Top 10 2-Player Board Games RIGHT NOW!

welcome back to the table today we're going to do something that we haven't done we haven't done this i don't well you and i haven't done it that's true and if you haven't looked at the thumbnail this is our top 10 two player games now if you just blindly clicked on the link without even looking at the title of the video or the thumbnail yeah if you did that thank you very much thanks for tuning in i appreciate your faith in our channel uh but no today we're going to be talking about our top 10 two-player games and we want to caveat this this is not games that we think are good with two players that might be for more players right these are games that are built not well specifically for two players in mind primarily for two players there will probably be some games on this list that you could play with three or four players yeah but i don't recommend it they're meant for two players or maybe two teams yeah okay we'll talk about that when we get there but even in that case i think it's better just to play with two players for sure i would agree and last thing this is not a list of 2021 top two player games it's not a list of all time it is kind of both our current top list for two players my top 10 favorite two player games to play right now right now yeah so with that said with that said let's get into number 10. number 10 for me is star realms this is a game that i've enjoyed for a very long time i remember when this game first came out it is a competitive deck building game that has a space kind of sci-fi theme where you're basically building a fleet of ships to battle your opponent and this game has gone through a lot of revisions a lot of new sets have come out there's a mobile app you can play on your phone i think even on steam there's a digital version of this game so it's it's easy to play it's super accessible and it's just fun i mean there are so many cool elements to this game it's a deck builder of course yeah where you're kind of competing to buy the cards in the row but you're also directly doing damage to the other opponent a lot of the cards that you're buying can attack or can do damage to your opponent's bases to your opponent's health point and and part of the whole thing is deciding if you want to build an economy or if you want to go heavy on damage because building an economy lets you get some of those more expensive ships but if you get a really small army that's really cheap and you're just hammering away at damage every single turn it's hard to beat that yeah and that one's really pure i mean deck builders usually do boil down to economy or damage in some way shape or form i mean some don't have damage at all it's just no score based but you're either attacking or collecting cards or maybe trying to do a little bit of both and that one is a great two-player experience for doing that and for teaching deck building just to one other person because it's that's what really the main thing you're doing it's pretty pure and the cool thing i mean my favorite thing about it that really revolutionized it is the the combo system where you have these different factions and a lot of the cards give you bonuses for having cards played from that same faction i know ascension does this a little bit yeah but star realms really hammered that in and like there's just some really really satisfying games in that yeah well my number 10 is not a deck builder okay it is a trick-taking game i have it right here this is jekyll vs hyde and this is about as new as it gets it is it just came out like a month ago right i'm not even sure how available is this is as of time of posting but this is a two-player asymmetric trick taking game i've already talked about it on the channel quite a bit we've even played it down the channel but one player plays jekyll of course one player versus plays hide the idea of the trick taking though is when you're dr jekyll thematically you want to keep control you want to maintain a balance right so you want to in any given round win as many tricks as you lose and there's 10 tricks per round hyde on the other hand he wants to go crazy he wants to win as many as he can or lose as many as he can so what it does as a trick taking game you kind of have to wrap your head around what am i trying to do because right even though i understand those rules thoroughly almost every time i play this in any trick taking game you kind of get into that groove of like oh i'm taking tricks i'm taking tricks if you're dr jekyll you don't want to keep that rolling right you want to stop at a certain point you need to pivot and the fact is you can't play really hard to win tricks without planning the rest of the round so that you can ensure that you're going to lose tricks right you don't want to accidentally win a trick the last trick you could accidentally win and that was yeah you can completely get into a rhythm where you're like oh i can't stop winning like there they saw that i was winning so and and and hide all the while if you're winning as jekyll is going to sit there and go okay well i'm just going to keep letting them win and kind of strategically plan so that that they do and it's really interesting because each round the difference between the tricks is how far this little marker will move on this board of hyde changing from jekyll all the way to hyde and hyde's going to win if that marker gets all the way to the end across three different rounds plus there's all these different uh powers that come into play and potions that will you can play a card play a potion change trump effectively do all sorts of things to change up the board and kind of like create chaos in the middle of the game and it is a trick taking game that completely keeps you thinking kind of allah the crew i think the crew for a lot of people made people kind of go okay yeah i've gotta really think about how trick taking games are played now same thing goes with jackal versus hyde and what i really appreciate about this game is the length you can play this game even even at three rounds you can play it in 30 minutes oh or or quicker or quicker this is the kind of game that you will absolutely guaranteed you'll play it once and then you'll want to switch roles so the other person can play hide and you can play jekyll because inevitably one of you are going to think uh it's harder to play the one i just it's always harder to play the one you are or the one that lost right exactly whoever lost that must be the harder roll but that is not the case and that jekyll vs hyde is my number 10. all right well number nine yeah my number nine is also a fairly new game it's called land versus c and this game kind of took me by surprise it came out earlier this year it was kind of i think a quiet release i mean i