through with! There's a lot of strategy for a simple game, deciding when you can afford to play, when you can afford to discard, and when you just have to cling onto cards for dear life in your hand! A game takes only 5 minutes, and a match is meant to be best of three games. It's got a colourful theme, attractive (oversized) cards, and quite a lot of depth for a game that's so simple to get started with: it's a real couples game in my opinion.

The only thing I don't like about the game is that there's allegedly a 4 player variant - but to play it you're encouraged to buy a second copy of the base game just so you can add it about 20 duplicate cards to your deck. Yeah, right. This fact is not a problem if you just want a game to play as a couple though, thank goodness!

Answer 19

I can't recommend Stefan Feld's Roma (and its sequel, Roma II) enough. I can't think of many two-player games that I've played more than 100 times, but I'm sure I've topped that with Roma. First, its basic design is ingenious. The use of dice to activate cards is quite novel, and the fixed victory-point pool is such a good idea that I can't believe other games don't use it. Second, it's tense from the very beginning: both players start the game losing, and sometimes you win just by keeping your opponent from repairing his position faster than you repair yours. It has fantastically sharp gameplay. A phrase I've used to describe it is "like a knife fight in a phone booth." You don't have very much room to move, and you really don't want to make a mistake.

I also love Attika, a game whose reputation suffered badly by its being sold as a 2-4 player game. It's fatally flawed with 4, and not very good with 3. With 2, it's a deep and fascinating game of positioning, resource management, and timing, with two completely different ways to win. (If you have 4 players, divide the tiles and the cards into two sets and play two two-player games.)

And then there's Innovation, which I think is 2010's best game. It's pretty easy to learn its mechanics, but you'll play it a dozen times before you start getting good at it. It's going to top 100 plays for me before long. It's a game that you keep learning more about the more you play it. I'm beginning to believe that every single card in the deck can be crucial in the right game - I still haven't ever thought, "Oh, thank God, I drew Clothing," but I'm pretty sure that some day I will.

Answer 20

I've played a ton of games, and Battle Line is among the best two player games out there.

Battle Line

This is a game made by the great Reiner Knizia, so already you know it's good. The way it works is there are 9 columns. On your turn you play a card onto your side of any column. Once your formation on a column can't possibly be beat by the opponent, you take that column. If you get 5 columns total, or three adjacent columns, you win.

Answer 21

There's an entire list of lists of games to play with your loved one on Board Game Geek. My wife enjoys the Settlers of Catan card game, but some people hate it. I recommend the Kosmos two-player games, particularly Odin's Ravens and Balloon Cup.

Answer 22

Knizia's Lords series (Minotaur Lords & Scarab Lords) is a lot of fun for a 2 player head-to-head card game.

It incorporates elements from area domination, as well as deck customisation (as you would in a trading-card-game). Easy to learn, hard to master!

Answer 23

The Awful Green Things from Outer Space is a great two player game, that is always a little different thanks to the unpredictability of what each weapon will do each game.

Answer 24

Tikal is a great board game for 2 to 4 players, and it plays very well with two.

Answer 25

My wife's favorite game is Balloon Cup. 2-player only, plays quickly, nice components.

Answer 26

In terms of avoiding conflict, ire_and_curses recommends Pandemic, "where each player works together to try and halt the spread of a number of deadly diseases".

Answer 27

Not really comparable to Settlers of Catan, but Blokus Duo is pretty good 2-player game. Price tag of $10 it's worth a look, I've played it dozens of times with my Brother already and it's pretty fun, simple, but challenging.

Answer 28

I recently had fun playing The Merchant of Venus 2 player, after not having played it for a few years.