Table for two: Our favorite two-player board games

Several weeks ago, Ars Cardboard asked a seemingly odd question: “Can you play board games if you don’t have a group?” The answer, surprisingly, is yes.

But what if you have a gaming partner and not a gaming group? Or maybe a non-gaming friend has been sniffing around your board game shelf and wants to dip their toes in the water without committing to a full-fledged game night. Again, you've come to the right place—today we're going to look at a few of our favorite two-player games. The majority of board and card games support two players, many of them quite well, but certain games work best when your table is set for two.

This is not, of course, an exhaustive list of the best two-player tabletop games on the market. We stayed away from miniatures games and wargames, for instance, as those are a tale for another day. Although they're certainly worth your attention, you won't find games like the perennially chart-topping Twilight Struggle or the new hotness Star Wars: Rebellion on this list (though you can read our review of the latter here.) If you're interested in two-player miniatures games and you don't want to go all-in on a full tabletop wargame, we'd recommend checking out Fantasy Flight's Star Wars games.

Instead, we decided to stick mostly to new-player-friendly card and board games that can be played in an hour or less. Most of our list consists of two-player-only games, although a few two-player-plus games snuck in for good measure. If your favorite game didn't make the cut (and with the endless supply of good two-player games, it may not have), share your picks with us in the comments.

Hive (2001)

Credit: Chris Hutchcroft

Here's the elevator pitch for Hive: "Like chess but with bugs—and no board." Depending on your entomological proclivities, that may sound amazing or like an idea worthy of being squashed. But if you're in the former camp, give Hive a chance; it's a winning two-player-only game that's compact enough to be played at a cafe and short enough to break out when you have just a few minutes of downtime.

In Hive, each side, white and black, must protect its queen bee while simultaneously moving to encircle the opposing queen. The "board" is simply any flat surface; pieces are placed in alternating turns, with each hex-shaped slab of chunky bakelite growing the "hive" in organic fashion. Different pieces show different insects, and each kind of bug moves differently—worker ants can move at will around the edges of the hive, while beetles can clamber up and over other pieces—so the hive morphs constantly. Play itself has only a few simple rules about unit placement and movement, which are easily mastered even by many children (my nine-year-old can play well).

But Hive isn't simple. Moving your queen out of harm's way before it's pinned inside a ring can force an opponent to rethink an attack strategy. Grasshoppers can come leaping huge distances across the board. The "one hive" rule—which forbids any break, even a temporary one, in the unity of the growing hive—can be used to pin down enemy pieces. Games are quick enough that defeat doesn't sting; instead, you'll find yourself pleading for just one more match. Highly recommended to anyone who likes abstract gaming.

—Nate Anderson

Jaipur (2009)

The best gaming partner you have access to might just be your real-life partner. And unless your significant other is as much of an uber-gamer as you are, you'll need to pull out something less intimidating than Terra Mystica when you want to get a game in. Atop the pantheon of two-player games sits the storied "couples game," and Jaipur, a game about trading goods in India, is perhaps the perfect realization of the form. It’s a snap to teach, it plays in about 30 minutes, and it's interactive in the best of ways.

At the beginning of the game, both players are dealt a hand of cards representing various goods—spice, silk, leather, etc.—and camels, which aren't goods but can be used in trades. A central market of five more goods cards is dealt to the middle of the table. On your turn, you're presented with a deceptively simple choice: get new goods or sell the goods you already have. To get goods, you can either trade cards with the market or take a card from the market without giving anything up. If you decide to sell, you'll discard all the goods of a certain type and be rewarded with tokens representing money. The value on the money tokens goes down as more and more goods are sold, so you want to sell quickly to get the best price. But conflicting with this "SELL NOW" mentality are the stacks of bonus tokens. The more goods you sell at once, the better bonus you'll get. Do you sell your two silk now to get the best price, or do you hold out and hope to collect more so you can get that nice, juicy five-card bonus token?

Jaipur is a great game of tug-of-war that provides a surprising amount of tense decisions within a small decision space. It's the only game my wife has ever set up by herself and asked me to play. I don't think I've ever beaten her.

—Aaron Zimmerman

Patchwork (2014)

Credit: Mikko Saari

A light, two-player game about quilting from the designer best known for the heavy serf farming epic Agricola, the heavy Frisian farming epic Fields of Arle, and the heavy dwarf farming epic Caverna? Yup—and it couldn't be better.