didn't hear a lot of hype about it and to be honest i was like okay it's a tile placement game but this idea this concept of it being land versus c a two player game where one player is land and one player c is so interesting yeah like just by just describing that it's like okay how does that work well as you're building out this this map you're placing a tile every single turn and they're double-sided and you're adding both to the sea and the land because every tile has a little bit of both and as the land player i want to make these giant land masses that are contained yeah and as the sea player you want to make these giant sea masses that are contained but the tiles have both right on them and so the the crux of the game is how do i close off my section without helping you close off your section also without giving you an opportunity to make my section bigger because part of the game is just not letting your opponent close off their section you have a giant sea area and i'm just adding sea to your area i'm not worried about closing off my land i just want to make your sea so big that you could never close it off yeah and there's more subtleties to this game too it's not just simply you've got these tiles and you play them and you're trying to build those pieces of land or sea but there are some powers on some of those tiles you might play a tile that lets you steal a tile from the other player which can be massive it can be because the tiles also by the way are double-sided so when you take tiles off of these stacks you're always going to have two at the beginning of your turn and you can look at your the other player and go okay what's on your tiles but not really because you will never know what's on the other side they can sit there and look at them they may have some hidden information there that really makes it far trickier to figure out what you're wanting to do because you might do something and you might be sitting there hoping oh i'm going to do this but if one of the other sides of their tiles has something that i don't know and it's this you could go out there and really kind of take advantage of that so it's a very interesting game and like ryan said and this by the way this was also my number nine oh well there you go or we matched up on number nines but land versus c is a the most competitive feeling tile placement game that i think i've played in recent memory because it really does feel tile placement's usually kind of friendly and you're just kind of doing your own thing the fact that this is all in one area kind of a la carcassonne yeah a little bit like carcass but far more head-to-head yeah i think of it like isle of skye if somebody else could come in and mess up the map that you're trying to make right kind of and it has a lot of modules it has some advanced scoring modes too that make the game even more tense you can make mountain ranges or these ranges of coral you can connect ships yeah these routes yeah with like wagons to make these trade routes and whoever has the most of either ships or wagons or ships or wagons on that route scores points i mean there's a wide variety of things um and i do want to mention there is actually a three-player variant to this game which is actually pretty neat yeah it does change up the game i mean this is still primarily meant to be a two-player experience but if you wanted to play teams you could play teams two versus two you could play a third player who's only scoring those mountains in the coral that is which is interesting um but really it is when you play a purely two player it's quite an experience yeah so that's land versus c both mine and ryan's number nine yeah do you want to go with your number eight sure let's go right to number eight number eight for me is a lawyer up this was a kickstarter game from a few years ago from ross from rock manor and this game is cool in the way that it simulates court we played this together um we did i don't know i think we did a round one we did around one i couldn't remember if it was a live stream but it's cool you're collecting evidence for this case and one player is the prosecution one player is the defense and you have these jurors that you're trying to influence and there's all these different icons that represent what is important to that particular juror and you're trying to find evidence that fits your argument that also sways those jurors to your side which i think is i mean that's super super fun it's funny interesting and it's really thematic too because there'll be cards that you get because there is a prosecution deck and and a defense deck and you're going to have cards that come up that feel very like oh this is that this is your smoking gun you got him and it may literally be a smoking gun like you have that card where you're like oh uh when am i going to play this but then things might change and you might not be able to take advantage of it as much as you yeah you can counter evidence you can get evidence thrown out of the case and yeah it really hurts when you think you you play that one card or you you take that one turn and then someone has the card in their hand that kind of foils that plan and thematically if you if you let yourself get into it it really does kind of capture that vibe of like that that tension and back and forth dynamic in a quarter yeah it has that kind of phoenix right value we just want to throw it on the card i object and you can even like you can approach the bench even during the game like it it's very thematic i don't know how accurate it is to the actual experience of being a trial lawyer but from the outside it feels like it it makes you feel like you're in a courtroom drama and there are a ton of different cases you can play and it's not like a narrative experience i mean you can play these cases over and over again you're not trying to like solve a mystery here you're just using a particular set of cards with a particular victim and there are a ton of expansion boxes for this and each come with several new cases and if i'm right there's even like a supernatural well there's a salem witch and i haven't played that one i have i i backed it and i had i think all of it or at least two of the extra boxes and the one i haven't tried is the salem witch trial is cool and they have different art there too yeah it's like ryan said i don't think it is an accurate simulation of the court system but with that said maybe the u.s court system would be wise to adapt just playing lawyer card game yeah so my number eight is a game called fugitive and this one's from fowler's games this is a cool hidden movement game and unlike most hidden movement games this is two players of course and one player is playing the fugitive the other player is playing the marshall and this is a card game