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.

The idea of Targi is pretty simple really. A desert tableau of cards is placed on the table, and players take turns to place their meeples on the border cards. Doing this blocks players on the same row or column, and then the resources each player gathers for the cards they claim can be spent on tribal cards, which give victory points.

It’s maybe not the most exciting theme to spring to mind for many people, and it doesn’t even have a board. So it must be doing something right to be sat just outside the top 100 on BGG. Maybe it’s the components?

What’s In The Box?

Hmm, well, the components are nothing to write home about. Inside this small box – which is that standard small box size now, like 7 Wonders: Duel – are:

• Two sets of player pieces – three Targi markers and two tribal markers each
• One grey ‘robber’ meeple
• A load of resource tiles – dates, salt, pepper, gold coins and silver cross victory point markers
• 16 ‘Edge cards’, which mark the boundary of the game
• 45 Tribal cards
• 19 Goods cards
• A rule book
• A nice little first player silver tile.

That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with the box contents. In fact, I really like the fact it’s so simple. In the days where setting up something like Anachrony feels like a task in itself, being able to tip a little box onto a table and be up and running in five minutes is a really nice feeling.

The cards are standard issue, the little wooden player pieces like nice with the white and pale blue contrast, and the card tiles for resources are sturdy enough. It’s not going to blow your mind, but you wouldn’t expect it to for a game that costs less than £20. So why should you, or anyone else, bother with this game over countless other small box offerings?

How Does It Play?

Now we’re getting into the good bit, the meat in this sandwich. Because desert… sand… never mind.

Setup and Gameplay

The edge cards are all numbered, and form the outer border of a 5×5 grid on the table. They always go down in the same order. Then five goods and four tribal cards follow the pattern in the rule book and fill in the space in the middle, to make our 25 card desert. The grey robber meeple goes on card number one, and each round moves onto the next card, blocking it from use.

Players take turns to place their three tribe meeples on the outer border cards, alternately. They can put them anywhere they like, as long as they meet the basic rules:

• You may not place on a corner ‘raid’ card
• You may not place on a card where any other meeple is, including the robber
• You may not place your meeple directly opposite one your opponent’s

That last one, about not playing opposite, that’s where the tactics stem from, Once all the meeples are placed, the players place their tribal markers (little round wooden discs) on the cards that mark the intersections of their meeples, like in the picture below.

Now the first player (the first player marker switches between the players at the start of each round) retrieves their pieces, taking whatever goods or actions are on the cards. For the edge cards, that can be as simple as taking a pepper or salt, or maybe using the trader to sell three identical goods for a gold coin. There are lots of options, I won’t go into all of them here. For the cards in the middle, it depends what kind of cards they’re retrieving.

Building Your Tribes

Goods cards from the middle just give you the resources shown, and then go onto the discard pile. Tribal cards, however, are different. Each has a cost on the top, a number of goods and/or coins. If you can pay those goods, you can place it in front of you. In the lower corner, the victory points are shown.

Your tribal cards can be laid out in a grid of three rows of four cards, always adding from the left. Any effects on those cards are instantly added to the game, so for example you might have one that says any time you add another Oasis card to your display, you pay one less resource. If, at the end of the game, your rows of cards have four matching types (there are Oasis, Well, Targi, Camel Rider and Tent) in, you get an additional four VPs. If all four in a row are all different, you get an extra two VPs instead,

If you can’t pay for the card immediately, you can keep one card in hand. To play it later, you need to have the resources and place a meeple on the Noble edge card. Unless, of course, you’re holding it just because you don’t want the other person to have it. But you wouldn’t be that sneaky, would you?

This is where the competition comes in, and makes the game come alive.

Competition Time!

Everything in the game is public knowledge, so both players can see both players’ tribal tableau and resources. Placing your meeples and blocking rows, columns and intercepts is a fine balancing act between claiming the things you want and stopping the other player from getting what they want. When you consider this is essentially a Eurogame, the level of interaction – if not direct – is really high.

You constantly need to be aware of what tribal cards are up for grabs, what resources the other person has, what powers their cards might grant them to change the cost or effects, what kind of tribal cards they might be after for their tableau. And all the while you’re trying to do the same for yourself. Just to top things off, when the robber gets to a corner card, there’s a raid, and both players have to give up increasing amounts of goods or victory points to the thieving grey git.

The end of the game is triggered by either the robber completing his lap of the edge cards, or one player adding the twelfth card to their display. Players count up the VP tiles they have, the VPs from their tribal cards, any bonuses for rows, and finally any bonuses your tribal cards might give you (e.g. ‘you get one VP for every two well cards in your display). The player with the most, wins.

Final Thoughts

Targi packs a lot of game in a small box. It’s one of those gems that’s really easy to learn, and as soon as those first couple of turns are over, the rules disappear into the background, leaving the players to play the game. That might not make much sense to you, but compare it to a really heavy Eurogame like Paladins of the West Kingdom, or Bonfire, and see how many times you need to plan your moves ahead with the help of the rulebook. With Targi, the (small) rulebook can stay in the box for the entire game.

The gameplay is gloriously simple, but offers so many tactical choices with every single placement. The internal conflict in the late game, trying to decide whether to get something you need or to stop your opponent getting something they really need, leads to some really interesting decisions.

This is a game where you’ll spend a lot of time going ‘Ooooh you $@*&, I wanted that!“, or helpfully suggesting they might need that thing on that card, because you’ve secretly got your eye on something you don’t want them to block.

It’s not a game dripping with theme, after all it’s some cards on a table which are meant to represent a barren desert, so it’s probably not going to appeal to people who like a load of minis marching around slaughtering one another. But once you abstract the game from the theme, it’s a fiercely competitive, closely-fought battle of strategy, misdirection and optimal play.

I’m a massive fan of Targi, and I only wish I’d bought it sooner than this year. One thing’s for certain though, I’ll always have a copy in my collection, and I’ve already got the expansion on my wishlist. If you’ve got a regular ‘player two’ it’s a must-have in my opinion. Andy Steiger, the designer of the game, has also released a solo variant which makes a good alternative if you find yourself on your own and wanting to play. You can download it here.

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