There are loads of classic games like Chess, Go, Nine Men’s Morris, Cribbage and Mancala which are still played today, but in this guide I’m going to focus on games from the last 25 years made exclusively for two. These are games which I think should be in your collection not just because they’re great games, but also because you can readily buy them.

Please also note that the ranking is personal to me, not an indication of what’s ‘best’, and that on any given day the order might change, depending on my mood. The important thing is that they’re all great.

5. Lost Cities (1999)

Kosmos Games

This is the oldest game on my list, and it’s a game I still play today. Lost Cities is a Reiner Knizia (Tigris & Euphrates, My City, Ra) classic, where each player can decide whether or not they want to embark on an ‘expedition’ and start laying down cards of a colour on their side of the board. The cards in each of the five suits run from 2 to 10, and each card you play must be higher than the last one played in that colour. The catch is that whenever you start a colour, you start on -20 points, and have to work back up to zero before you start scoring points.

In true Knizia fashion, there are just too many options, and with five colours between two players, someone’s going to get tempted to start a third. It’s a really personal little duel, and I take no end of delight in watching someone start a run of a colour, knowing full-well that I have the 9 and 10 of that suit in my hand. Add to that the multiplier cards which (if you choose to use them) have to be played before you start a run, which will multiply your points – or negative points! – and it’s a brilliant example of pushing your luck.

Lost Cities is an classic, and I’ve had a copy in my collection for longer than I can remember. You can pick it up for less than £20, and it’s great.

4. Jaipur (2009)

Space Cowboys

Jaipur, by designer Sebastian Pauchon (Jamaica, Yspahan) is a card game about trading fabrics, spices and precious gems, hoping to become the Maharajah’s personal trader. You’re both buying cards from the central market, then selling them to earn tokens, which in turn add to your final tally in deciding the winner.

I bought Jaipur in 2010 originally, and played it to death, then bought another copy. It’s safe to say it’s a good game. “F*$king camels” is a phrase you might come to know after a few games, as camel cards are worth nothing, but can be used to trade for goods. If there’s nothing you want from the market, you can pick up all the camels, but there’s something frustrating about having a handful of camels.

Jaipur is really easy to learn, and it gets increasingly tactical as you play it more and more with the same person. You start second-guessing what the other person’s strategy is, and trying to decide what you want to do. Diamonds and Gold are worth a lot, but there’s less of them than leather. Quality, or quantity? The more you play Jaipur, the better it gets.

It’s only around the £15-20 mark, so really it’s a case of whether you have a good reason not to buy it.

3. Targi (2012)

Kosmos Games

Andreas Steiger might not be a designer whose name you recognise, and that’s because other than Targi, he’s got no other games credited to his name. But in Targi, he made a game that most other designers would have been delighted to create. It’s a game about trading dates and spices, and expanding Tuareg tribes in the desert.

I’m a massive fan of Targi, and I recommend it to just about anyone who talks to me about getting something small, but deep. The board, as such, is a grid of cards, and through clever worker placement you simultaneously claim resources as your own, and try to deny your opponent the thing you think they want.

It’s deliciously tactical, and it’s full of difficult decisions on every turn. Deciding whether to go for something you want, or just blocking your opponent, is agonising at times. It’s such a simple game to play, and I always find it amazing how deep a game Andreas managed to cram into a few cards and chits. If you want to get your Euro game fix in a package that’s cheap, and small enough to take to the pub one night, Targi is an essential purchase. At less than £20, you’d be mad not to.

I wrote a full review of Targi last year, which you can read here.

2. Watergate (2019)

Frosted Games / Capstone Games

Watergate is an asymmetric tug-of-war game set during the height of the Watergate scandal in the US. One person plays as the Nixon administration, the other as the press of the Washington Post. Both players have different goals, and use their dual-use cards to swing momentum towards them, gain initiative, or to uncover evidence. The Post try to use the evidence to connect two informants to Nixon, while he tries to remove evidence and swing popular opinion irreversibly .

It’s designed by Matthias Cramer (Rococo, Glen More II Chronicles), and I love the agony of choice you get on every turn. Your deck of cards gets recycled, like in most other games, but instead of playing a card for its value, and moving evidence or momentum in your direction, you can play some as actions. Some of these actions are really powerful, but might see the card removed from the game. Deciding when to take those actions can really feel like make-or-break time.

The back and forth is fantastic, and the balance of trying to move evidence and momentum onto your half of the board, and trying to complete the spatial link puzzle on the other side of the board is so much fun. Even if the idea of politics in a game bores you to tears, I strongly urge you to give Watergate a try. You can pick it up for a shade under £30.

I wrote a full review of Watergate last year which you can read here.

1. 7 Wonders Duel

Repos Production

My Number One spot goes to the spin-off from the original 7 Wonders game – 7 Wonders Duel. Duel took the formula established in the original game, which worked best from four to seven players, and boiled it down to a two-player game. Antoine Bauza (Takenoko, Hanabi) and Bruno Cathala (Five Tribes, Kingdomino) made a brilliantly balanced game with multiple routes to victory.