so there's going to be basically this string of cards that's built throughout the game that is kind of think catch me if you can and in fact the graphic design here is very catchy it really does look like that yeah um but the fugitive is on the run and on the fugitive's turn they're going to be playing cards into that row and the row is sequential but you don't the cards aren't face up necessarily so you don't see what the sequence is but you know that it's going to start at zero and the fugitive is basically trying to get to the point where they can play the number 42 or 43 card i can't remember which and when they do that they're going to win the marshall is trying to uncover all of the hideouts which are effectively every face down card in the row so what happens is the fugitive is going to play a card say there's a zero here they play the next card that next card could be a one a two or a three naturally but as the marshall you don't know and the fugitive can play extra cards underneath it to sprint so it could be a little more than that so effectively the fugitive is playing a bunch of different numbered cards sequentially raising but with gaps and the marshall's trying to guess what those are to basically uncover all the hideouts to catch the fugitive so it is literally a chase of a hidden movement and just like any hidden movement game the you're using a lot of deduction elements to try to guess ahead of what you think that the fugitive is planning which is super interesting too uh because it's not so i'm not looking at you you know this is not a lying game this isn't a game where i'm like no there's no bluffing this is deduction is this it though it's pure deduction based on the cards that have been played you know kind of the range of numbers that could possibly be out but you don't know exactly how far the fugitive has gotten well yeah and you don't know when they use those sprint cards you don't know what sprint's cards some have one foot well some have two so they let them go a little further there are also events that you can play with that kind of change things up and make add a little more chaos and the marshall on their turn effectively at the end they're guessing as many hideouts as they want the rub there is if you guess any of them wrong so if you think i think i know three of the hideouts and you guess one and two and three and the third one's wrong you have to guess all the numbers at once yeah and then the fugitive just says if one of them's wrong sorry and they don't uncover any of them so you might want to not push your luck and just guess one that you know for sure or you might want it just depends on how far ahead of him it's a really interesting twist on hidden movement for sure it really is really moving really in a straight line and it's super simple to play this is a easy i mean the box is tiny you can travel with this thing it does end up taking some table space so this is not something you're going to be playing on an airplane but again it's like a 30 minute 30 to 45 minute game yeah very very tight game all right are we on to seven we are on the seven seven for me is unmatched battle of legends i should have figured which yeah i mean i've loved this game since it came out there's a lot of reasons that i love this game for one it is a cool two-player tactical combat game it can be played at three and four with weird variants but i don't i get right to the pure to fair mode this is where it really really shines what's so cool about unmatched and i've talked about this for years on the channel i think yeah is the ability to combine these cool characters from all of these different ips or fictions or legends i mean we have i don't even know maybe 20 characters now with a whole set of marvel characters about to come out yeah that are awesome that is the big draw and i've played it a little but not as much as you can mix and match as much as you want you can mix and match as much as you want um one of the matches ups i played not too long ago was sherlock holmes versus the velociraptors from jurassic park which was a really that might be better than the joke i was gonna make that that's a great example and it sounds silly but that's that was again it played out really well and what i really appreciate about this game is the the artwork and the design that goes into it all the artwork is done by mondo studios they do those really cool movie posters if you've ever seen those and every character has a unique deck of cards that's thematic they have a unique usually some kind of assistant or associate um some kind of ally it depends i mean there's the the buffy box came out not too long ago and then more recently we had deadpool yeah you just got deadpool recently right and yeah i did and i posted some photos of this on instagram facebook discord wherever but uh deadpool uses cards from all of the other sets oh he has just handwritten his own stuff over them so it's like super he's like he's not literally using other not literally cards in his deck are they look like they're all cards from other decks but they have like post-it notes over them or like he's scribbled things out or he's drawn pictures of himself over the other artwork i mean that's brilliant it is brilliant it very much feels like deadpool i mean it's a fun deck to play and i've gotten to play some of the marvel stuff that's coming out i can't talk about it yet the heroes have been announced you can go online and see who they're going to be they're also super thematic i mean each one really feels like the marvel character so there's plenty of unmatched to come volume two is about to release no so if you missed all of the first wave of content it's fine it you can jump in at any point you don't want this volume to because they have a whole nother set of heroes that are really cool very cool well my number seven is not unmatched i assumed it wasn't but like many of our two-player games it is very very head-to-head and has a bit of that tug-of-war aspect to it and spoiler alert it's probably maybe even higher on your list oh my number seven is watergate and this one's from capstone games we played this what was it three years ago now yeah that it came out at an order forever ago it was that origins clay had gotten an early copy from capstone and we we got a chance to play it and a lot of us did uh and some other people from some podcasts that we're friends with were all there playing it my wife taught me this game which is a rarity uh i'm usually the one teaching a game but watergate it's it's not higher on my list by the way because i do think one of the things about watergate is that um the theme oh i try to play this with my kids now after you play it people generally like it no matter what but when people think watergate like my sons didn't