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Many of the most popular tabletop board games are designed for big groups—that’s what game nights are about, after all. But coordinating the schedules of a bunch of adults can be a puzzle more intimidating than the Saturday New York Times Crossword, so it’s nice to have options for a quiet night in with your partner, roommate, or friend. Two-player games have come a long way since checkers, backgammon, and Battleship, and today the best of them are just as complex and enthralling as any group game. We talked with experts, spent more than 25 hours researching, and played 20 different games to find the one-on-one games that most people will enjoy.
Ideal for a pair of players who really want to test each others’ abilities, these games are much more reliant on skill than luck. They have high skill ceilings—meaning they continue to provide challenges for even experienced players. But they also tend to be easy to learn, which helps new players progress quickly, even if they’re outpaced in their first few games by a more skillful opponent.
A quick tile-laying game in which you attempt to surround your opponent’s queen, Hive scratches the chess itch without actually requiring you to play chess.
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*At the time of publishing, the price was $28.
How it’s played: Hive is a game of placing and moving bugs (represented by tiles) in order to surround your opponent’s queen bee. On each turn, players either place a new piece from their collection onto the table or move one they placed in a previous turn. Each piece has a unique way to move around on the table—beetles can climb on top of other pieces, ants can move anywhere they want on the outside of the played tiles (known as the hive), grasshoppers can bound over all pieces in one row—and when they move, they must not leave any other pieces stranded from the group, which the game calls “breaking the hive.” Once a player’s queen is surrounded (whether by their opponents’ pieces, their own pieces, or a combination) that player loses.
Why it’s great: Hive has all the tactical depth of chess but without the cultural expectations that come with it. It’s a deeply strategic game that is simple to learn and play—on any one turn you can take just one of two possible actions—but it’s still deep enough to keep revealing new ways to play, even after you’ve played dozens of games. Many times in testing I’d lose (or, rarely, win) in an entirely new and unexpected way, which made me want a rematch so I could try out what I’d just learned. It also takes no time to set up; there’s no board to assemble or deck of cards to shuffle—just tiles in a bag, so you can jump right into playing.
The tiles are wonderfully tactile and clicky, and in the base version of the game they are comfortably sized and easy to pick up and hold. There’s a Pocket version, which comes with slightly smaller pieces, though it’s still a struggle to fit the game into most human-size pants pockets. (The Pocket version also includes two of the expansion tiles, giving you new bugs with unique move abilities to play with right off the bat.)
Flaws but not dealbreakers: More so than the other games in this guide, Hive is a test of each player’s skill, which can be challenging for a new player facing an experienced one. But it’s still a simple enough game to learn that new players can gain ground quickly.
Summoner Wars is a fun battling card game, with a tricky movement puzzle thrown in for good measure.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $49.
How it’s played: A battling card game that takes place on a 5-by-8 grid, Summoner Wars feels like a mix of Dungeons and Dragons combat and a particularly tricky Zelda temple block puzzle. Players select a fully assembled deck representing one of the factions in the game. (The Master Set we tested comes with six factions, the groups whose individual playable units comprise each deck. But there is also a cheaper Starter Set, which comes with just two, and a number of expansion decks have been announced. You can also try out the two factions from the Starter Set for free in the online version of the game.) The decks all feature powers that are unique to that faction and encourage different play styles. For instance, the Vanguard faction prioritizes healing and boosting its units’ power, while the Fallen Kingdom can power up some of its units by sacrificing others. Players get a small supply of magic that they can use to summon units onto the board; turns consist of these summonings, unit movement, and attacks. The ultimate goal, of course, is to eliminate the other player’s summoner.
Why it’s great: This game feels as tactically deep and interesting as the more elaborate war games we tested, like Undaunted or Memoir ’44, but it requires much less time to set up and learn. The game mechanics are extremely well balanced: The magic you use to summon units onto the field can be regained only by eliminating enemy units (which can be tricky) or by discarding cards from your hand (an extremely limited resource). Each faction deck functions with an internal logic that doesn’t lock you into a specific play style. But it does reward learning the faction’s strengths and weaknesses, since understanding what makes your faction special can make strategic choices a lot simpler. And the remarkably cramped size of the grid makes unit placement and movement feel like an intricate dance, as you try to slide units to where they’ll do the most damage without getting in your own way.