Patchwork is a two-player game about picking up fabric pieces and assembling them, Tetris-like, onto your personal square game board while simultaneously trying to maximize the number of "buttons" (essentially, money) that these pieces deposit in your personal treasury. The game uses a wonderful circular movement mechanic to ensure that on each turn, players have a choice of just three fabric pieces—but that these three change constantly.

The rules can be explained in a couple of minutes, the gameplay is quick (20 minutes) and non-confrontational, and play is smooth and engaging. Quilt away!

—Nate Anderson

Lost Cities (1999)

Credit: Hubert Figuière

The best two-player games are titles that could only exist as two-player experiences. Lost Cities is one of those games.

The game is nominally about explorers setting off on expeditions to discover mythological cities lost to time. What it's really about, though, is two players trying to score points through careful hand management, a judicious amount of luck-pressing, and knowing when to cut your losses.

Players set off on expeditions by playing cards—which come in five different colors and are numbered 2-10—in ascending order on their side of a central board. When you play a card to start an expedition, you're putting yourself on the clock—committing to a color puts you at a 20-point deficit until you can claw your way back to the positives. Cards score their face value, so you'll need to play three or four cards before you break even. "Handshake" cards can be played before you commit to a suit and act as multipliers for your score in that color, both positive and negative. Instead of playing a card, you can discard a card you don't want, but be careful—your opponent can grab your discards on their turn.

There's a bit of luck involved, but that's part of the game's draw. The only real downside is that its scoring can be a bit opaque and mathy, which is at odds with the game's simple, elegant ruleset. Still, there's a ton going on in this little game, and I highly recommend it. You can also check out the excellent iPhone version for $3.99.

—Aaron Zimmerman

 Android: Netrunner (2012)

If you’re playing a collectible card game in 2016 and you’re not playing Magic, you’re probably playing Android: Netrunner. Fantasy Flight Games’ 2012 reboot of Richard Garfield’s 1996 cyberpunk original has become massively popular over the past four years, and for good reason. While many CCG-style games are content to crib Magic’s dueling wizards setup, Android: Netrunner presents players with a unique, asymmetric bluffing game.

One side plays the part of a global mega-corporation whose objective is to advance their face-down “agenda” cards by putting tokens on them. The other player is the “runner,” a hacker who needs to break into the corporation’s servers to steal the agendas. Runners have to hack through the corporation’s firewalls—face-down cards with nasty effects on them—by using a suite of programs (cards, of course) in their rig. The corp can hide traps instead of agendas on their servers, meaning that even if a runner breaks through the corp's defenses, they could be in for a nasty surprise. The result is an intoxicating mind game that’s unlike anything else in the CCG world.

Like Fantasy Flight’s other expandable card games, Android: Netrunner is a “living card game,” meaning that you buy fixed packs of cards instead of random boosters. That model makes the game less expensive than Standard-legal Magic, but it’s still not cheap. There are a lot of cards out by now, so getting a full playset (or even a tournament-competitive deck) can be fairly intimidating and expensive. Thankfully, you can have fun right out of the core set box before deciding if you want to dive deeper down the rabbit hole. Netrunner will be a bit much for tabletop neophytes, so make sure to bring someone not scared off by bespoke cyberpunk jargon and arcane timing rules. But if you and a friend love CCGs and haven't tried this game, stop what you're doing right now, head to your local game shop, and tell them Haas-Bioroid sent you.

—Aaron Zimmerman

Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small (2012)

You'll forgive us for putting two of Uwe Rosenberg's games on the same list, but there are still others we could have included. The man makes a mean two-player game.

His 17-century subsistence farming sim Agricola is an undisputed modern classic, but it’s also a stressful, strategically heavy knife fight. Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small, the two-player version of the game, is a comparatively breezy experience. The smaller game strips out its predecessor's vegetable farming, complex occupation comboing, and sweat-inducing feeding requirements and leaves you with one goal: build a farm full of cute little animals. (The game's animeeples are worth the price of admission alone.)

That's not to say there aren't any tough decisions to make. You'll have to split your limited resources between constructing the fences and buildings that make up your farm and acquiring the animals that actually score you points. The worker placement gameplay is similar to that found in the original, and you'll never be able to accomplish everything you want (the hallmark of any good Euro). The game lasts only eight rounds, so every action counts.