don't even you know know what the magic was about someone outside of the united states right you have even less of an idea of what watergate was but with that said regardless of the theme you're playing this tug of war game that is really interesting that is just built around playing a card and playing another card and these cards are multi-use cards which is one of my favorite things going on and you can use a card to just basically generally grab some evidence and there's this whole board where you're either trying to protect nixon from the evidence or on the other side the press you're trying to gather evidence and string it together and the board is really cool it's like one of those little push pin boards string it together to implicate nixon and it just goes back and forth and back and forth and it's very asymmetric in terms of what you're doing and what you're trying to do but also with some overlap in terms of the mechanics and you might be right it might be on my list so i'm not going to talk about it right now because i i might bring it back up here in a little bit i think you will i think you will have to see uh but let's go into number six then yeah so number six for me is dice throne this is another huge game that also has marvel set coming out now that i think about it i didn't even make that connection marvel just got done on kickstarter dice known is cool i'll tell you what i'll be honest i was so resistant to the idea of dice thrown because i'm not a dice chucking fan no like a pusher look yeah so push your luck dice rolling luck of the you know luck of the dice sure and but you know and the first season when the first season came out was done in a very different way and like they they hadn't quite gotten their groove going and season one was fun but it wasn't you know it didn't have what season two has and season two had this big box with all these character packs in game trays where you pulled one out and every character had this cool full art board and all their components in one game tray and that sucked me in yeah well the presentation of season two and the presentation this whole concept of like choose your fighter kind of pull your fighter out of the box go head to head against another fighter and once i finally like let myself get past it and start playing it i really i enjoyed it so much i had to have all of it i went back and i got all of the season one stuff when they came out with the rerolled so now all of season one is in that same packaging with that cool same aesthetic that season two comes with but that that concept of choosing a fighter like that we see in video games so often i'm surprised that more board games don't capitalize on that because there's just something so satisfying of just looking at the box and seeing all the cool artwork of like all these characters you know the paladin the treant the ninja and you know just grabbing it like i don't know it feels it's cool it feels cool it's the closest thing in board games to a character select screen right you know you're basically you open that big box especially those new boxes and they're all lined up there and just the idea of like i'm going to try this guy and you pull it out you open it all up everything you need is right there it's a lot of fun and the marvel one is pretty yeah i got to play the marvel one play it a little bit oh you've played the whole one right well i played some of it i got to see all of it at bggcon a couple weeks ago but again like a fighting game what i really appreciate about diastole is that anyone can start playing it immediately just like button mashing in the game you could just be rolling those dice doing damage but the more you play any given character the more you start to see some of the combos and synergies and these characters have some real depth oh and flavor too and then real real flavor the characters don't yet at least feel like re-skins the characters definitely have uh unique aspects and particularly even some of the marvel ones the marvel ones that we know of and how they work they've continued to uh sort of advance what they're doing there with them and this is another one of those games like what david said where it's like a 15 to 20 minute game and then you're gonna be like okay another one let me try a different character let's let's do this again or let's swap characters because there's so many characters to try it's just you'll get sucked in i almost guarantee it yeah i often want to stick with the same character because i if i lose i want to just keep going i want to try to figure out the one character that i had so my next game is doesn't have any characters it is called paris city of lights this is an abstract game from devere that ryan and i had a chance in fact we did a review of it we did a live play of it what last year two years ago maybe two years ago it's been a while been a while uh but this is a really cool tile placement game set in paris and the box itself speaking of presentation yeah is the board so you take the lid off and then the base box has the board sunken down in it and it's even dual layered what you're going to do is there's two phases in the game which is really the cool aspect of this because you really have to think i think ryan and i you and i both were kind of surprised after we played it like yeah the first time i played that i i completely misunderestimated the second half of the game yeah and you have to plan because in the first phase of the game you are either placing a foundation tile if you will which is just a square tile that has some colors on it you're going to be one color the other player is going to be the other and then there's like a purple that is usable by both of us if you don't do that on your turn you're taking one of many polyamino building tiles for your supply that's for later once the board is filled with the foundation you go on to phase two which again has on your turn choices you're either going to place one of those buildings and the buildings have to be placed on at least a foundation of that same shape of all of your color or maybe mixed with the purple or if you're not doing that there's all these postcards around the board from paris that will basically do different powers so you might have planned such that like okay well i'm going to use that power that'll allow me to effectively change the board a little bit so that it's going to let me play these tiles but it's really interesting because the first time you play it no matter what i guarantee phase one is gonna end and one player who's new to the game is gonna say oh well i barely collected any buildings well and that's that's the thing i was gonna mention my favorite thing about the game is that balance of if you're not collecting buildings and your opponent is