Flaws but not dealbreakers: Despite feeling cramped in terms of card movement, the grid occupies quite a large space on a table. Folks with smaller spaces, or those who like to have room for snacks and drinks on their play surface, may be annoyed at its sprawl. In addition, the Master Set box doesn’t come with any sort of organizer for the decks of cards; this means you’ll need to supply a rubber band for each deck, unless you want to spend time sorting them each time you play.
Duration: 40 to 60 minutes Rules: PDF
A big game in a small package, Star Realms is a wonderful deck builder that plays quickly and invites replays.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $15.
How it’s played: Like the popular Dominion or Marvel’s Legendary, Star Realms is a deck-building game: Players “buy” cards from a shared market to power up their decks, deal damage, and eventually eliminate their opponent. It grafts that basic system onto a wonderfully robust and interconnected world that rewards replays and accumulated game experience. You start out with a very small deck of generic economic and martial ships, but you can quickly build a fleet of bases and ships from four different factions. When you play cards from the same faction together, they gain extra power. And because all of the available ships are bought from a common market, you can keep track of what cards the other player picks up and try to foil their strategy.
Why it’s great: Though the first few turns can feel underwhelming because your starting hand gives you only a few options for play, the game ramps up quickly. About 10 minutes in, you’ll suddenly find yourself buying space stations the size of planets and delivering haymakers, as you and your opponent slug it out with your increasingly powerful decks. This loop, which really ramps up once you get cards with complementary powers into your deck, gives the game a constantly escalating pace. It’s incredibly competitive, too: Every game I played in my testing ended up being a close match. And because each deck is built from one common pool of cards, this game doesn’t require hunting down and buying booster packs to make sure you’ve kept up with the newest, most powerful cards.
Flaws but not dealbreakers: The art can feel a little dated at times, reminiscent of early aughts sci-fi trade paperback covers, but that doesn’t affect gameplay. And even though the game mechanics are generally easy to learn, we found the health system—in which each player uses a pair of score cards to keep track of their “influence”—to be unintuitive and clumsy.
Sometimes you don’t necessarily want to mercilessly grind your opponent into the dirt. These are some options for lighter, more luck-based (but still interesting) games for a laid-back vibe.
The Fox in the Forest uses powered cards and a unique scoring system to shake up a game-night staple.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $12.
How to play: Anyone who has played a trick-taking card game such as Spades or Hearts (or the favorite for my family, Oh Hell) will be familiar with the main mechanic in The Fox in the Forest. Each player gets a hand of 13 cards from the 33-card deck—the rest are set aside into a draw pile—and the goal of the game is to win tricks by playing a higher-value card than the other player. Higher value can be relative, though: Every odd-numbered card modifies the game slightly, giving you powers like switching out the trump suit or forcing the other player to play a certain card.
There’s another catch, too. You don’t want to win too many tricks, since the scoring system works on a curve. To get the most points, you’ll want to win either 0 to 3 tricks or 7 to 9 tricks. Winning 4 to 6 tricks gets you fewer points, and if you win 10 tricks or more, you get no points at all for that hand. At the end of each round, the scores are added, and the first player to get to 21 points wins.
Why it’s great: The Fox in the Forest sits at the perfect intersection of luck and strategy for a quick, low-stakes game. The common trick-taking mechanic is instantly recognizable to a wide range of people, and it’s simple enough to learn for those who are unfamiliar. The game’s unique features, like the added power cards, keep the decisions interesting enough to differentiate it from those playing-card classics. It’s also easy to travel with, so it does well at a bar or on a trip.
Flaws but not dealbreakers: The box includes a number of little cardboard pieces that are used to keep track of the overall game score, but we found them more trouble than they were worth. It was much easier to just keep score with a pen and paper.
A quick game focused on trade and hand management, Jaipur is an economic game at its most accessible.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $25.