7 Wonders Duel plays in about half an hour, and the players create a tableau by purchasing cards from the display, boosting the resources available, and building those famous Ancient Wonders of the World. At the same time there’s a track depicting military strength, and tokens to claim marking scientific supremacy. If you do well enough in either of those areas, you can trigger a win before the game even ends. So while you’re building your own tableau, you need to keep an eye on your opponent, lest they sneakily build an all-conquering army. Denying someone a card is often as important as claiming one for yourself.

The way the cards are laid out in each of the three ages, with some ‘locked’ by those on top of them, and some face-down until they’re unlocked, adds a nice level of strategy to the game. No two games are the same, and it’s really easy to teach the core concepts of the game. I’ve played 7 Wonders Duel a lot of times now, and I still enjoy each game as much as I did before. It satisfies that Euro-loving part of me that loves to see a tableau of resources come together, in a similar way to Splendor.

You can grab 7 Wonders Duel for around £20, and if you ever play games with one other person, you really ought to be playing this one.

Summary

There you have it then. My top 5 two-player games. There are so many great games that I had to cut from this list, and I want to give honourable mentions to Patchwork, Battleline / Schotten Totten, Undaunted: Normandy, abstract classic Hive, and the ever-present Twilight Struggle. The games I’ve listed above though are all fantastic, readily-available, and cheap. You could pick up all of them for around £100, even if you shop at your FLGS (which I urge you to do if you can), and you’ve have a solid collection of small, brilliant two-player games that will last you years.

The reason 7 Wonders Duel pipped the others to the number one spot is because of the expansions. Targi has an expansion, but it doesn’t feel drastically different to play. The two expansions for 7 Wonders Duel (Pantheon, and last year’s Agora) are both great and really add loads of freshness and new things to do in the game, if you find it getting stale for you, or if you just want something a little deeper.

Leave any comments down below, or find me on Twitter and tell me how wrong I am, and which games you’d put in the list instead ;).

The post Top 5 – Two Player Games appeared first on Punchboard.

Watergate – Some Background

It’s important to give a little bit of background here, because the theme is so deeply ingrained in the game. Watergate, better known as the Watergate Scandal, was a scandal between 1972 and 1974 in the US. At its heart the Nixon administration paid five people to break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, and then continuously tried to cover up its involvement. Two reporters from The Washington Post (Woodward and Bernstein), among others, uncovered evidence of the involvement, and eventually Nixon was forced to resign, and nearly 50 members of his administration were convicted.

It was an enormous national scandal and the media vs politics ruckus that ensued is still the subject of films and books to this day.

Now you’ve had the (very) short version, let’s have a look at the game.

What’s In The Box?

Watergate comes in a small box, and in that box is a small board, two decks of cards, a bag full of small evidence tokens and some wooden markers. That’s all there is, and that’s all it needs really. It’s a game for two players only, and happily sits on a small table between the players, which is the way it’s designed to be played.

The board is nice and sturdy, with really nice artwork and graphic design. I love the cards, they have a lovely soft finish and are slightly larger than standard playing card size. In Watergate the cards are the game really, so I’m happy so much attention to detail is paid. The photographs of the real people are included on each card, along with clear iconography, and some really nice flavour/history text on each one.

It’s nice to have a black cloth bag included too, for blind drawing of the evidence tokens. The publisher could have taken the cheaper option that many do, and told you to place them all face-down on the table, but they didn’t.

The rule book deserves a special mention. Not only does it have really clear instructions and setup diagrams, with examples of every rule, but it has bios of everyone involved in the game, and a well-researched history of events.

You could easily take this with you anywhere, and I could see it being a great one to take to the pub for a few drinks with a friend.

How Does It Play?

Before I played it, I’d heard Watergate described as ‘Twilight Struggle Lite’. Twilight Struggle, if you don’t know, is one of the best two-player games ever made, which has a tug of war of power through playing cards. It’s also very deep and needs a lot of concentration. So when I heard that comparison, I was a little worried, as I’ve played Twilight Struggle, and it is brilliant, but it’s hard to learn and doesn’t easily win over new players.

Now that I’ve played it, I can happily say that while I can see why it got that comparison, it’s nowhere near as dense, and that’s a good thing.

Setup

The board is placed between the two players, with the player taking the role of the newspaper editor having the board facing them, and the Nixon administration (referred to as Nixon) viewing it upside-down. Each player has a deck of cards unique to their side, and these cards are what drive the game.

The board itself features a cork pin board design for most of it, with a web of strings and pins on it, much like you’d expect to see in a film when they uncover someone’s secret research into a subject. Strings linking people. places and things – that sort of thing. On the right-hand side of the board is a research track, with a zero space in the middle, and five steps on each players’ side. To the side of the board is an Initiative card which always points an arrow to one player or the other. Whoever it points at draws five cards each round, and plays first, and the other draws four cards instead.

The bag of evidence tokens and seven tiles representing potential informants or supporters sit on the table next to the board. Setup takes five minutes at most, which means you can get into playing really quickly, unlike something which needs a lot or preparation like Paladins of the West Kingdom.