collecting a lot of buildings you're getting kind of control of the of the board layout and you're getting to like create some shapes that are very beneficial to you but if you don't have the buildings to place in the second phase it doesn't matter how well you position the board because you'll have nothing to put on it so you really have to strike that balance right and some of those powers will let you sort of play with that a little bit there are some buildings that are effectively out on those powers but it is a really interesting thingy two-player game and unlike fugitive this one is absolutely one that i think you could play in a small space oh yeah other than having some of these tiles spread out it is a very small footprint of a little box that's just sitting in the middle of the table as paris city of lights is the english translation i'm not going to try to butcher the french pronunciation but that one's from devere and it is my number six all right number five for me is targi and this is perhaps one of the meanest two player games i have on my list this game is all about blocking your opponent at every possible step i mean it's neat i mean the way that it works because you have this grid of cards out there and every card is either an action like the cards are on the outside are actions and the cards on the inside are either cards that give you resources special abilities or cards that you can actually put into your little camp and you're trying to kind of build out this camp in such a way that it scores points you're in your scoring points in all these different ways some of the cards that you're grabbing also have in-game scoring points on them but what's cool is you're placing your figure on one of the outer spaces you can't place opposite that but when you've placed two figures you're taking the card that's in the middle so basically if you were making a line from one to the other you're grabbing a card so if i place one pawn because i really want a card that's really juicy my opponent can come and put them in the other axis meaning no one gets that card now they've effectively blocked me from it and them and so you're going to be spending so much time just placing in other spots just to stop your opponents from getting that really juicy card and there are some powers that let you take cards even if you didn't place on them so setting up that perfect turn where you've blocked your opponent out of everything meanwhile you have this card that lets you just take the card anyway even though you were both blocked it's really satisfying but it's it's not a super long game either so it can feel bad i think if you're you know not evenly matched you've got to kind of know if you're teaching this game maybe don't just beat up on them constantly but when you've got two players that are about equal skill it really becomes almost like a chess match of where you're placing those trying to like bluff someone into thinking you want one card from the middle so that they block you and really you set yourself up to take another card that might have benefited you otherwise i mean it's it's super hard to explain just talking about it it is tricky to explain in fact i just got a copy of this just recently from my secret meeple we ran a secret meeple and i got targi among some other things and i'm looking forward to trying this with alicia because neither of us have played it i think i never even played target once a long time ago uh but it's been long enough to where i'm it's like i'm a fresh player but if i played you i feel like uh you'd have to go easy on i mean and i think that's part of any any two-player game like this like if you're if you're wanting the other player especially if it's like a significant other partner roommate somebody that you want to play games with you over and over again don't just destroy them on your first play i think that that just goes without saying yeah and that you don't have to go you don't have to go easy on them you don't have to let someone win but yeah if you're wanting to uh spread the good word on board games maybe don't destroy everyone once you're on even level then gloves are off you go head to head exactly you know but i i think that's true for teaching any game really but that's that's a personal personal thing but yeah target definitely if you haven't played that one and i know this is one maybe a little more obscure but i think that everyone that i'd talk to as soon as they've played it they've just loved it yeah there's been a lot of talk of target on our discord target talk targy talk yeah we don't have a channel called target we might know i didn't own it either i also got it from my secret people oh did you i really did are we each other's secret music i uh i got it because i know i've been talking a lot about it on discord i'd gotten to play it earlier this year and fell in love with it but i never i didn't own it it is one of those games where you don't necessarily like you you play it you like it you might not necessarily buy it for yourself especially the person you're playing with owns it but it's good to have it now to be able to take it to new groups and play with new people for sure uh well my my next game isn't quite as mean but like many of the games we're talking about it is one that makes you constantly kind of think and rethink what you're doing and playing which i think is really a common denominator with a lot of these particularly two-player games this one is santorini also from roxley games honestly i think this is one of this when did this come out 2017 maybe a while ago it's been a while uh i i backed this on it was one of the earlier games that i backed on kickstarter and the great thing about santorini is it starts with a very very basic game in fact the game that existed the designer had made it out of wood and it was very it didn't look anything like it does now um but then roxly as they do like they've done with dicethrone have added a layer of development and polish in terms of presentation oh it looks i mean it looks like santorini this the greek city i mean yeah the board is gorgeous the board is raised and i mean aside from the presentation alone the gameplay is what does this for me because even the base mode is quite simple but very fun you're basically moving one of two pieces and building and what you're trying to do is get on the top of a level three building but there's a level four that can be capped so that you can't go on there by the other player so it is very much a strategic dance around this board the absolute coolest thing about this game and probably the reason it's still so high on my list and in my collection is all of these different power cards or character cards that you can take you're playing these different gods and when you do that