How to play: Jaipur is a set collection game that has players compete to be the best trader each round. To start, players draw cards from a common row that contains both material cards (things like diamonds, gold, silver, cloth, spice, and leather) and camels (essentially a less-valuable commodity you can use for strategic purposes). This row is replenished from the deck after each draw. Every turn, you can either draw one card from the common row, trade any number of cards from the row in exchange for an equal number of cards you already hold, or sell materials for points. You can also choose to pick up all the camel cards in the market. But doing so gives your opponent a whole new row of cards to draw from, so it’s a calculated risk. Each material card has a different value, and you get extra points for selling three or more of the same material at a time.
Once three types of goods are sold out—or the market runs out of cards—the round is over. The scores are added up, and whoever has the most points from the round gets a Seal of Excellence. The player who gets two seals first wins the game.
Why it’s great: Economic games have a reputation for being overly complicated or dull, but Jaipur sidesteps all of that by keeping the decisions simple and the tone light. Luck is a factor in this game, both in the supplies that hit the market during your turn and in what the goods will actually be worth (though selling early makes getting higher values more likely, which keeps decisions from feeling too make-or-break). But the game’s balance never swings so far over to the side of luck that you feel like your decisions don’t matter. It’s a constant challenge to try to pull valuable goods from the market without giving your opponent an opportunity to do the same—keeping you engaged throughout the round.
Flaws but not dealbreakers: This game is elegant and well designed, but its skill ceiling is decidedly low. In other words, the game remains fun and light no matter how often you play, but once you’ve played through it once or twice, there’s not much more to learn or explore.
These games are more competitive than our relaxing picks, but they’re not quite as antagonistic as our duel-game picks. They tend to offer multiple ways for players to win, and involve competition over a shared resource supply, asymmetric powers for each player, or a mix of some or all of these features. Players familiar with what are generally referred to as “Eurogames”(Catan being the classic example) will find a lot of similarities here.
This is a complex, involved game that has you keeping track of multiple goals as you compete for a limited set of resources to develop the most impressive ancient city.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $28.
How it’s played: Your task in 7 Wonders Duel is to create a more magnificent civilization than your opponent does, something you accomplish by building wonders like the pyramids, the hanging gardens, and the colossus. Of all our picks, this is the one that feels the most like a modern multiplayer board game, but pared down to work perfectly with two players. The game is played over the course of three rounds (or “ages,” as the game puts it). In each age, building cards are arranged into a pattern in the middle of the play surface, some faceup and others facedown. Players draft building cards and either build them in their city, discard them to earn coins, or use them to construct a wonder. Each building or wonder you have in your city not only earns you points or gold, but also provides resources that make it easier to build more and more complex buildings, earning you even more points and gold.
Having the most points at the end of the third age is just one way to win. You can also beat your opponent with military might by buying buildings that move an army piece toward the other player’s city. Or you can win a science victory by collecting six of the seven available science buildings.
Why it’s great: This game feels a lot bigger than the other games on our list. There are many things to keep track of, on both your own and your opponent’s side of the board, and multiple ways to win. Crucially, that abundance of options never feels overwhelming because of the game’s deliberate pacing. The wonders you select give you a target and game plan for the first two ages. But once you’ve accomplished those goals (usually near the end of the second age, in my testing), the third and final age acts as a sort of mad dash to the finish as each player uses the economic engines they’ve built to snatch up as many victory points as possible.
Flaws but not dealbreakers: Though the game has an elegant design and isn’t too difficult to learn, it’s probably the most intimidating of our picks—at least for tabletop gaming novices—due to its various win conditions and the amount of things to keep track of. If you’re new to this kind of game, try to power through the steep learning curve, and you’ll be rewarded with a complex, replayable experience.
Targi is a deceptively complex game. You do only one thing: place workers. But trying to figure out the best way to do that is surprisingly complicated—and fun.
*At the time of publishing, the price was $17.