Playing The Game

Watergate is an asymmetric game. Nixon has to gain five momentum tokens to win, while the editor has to link any two informants to Nixon on the board, by placing connected evidence tokens on it. On your turn you play a card from your hand, and each card has two parts. The top part of the card lets you move any evidence token of a matching colour towards you by the number of steps written on the card, or you can choose to move either the round’s momentum token, or the initiative token towards you instead.

The bottom of the card has more specific options, and these are usually Events. Each event marks a change in the game and usually that card is then removed from the game, instead of going onto your discard pile. These events can see informants being added to the board, tokens being drawn blind from the bag and placed on the board, or even preventing the other player from playing their own events in that round. The payoff for losing a card permanently can be huge, but has to be balanced with losing whatever power that card had for moving tokens instead, so it’s a really nice balancing act.

Players play their cards one after another, and this is where the beauty of the game comes to the fore. It’s this magnificent tug of war, where the three evidence tokens, the initiative marker, and the momentum token are constantly pulled between each player’s sides of the board. If you manage to get any item to the fifth and final space on your side of the research track, you instantly claim it. The round ends when both players have no cards left, and whichever tokens are on your side of the board, you get to keep.

This all sounds pretty straightforward, and even writing this now it sounds simple even to me, so let me give you an example of the sorts of things running through your mind for every card of every round of the game.

Difficult Decisions

Let’s put ourselves in the role of the editor, and let’s say we’re a couple of rounds into the game. Nixon has grabbed two of the five momentum tokens he needs, and we’ve managed to add one of the blue informants to the board. Our goal, as editor, is to link our informants – on the outside of the web – to Nixon, in the centre. We can see there’s a blue evidence token on the research track this round, which would go a long way towards making that link.

The thing is though, we can see the momentum token is already two steps towards Nixon. If the round ends and it’s still there, he gets it and is another step closer to victory. So should we focus using our actions to drag that little red token back to our side of the board, to scupper him? Or should we concentrate on moving that blue token towards us? Or maybe we should pull the initiative token towards us more. That has the benefit of giving us more cards in the next round, and whoever wins it at the end of a round gets to place their evidence tokens on the web first.

At the same time as we’re running over all these options, Nixon is doing the same thing. That momentum token would be really good for him, but in the same breath, if he were to take that blue evidence token, he could flip it to its black side and place it, blocking links for the editor.

On top of all of that, every card has it’s special actions and events, and the entire time neither of you knows what the other is holding, or the order they’re going to play them in. Tense stuff. So much of this game is about reading your opponent. In your first games you’re paying attention to the mechanics of playing, but you soon find yourself watching the other player’s eyes and trying to read the subconscious exposure of their plans.

“Is she looking at that evidence token? She is! She keeps looking at that space on the top of the evidence board, she wants to block me I bet…“

As soon as either player accomplishes their goal the game ends immediately, and the loser starts setting it up for another game, demanding instant revenge. That’s not in the rule book, it’s just what happens.

Final Thoughts

That’s all there is to Watergate. It’s not a very complicated game, but goodness, it’s a deep one. I love the constant ebb and flow, watching the pieces pulled back and forth on the track like a ageing armchair in a messy divorce. You might not desperately want or need it, but you’ll be damned if the other person’s getting it! Just as you think you’ve worked out a strategy for the current round, it’s almost guaranteed the other player will do something that ruins your perfect plans.

The theme is so thick and heavy in this game, that I’d really recommend immersing yourself in it, just to add to the overall atmosphere. This is a site about games, not films, but I highly recommend watching All The President’s Men (Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford) if you haven’t seen it (or even if you have). If that doesn’t get you itching to play this, nothing will.

I can see the comparison to Twilight Struggle, but it’s not a good one in my opinion. Twilight Struggle’s cards see each player playing events beneficial to their opponent in their own turns, whereas the cards in Watergate really only benefit yourself, so there’s seldom the choice of “What’s the least worst option here?”, which is what Twilight Struggle excels at. There isn’t too much to keep track of in this game. Both of you can see the evidence board, and know the state of play. Both of you know who has the most cards, and both of you can see who’s going to win what at the end of the round. The only secret is what colour the evidence tokens are each round, as Nixon draws them and looks at the colours. The substance of the game comes in choosing what to do with that information.

I wasn’t really aware of Matthias Cramer before Watergate (although now I realise he’s also the designer of the Glen More games), but he’s come up with something really special here. It’s simple enough in its mechanics to teach to almost anyone, very quickly, but it will take a long time to get really good at. What I absolutely love about this game is how after just a couple of plays, those mechanics disappear. That’s something which in my experience only happens with great two-player games, they become a vessel, a method for one person to compete with the other on a level playing field. The game, as such, is each player trying to outsmart the other, and it’s brilliant.

I highly recommend Watergate for anyone that has a regular ‘player two’. Its clever play, quick setup and portability make it an instant modern classic in my opinion.

The post Watergate Review appeared first on Punchboard.