it completely changes how the game is playing yeah and you can win with a completely different win variable that's what i was going to say and i my god might win one way ryan's might win another so it also makes it absolutely asymmetric and when you play several games in a row what's really fun to do is take that deck and every game you play you just flip it over a new god card so you have to think every single game like oh wait a minute how am i not using the same god card every single time with the same special ability and you have to describe to your opponent like oh here's who i am and here's how i can win because not only do you have to know how your character plays your opponent absolutely has to know because they're they need to make sure they don't let you win well right that's the hardest part about the game right any of these abstract games like this uh it's almost more important to stop your partner from winning than it is to try to win exactly you can end up placing that one key building that they need because you can only hop up like one level at a time so if you make that little stairway for them they're gonna hop up it next thing you know they've won and you're like why did i do that why did i not see that yeah and one of my one of my favorite cars i can't remember the name of the character but there's a character who can win not by getting well you can always win by getting to the top that that win condition's always there but there's one character who can win by jumping down oh yeah to a grass spot not even from the top i think it's from like a level two or uh level two space if he jumps down he wins so what you're effectively doing as the opponent is running around like some sort of circus building on the ground around them so that they can't jump down to the ground level because if they jump down to the ground level instant win for them which is crazy i don't think i've even seen all of the different god cards that you can play in santorini and i have the golden fleece expansion with it as well which i think a lot of people play with that was so close to hitting my list because it really it's it's such a mental game it will always be on my list and i've talked to people who had an experience with it and thought and i'm like what and then i find out that they never played with those cards right you kind of i mean it's good to learn the game without them but you really want to at least try the game with them well like i said i love the base game those cards elevate it more than any other game i've seen in terms of what like an expansion or or a new element does for a game but yeah santorini that is my number five all right under number four so i finally get to talk about it watergate is my number four four okay david i think you're not doing this game justice well i love it i love it watergate is one of my favorite two-player games and there's the only reason it didn't end up higher is because you'll see why some of the other games on my list are absolutely close there's a lot of good two players there are a lot of good to play games but watergate is so much fun that idea of like either playing as the editor or playing as nixon and that that board that david talked about that little like there's like all these strings connecting to nixon and your whole goal is to get evidence onto your side of the tug of war so you can put it out on that board in such a smart way that you can connect two people to nixon and if you can connect two people to nixon you prove that he was a criminal you win but nixon's constantly burning evidence he's turning some of those witnesses to his side which means they're not available to you anymore and the core of the game that that row i guess that tug of war where you're moving not just the pieces of evidence but also the initiative counter to determine who gets to go first next round and these little power tokens which if you let nixon get all five he just flat out wins the game anyway i mean that's the thing that nixon goes after right away right that's the easy thing for nixon to go oh well i'm just going to pull this as much as i can yeah and you as the editor have to you have to not only stop nixon from gaining that but you also want to keep the initiative you also want to keep the evidence you also want to keep him from turning people against you regardless of the theme and i'll be honest i'm young enough that watergate doesn't have any real meaning to me other than the movie and amazingly enough me too other than the movies about it which is fine i mean coming into the theme it's like okay i get it i know that nixon was you know under trial by the press and like that's all you really need to know to play the game it doesn't require any kind of like historical knowledge to win no not not at all i think that knowledge or at least even a vague knowledge of it of what happened is probably enough to understand the flavor right and that's that is what helps and the flavor and the history in those cards is actually kind of interesting when i did play that with my son who didn't know anything about it it was almost a little bit of an education for definitely like well who was this guy and i'm like oh well and some of them i didn't even know but it's it's one of those things that brings history into board gaming in a really interesting way plus this is a game mechanic i mean this is not unlike twilight struggle in terms of how you're playing it um this is a game mechanic that i could see used for all sorts of different themes like i just love the way and the multi-use cards being like there's actually several uses for the cards because you're either going to be moving evidence you're going to be moving those tokens you're going to be playing them for the ability and some of those abilities are going to have multiple options and some of them are going to remove those cards out of the game they're just like one-time use cards and again this is another game that's about 30 to 45 minutes maybe even less if you're two really skilled players i can't recommend watergate enough yeah it's good a lot of tension and like we said on santorini where that was a game where you're trying times to just not let the other person win it's not about you winning necessarily as much as it is that this one does a good balance there is a really good balance you have to not let them win but then in the next turn you have to do something to try to win you have to keep pushing your own win condition forward the game is kind of weighted towards nixon because if time runs out nixon wins so it's a little easier for the editor to move things but but it's it's weighted in a in a really balanced way that makes both sides feel different yeah the the pacing just feels different for both sides yeah watergate is a great