How to play: Targi is hard to describe but surprisingly easy to learn. The field of play is a grid of 25 cards. The outer 16 are called border cards, and they’re always placed in the same order and cannot be picked up by players. The inner nine cards, which consist of tribe cards and goods cards, can be collected by placing workers (called Targis) on the border cards during each turn. Both border cards and tribe/goods cards provide actions that players can take after placing their markers. The game ends when a player collects 12 tribe cards. But since each tribe card is worth a different amount of points, the first player to 12 isn’t always the winner. These card bonuses allow for several different layers of strategy, and players also have to contend with a “Robber” that raids their supply of goods and gold at regular intervals.
Why it’s great: With just a few restrictions on how you can place your pawns, a game of Targi seems simple at first glance. But beneath the surface, you will find a wealth of complex decisions. Trying to acquire the tribe cards you want can be maddeningly tricky, even if the other player isn’t actively trying to block you from getting them. And since you can place Targis only on unoccupied rows and columns, the placement options narrow quickly as a round progresses. That would be a bummer in a more complicated game, but thanks to Targi’s rapid-fire pacing, you’re often already thinking about where you’re going to go on the next turn before you place your final piece of the current round.
Flaws but not dealbreakers: A few times during testing, the game seemed to drag a little at the end—often because it became obvious who was going to win, and the last few turns just consisted of the victor filling out their display of cards to end the game.
If you want a quick intro to role-playing paired with wacky dystopian fiction: Try Inhuman Conditions. This game offers a tight, exciting experience that somehow turns the high anxiety of an interrogation into a wonderfully weird and fun conversational wrestling match. The game is currently unavailable (the designers hope to have it back in stock by October). But in the meantime, you can try it for free via a print-and-play download (PDF) (which also includes modified rules for playing via Zoom).
If you want a quick, relaxing tile game that’s lower stakes than our picks: Try Patchwork. Simple, speedy, and chill, it’s one of our favorite board games for beginners. The quilting-themed puzzler is simple to learn, and it has a 20-minute play time, so you can zip through multiple games of Tetris-like placing and arranging.
If you’re in the mood for an action-packed, neon-infused card game: Radlands is a post-apocalyptic deck battler full of Mad Max–style characters dressed up in a Miami Vice color scheme, and it’s a quick and exciting game to play. The structure is simple but robust, and the limited ways you can generate water (the essential resource that allows you to play cards or carry out their actions) keeps the action tense as players try to efficiently pick apart their opponent’s defenses without overextending. It’s not quite as easy to pick up as Star Realms and not as strategically interesting as something like Summoner Wars, so those are probably better options for most people. But if you like those games and are looking for a new take on that style, Radlands is a good option.
If you’d prefer your war game to take place in Normandy instead of Narnia: Undaunted may be for you. A mix between a deck-building game and a straightforward war game, Undaunted is a fun and relatively quick experience. The different scenarios are easy to set up and well balanced—a notable advantage over the similarly themed Memoir ’44. And the command system that relies on building out your deck with different troop cards makes you feel like you have much more control over strategy. It’s similar enough to Summoner Wars (which we liked slightly better in our play tests), so if you like the World War II theme better than a swords-and-sorcery one, you'll have a great time with this game.
If you’ve played all of our picks and are still looking for a new challenge: It might be time to try Twilight Struggle. This wildly popular area-control game casts players as the two superpower protagonists of the Cold War, and it’s a fantastic example of how carefully using mechanics to explore a game’s theme can build wonderful narrative tension. Using cards that feature historical events from different periods of the war, players attempt to exert influence on other countries, win the space race, foment coups, and otherwise try to take control of the world. It’s a deep strategic game that, after a few playthroughs, has kept me thinking about new ways to win. But that depth comes at the expense of a steep learning curve and slow gameplay. The first few times you play will be a slog, as you check and recheck what each action really does, consider how the cards you’re holding might affect the different game trackers, and try desperately to figure out the best path forward. The amount of time a player needs to dedicate to learn the game before they can really find the fun is just too much for most casual players. But if you’re willing to put in the time, this one is a masterpiece of design and tactics.
Air, Land, & Sea is a quick, card-based battle game in which players try to gain control over the three titular theaters of combat. Each player is dealt six cards, which constitute their hand for the entire battle. And they play them strategically to control each of the three theaters of war, which is a matter of playing higher-value cards than their opponent—a bit like the card game War. The battles continue until one player reaches 12 points and wins. It’s a fast and easy little game, but in our testing it wasn’t as interesting as Star Realms or as relaxing as The Fox in the Forest.