You can, of course, play Agricola proper quite happily with two players, and it is a much deeper game. But All Creatures Big and Small is so much simpler to teach and so much quicker to play that you may find yourself grabbing for the smaller box when you only have one other opponent (especially if that opponent is a newer gamer). It does feel a bit like "Agricola Lite," but that's not necessarily a bad thing. And when you've exhausted the strategies of the base game's static setup, you can pick up an expansion or two.

—Aaron Zimmerman

Dominion (2008)

Credit: wgunther

If you’ve played modern board games, chances are good that you’ve played Dominion. Released in 2008, the hugely popular card game set off a “deckbuilding” game craze that rages to this day. The idea is simple. Each player starts with an identical, crappy deck filled with measly coppers and 1-victory-point cards, and you'll use those cards to buy better cards—higher value money cards, action cards, cards that give you more actions and purchases per round—until your deck purrs like a well-oiled money- and point-generating machine.

It’s kind of like building a Magic: The Gathering deck as you’re playing the actual game. Each game, you’re presented with a shared market of ten different decks of "Kingdom" cards, along with money cards and victory point cards. Coming up with a strategy of how best to combo cards from those decks is always a blast, and because you'll put out a different random spread of decks each game, Dominion is ludicrously replayable (when you get bored of the 25 decks included in the base game, there are boxes and boxes and boxes of expansions).

Dominion plays well at all player counts, but the two-player game might just be the best way to play. Downtime isn’t a huge issue in three- or four-player games, but the game positively zips by when you’re only waiting on one other opponent. At two players, the game becomes a flurry of card shuffling, playing, and grabbing, and you'll tear through games in no time. I don't think I've ever played just one round of Dominion in a session; someone is usually setting up the next game before even asking if other players want to go again. The answer is always an understood "yes."

—Aaron Zimmerman

The Castles of Burgundy (2011)

Out of all of designer Stefan Feld's games (and there are many), my favorite is the near-perfect Castles of Burgundy (or as it's more cutely known in German, Die Burgen von Burgund). If a game with such bland artwork, thin components, and dry-as-dust theme is so universally loved, you know it's something special. And although it plays well at all its player counts, it's widely agreed that the two-player game is where it really sings. By lowering downtime and allowing players to pay close attention to what their opponents are doing, the two-player game feels just right.

In Burgundy, you'll be partaking in the grand tradition of Eurogames by building up a nondescript estate in medieval Europe. At the beginning of each turn, you'll roll two six-sided dice; the numbers you get will tell you which section of the shared central board you can grab a building tile from. They'll also determine where you can place tiles on your personal player board. Stefan Feld has written the book on how to do dice in a strategy game. There's always something you can do with your dice, and there are plenty of ways to mitigate the luck of the roll.

With each die, you can either take a tile or play a tile. But because of the crazy combos baked into the tiles, these two small actions can lead to an explosion of further actions—"I play my City Hall, which lets me play my Castle for free, which gives me a bonus action, which I'll use to play my Boarding House, which gets me four workers..." Setting up and executing the perfect combo while your opponent looks on in wonder is immensely satisfying.

Burgundy is great as an entry-level mid-weight Eurogame; if you and a friend are looking for the next step after Catan, give this ugly duckling a chance.

—Aaron Zimmerman

Targi (2012)

Targi is Tuareg for "terrific." (Not really.) This pleasing two-player worker placement trading and acquisition game builds its rectangular board out of cards; the outer edge is made up of the same cards on every game, while the inner cards change routinely. In each round, players alternate placing three wooden markers on edge cards, each of which grants resources (dates, salt, etc.) or abilities, and other players are shut out of those particular cards on that round. So far, so... usual.

But Targi's twist is that each player also takes the actions of the cards located at the grid positions where these wooden markers intersect. So on each turn, you're angling not just for the actual cards you claim but for those middle cards where the x- and y-coordinates of your placements meet. While the outer cards remain put, the inner cards are taken and can be added to one's tableau, where they grant victory points at the end of the game. (Arranging these cards in various sets can earn bonus points.)

If it all sounds a bit dry thematically, that's because it is—unless you really have a thing for dates, salt, and guys on camels. But this is a wonderful piece of strategy gaming, too; Board Game Geek currently ranks it in the top 100 strategy games of all time. Also in its favor is that the game doesn't go on forever; it has a defined number of turns as you advance a "robber" token around the edge of the board, and the game should be complete in about an hour.

It can be hard to find good, quick two-player games that aren't "light," but Targi does an admirable job of providing a slightly heftier, more strategic experience for a pair of players.