game and it would be higher on my list but like i said i think that history thing kind of it's not the most accessible or common theme not thematically anyway uh my next one is has nothing to do with nixon i'll tell you that the next the next one on my my list has been on probably as many top 10 two-player board game lists as there are okay for a very long time it is jaipur oh yeah yeah jaipur has been out i don't even know when this came out but it's been around for as long as i've been playing modern board games and this is a pure two-player game very small footprint you can play this anywhere this is a game that you can absolutely travel with and i've never met anyone who thought jaipur wasn't fun no it is fun it's it's fun it's simple it's simple it's very easy to play what you know while you're hanging out you know waiting for your food to get there we've i've played it at a bar just having a drink playing a game like that well even the app we alicia and i played the app when we're even remote from one another i mean this game and just so you know to give you a sense if you've never heard of jaipur this is basic set collection but there's this little row of cards and on your turn you're taking maybe a card or some cards into your hand and you have a hand limit which is kind of one of the big rubs in the game you're trying to collect sets but not just those cards so that you can play them but then you're basically spending cards out of your hand as an alternative to taking cards in order to take some of these chips that are going to score you points and there's all these different colors all the way up to like a red and gold and you're doing that until three i think of those chip stacks is empty it has a player controlled dynamic in terms of how long it's going to go and there is that tension where you're like okay i've collected another red how many red do they have because should i seize this red because what i didn't mention is the chips degrade in value as you take them so the first bread that's going to be taken or the first gold or whatever is going to be a higher value and some of the stacks like the lower colors if you will the less the more common ones there's a ton of chips but taking those is more specific the the ones you want to get early are higher value in a lot of cases yeah when you talk about games like jaipur it's easy to like pass it off as an old game i mean i i haven't played my copy of japan in years just because you keep chasing the cult of the new yeah but every time you start talking about it it just makes you want to go back and play it again plus camels like if if if if you want a game with camels which is a silly thing to say one of the cool aspects is camels is another thing that you can score and camels also gives you the flexibility of taking a lot more cards at once because you can take a bunch of cards and just replace them with camels there's a lot of tension in this game too because if whenever you do that whenever you take a lot of cards there's a mechanic where you're refilling the row and what you don't want to do in this game is refill the row at the end of your turn for the new ride oh look three gold so yeah jaipur classic classic two-player game i don't ever see this leaving my top ten i need to get the app that's for sure oh the app's great i don't have it i've played it even against the computer it's very competitive all right number three number three for me is star wars rebellion you probably knew that this was going to be on my list i am a huge star wars fan however that doesn't just mean i'm going to just play any star wars game or love any star wars game right i'm actually kind of picky when it comes to my star wars games and ip games in general because i don't want something that feels goofy or silly i want something that makes me feel like i'm in the ip or in that franchise and there is no better game for that than rebellion that's what i've heard i mean this is one of the most thematic games i have ever played that is a true love letter to star wars now again caveat this can be played with four players you can have one team being the rebellion and one team being the empire i don't i don't like it at all because it just it just splits up your turn yeah that's all it does like you just have a person sitting next to you it's just so much better as a 1v1 two-player game and the whole asymmetric concept of this game is that the empire is hunting down the rebellion while also completing these super projects like building death stars or giant star destroyers and things like that while the rebellion is hiding out and they have a secret base that the empire doesn't know about and they're trying to complete these missions basically to score enough points against the empire to win now these missions are are very thematic there's some like gaining the death star plans and then once you have the death star plans you can go send a fleet to try to blow up the x-wing and so you can have these very thematic movie moments like the run on the x the run on the death star but in the board game no outcome is determined so you can steal the plans go run on the run of the death star and your entire fleet gets destroyed by the empire so you're rewriting star wars so a lot of it is rewriting star wars history but what i really like about it just like the new movies yeah but what i really appreciate it is the thematic moments the exciting moments that just naturally come out of the game you'll have moments like the empire has missions to capture one of your characters and put them in carbonite except maybe this time they captured lando they have lando and carbonite you have to go rescue land oh interesting which is neat and the empire might blow up a base they might blow up a planet with the death star that they think is your base and they might get your base and then it's game over they just randomly happen to blow up the right planet i mean these moments are super exciting and the game does a really good job of keeping the pace neither side feels like like you're ever out of the game right even like the the scrappy rebellion you can come back up you can evacuate your base if the empire finds it and you can start over again somewhere new so there's just so many different ways that this game can play out it's i mean i want to go play it right now you know what's fun i'm glad you said that because i do want to play this i've never played that surprisingly i've not once ever really and i'm a pretty big star wars fan i'm not i wouldn't say i'm a complete fanboy but i love star wars just like most people do i've never played it because it is a it is a big it's a bit of an intimidating looking like a three-hour game to play so it's an all-day kind of game you're now pitching against it for me however