Catapult Feud is a dexterity game that does what it says on the tin: Players control toy catapults and use them to knock over fortresses that the other player has assembled. In our research, we found the gameplay to be a bit too simplistic for most adults, but it could be a fun game for younger players.
Claim is a trick-taking card game with a multi-round twist where players use their cards to gather supporters to their side in a quest to take a murdered king’s throne. This one is well reviewed and looked like a good game in our research, but it didn’t rate as highly on BoardGameGeek as the card games we opted to play-test instead.
Codenames Duet is a two-player version of one of our favorite party games, and unlike our picks, it focuses on cooperation. Players alternate giving one-word clues to their partner to get them to correctly guess which word in a grid is an “agent”—without accidentally selecting the hidden “assassin” card that ends the game. If you like the original version of Codenames, you’ll find a lot to love about Duet. The downside, at least for me, is that playing this game mostly just reminded me of how much I like the original and made me want to get a group together to play that.
Crokinole is a dexterity game originally invented in the mid-1800s. It features a wide, circular wooden board and small discs, and gameplay is like a mix of shuffleboard and curling. Players alternate flicking discs, attempting to land their own in a center ring while bashing their opponent’s out. It’s widely popular and looks like a fun experience, but the smallest playing boards are around 27 inches wide and cost more than $60 (and those aren’t even regulation-size playing surfaces). That’s a big investment of both money and space for just two players.
Cryptid: Urban Legends is an asymmetrical, abstract game where one player is a mysterious cryptid trying to escape a city, and the other is a scientist trying to track down and capture them. The players use cards to move three colors of cubes between the squares of the ever-shifting board. The cryptid player’s goal is to create a recognizable pattern using the cubes, which would expand their presence, while the scientist wants the opposite. The game’s concept and play style are unique, but unfortunately the experience never really clicked for me or anyone I played with. It’s difficult to manipulate the cubes without alerting your opponent to your plan, which they can easily squash, leading to a stalemate—which makes the very short play time feel like a slog.
Fog of Love is a role-playing experience designed to be the board game equivalent of a romantic comedy. Using hidden objectives and situation cards that make each playthrough follow a familiar act structure, the game seems to build a good framework for role-playing choices. But Inhuman Conditions is slightly less intimidating in terms of time commitment, and its role-playing can be less emotionally fraught, so we think it’s a better game to try first.
Just like 7 Wonders Duel, Imhotep: The Duel is a scaled-down version of a popular multiplayer game—in this case the worker-placement game Imhotep. But even though it provides an enjoyable experience, this version doesn’t condense as effectively as 7 Wonders. In my testing it felt smaller and less substantial, and the few options you have on your turn don’t feel as impactful, which made strategy choices straightforward to the point of being dull.
Klask is like a tabletop air-hockey table built by a particularly entrepreneurial woodshop teacher. It’s a lovely dexterity game that combines magnets and reflexes, with your aim being to get a little plastic ball from your side of the board into your opponent’s goal. You do this by moving a pawn-like striker that is magnetically attached to a handle beneath the board. There are also little plastic magnets in the center of the board that can attach to your pawn and gum up the works. It’s an exciting game to play and watch, and when I brought it to a game night with three of my friends, we had a good time setting up a quick little tournament. But it’s also quite large and fairly expensive for the amount of play time most people will likely get out of it.
Lost Cities is a card game where you push your luck by funding risky expeditions into various harsh environments. It’s an engaging concept, and games are quick, but we found several of the other card games we tested more fun to play—and almost all of them were easier to travel with than Lost Cities’ comically oversized box.
Memoir ’44 is one of the most accessible war games in production. It pairs the childlike fun of playing with little green army men (plus tanks and artillery) with some of the feeling of a more involved hex-based battle game, like the Standard Combat Series. Set in the European theater of World War II, this game is a great intro to more tactics-heavy games like Undaunted. But it takes a long time to set up (there are a lot of those little green army men), and it isn’t well balanced. And it has a frustrating movement system that too often leaves you unable to control distant troops.
Odin’s Ravens is a card-based race between Huginn and Muninn, two ravens that serve the Norse god Odin. It’s quick and easy to play: Players move along a track laid out through a series of landscape cards, traversing them by playing matching cards from their hands. Loki cards can either advance your raven or hinder your opponent’s, but your supply is limited, so choosing how and when to play them is the game’s main difference maker. Overall, it’s a fun experience, but the gameplay is shallow, and once you’ve played a few times it loses its luster. The other card games on our list simply have more replay value.
Onitama is a quick and easy-to-learn chess-like game, with just three pawns and a king. The main difference is that instead of each piece having its own unique move, they’re controlled by cards. As you use them, these cards are passed to your opponent, so you’re in a constant push-pull as you trade moves looking to get the upper hand. It’s a quick game—my playthroughs lasted about 15 minutes—but we enjoyed the depth of Hive more. On the plus side, Onitama uses a neoprene mat instead of a cardboard game board. We’d love to see more games use this, since it helps the game fit into a smaller box (when rolled up) and feels great to play on.
Quoridor (pronounced like “corridor”) is a quick abstract puzzle in which players place walls and move a pawn between them. Each player has a supply of 10 walls, with the goal of getting their pawn to the far side of the board first. On each turn, you can either move your pawn or place a wall to block your opponent. This mechanic means the game goes from friendly to mean very quickly, and the simple concept makes it easy to teach and fun to play—at first, anyway. Unfortunately, we found that that simplicity meant the shine wore off quickly after a few plays.
Rivals for Catan is a two-player card game set in the world of the wildly popular Catan. Rivals seemed promising in our initial research, but it got lower scores on BoardGameGeek than the other card games we looked at, so we didn’t include it in our testing.
Royal Visit is a tug-of-war in which players use cards in an attempt to convince a monarch to visit their duchy instead of the other player’s. But it also didn’t rate as high as several other card games we saw in our research, so we opted not to play-test it.
To get an idea of what makes two-player board games successful, I reviewed lists and articles from board-game review sites like Shut Up & Sit Down and Dicebreaker. I surveyed my Wirecutter colleagues for some of their favorite options. And I researched the most popular games on both Amazon and the BoardGameGeek forum. To get experts’ perspectives, I also talked to Greg May, owner and operator of multiple New York City game cafés; award-winning game designer Jeeyon Shim; and Michele King, a communications professor and the director of William & Mary’s academic and applied esports program.
A lot of the features that make any game fun—being strategically balanced, having consistent play times, fostering satisfying interaction—are what we looked for when drawing up our list of two-player games to test. But great two-player games have a couple of specific traits that are important to keep in mind: They should be easy to learn, and they should be explicitly made for just two players.
As May pointed out in our conversation, modern two-player games face competition from classic games like checkers, chess, and backgammon—games many people grew up playing and know inside and out. That, combined with the increased social pressure of learning or teaching a game to one person (without a group dynamic to play off of), makes it extra important for these games to be easy to learn so new players can get into gameplay as quickly as possible.
And though there are plenty of games that play well with two to four players (Small World, Quacks of Quedlinburg, and Wingspan are all good examples), games that are intentionally designed for just two people usually provide the most complete two-player experience. In other words, you won’t feel like you’re missing something without a larger group.
Based on our research, plus recommendations from colleagues and experts, we compiled an initial list of 33 games. After comparing ratings on BoardGameGeek and reviewing video playthroughs, we discarded 13 of these—due to either player complaints, availability, or complexity—and settled on a list of 20 to test in person.
During testing, I played each game with a rotating crew of eight friends and volunteers, and I used their feedback to augment my own experiences. After playing each game at least once (though most were played multiple times), we arrived at our picks.
This article was edited by Ben Keough and Erica Ogg.
James Austin is an associate staff writer currently covering games and hobbies, but he’s also worked on just about everything Wirecutter covers—from board games to umbrellas—and after being here for a few years he has gained approximate knowledge of many things. In his free time he enjoys taking photos, running D&D, and volunteering for a youth robotics competition.
by Anna Perling and James Austin
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