it's the closest you're ever feeling like to being a kid playing with your old star wars toys you know you've got you're building your x-wings your star destroyers moving your death star it's really cool i want to try it but this is how if you'll do this you teach me and one other person who's never played it because i definitely don't want to play you i think i'll get destroyed it depends i mean if i play i don't ever play like the rebellion really ever so i mostly play the imperial side so that is the set i am way more confident with so it might be a little interesting here's what i'll say i will definitely play star wars rebellion before we do another top 10 two player game list who knows what that'll be exactly my number three is not a giant game like that it's not based on star wars it is i like these little caveats by the way it is it it's not also star wars rebellion it's a different game right now we've had some overlap this is definitely not overlap because mine is a little game called crocodile yeah you know i learned crocodile i played crocodile at bgg khan for the first time ever when at bggcon two weeks ago for the first time for the first time you've never played with me no well we've never played oh my gosh so it's interesting that you said that because i had never played crocodile but this is a game that's been around forever it's a dexterity game if you're not familiar i'm setting up pictures right now and you're flicking little discs trying to get them into the center of the board but it is so much more than that and is so strategic and when i say dexterity i think a lot of people with board games they think dexterity is like chaos like jenga or like oh do i have to have a steady hand this is skill like playing pool or billiards right like and it and it really is it really feels that way more than any other game i've ever played and i too saw it at a couple conventions over the years and i looked at it and i saw a lot of people playing it there's always like a crocodile tournament at one of our local cons every year there's a little girl and one year that tournament one of the organizers came over to me and said hey we someone didn't show up for their spot you want to sit in like it's easy to play you'll probably have fun i said sure i was done the rest is history and now it's number three on my top ten two players list uh i got a boy i got a crocodile board uh probably three or four years ago now i love the game the game in fact i kind of want another like yeah yeah i want to get like i have a really nice one it was from mayday but they have some there are some companies make some really nice ones oh yeah and i kind of want to get a really nice one because i can tell you again like some of these other games that will never leave my list crocodile will never be a game that i'm like yeah i never need to play crocodile again it's always a game that you can come back to and play and kroger is one of those games it is a classic game it's been around like you said forever and it will be around forever because it's so easy just to sit down and play you can play with anybody your grandpa your sister your kid are you because you're really just flicking discs really i mean there's so much strategy into where you're flicking the discs you have to try to hit your opponent's discs and you're trying to create these chains maybe where i hit one of your discs and do another one of your discs and not get off the the coconut board so there's a ton of strategy and also these really exciting moments where like you get that perfect shot and you're like i can't believe it it's very exciting moments and also if you have the right attitude about it you can enjoy your play as much as you can enjoy your opponent's play because you can admire that skill that's being you know like if you're that lucky shot that happens or that well that that you don't generally enjoy if they are not a great player and they just luck out and you like clear three of your discs it does happen or someone's getting it in that center but the skill involved with the game is enough to be a challenge but not so much that people can't do it right everyone can every once in a while get one in that center hole yeah or get a really good shot and it's just enough to keep everyone wanting to play since you're really just flicking i mean you can be pushing this a any any way you want i mean well you can't you can't just slide you can't slide it but i mean if you're like like if you have some difficulties with dexterity i mean there are tons of other ways that you can flick these discs i mean it's just it's perfectly playable yeah crocodile if you see it and you've never played it and you see it at a convention i urge you take take the 15 minutes to sit down and play it with someone that's my number three all right what's your number two well number two is a game that you're probably saying where is this on the list this is seven wonders duel i mean let's be honest this is one of the most popular two player games of all time in fact it's number two on the bgg list the only one that's higher than that was twilight imperium oh and that's why they're premium twilight struggle number two on their top player two players well it's also quite high overall it is also quite high overall on the the bgg top like 100 games i mean and there's a reason for that it takes that seven wonders theme which a lot of people love seven wonders it's a game that got a lot of us into the hobby it still brings new people into the hobby but it distills it down to a two-player game and a very different game well it is it is different it shares dna if you can play seven wonders you can play seven wonders duel you're doing kind of the same things you're taking resource cards to generate resources to take better cards increase your military strength to build out these wonders but what's really neat is the way that these cards come out in like a pyramid where they're kind of overlapping each other and some of these cards are face down so every time you're taking a card you're giving one of the other cards to your opponent yeah and also if you're the one responsible for letting a card flip over it could be the perfect card for your opponent and you just gave it to him so part of the game is timing your pulls so that maybe you aren't the one that takes the last card off that makes another card flip now there are two expansions out for this that i think make the game even better yeah i can kind of address that a little bit yeah that that first the the base game is fantastic oh yeah i love the base game so i was going to say the best with that said particularly the first expansion agora no of course the second expansion oh yeah was the three the the first one was the gods pantheon yeah pantheon pantheon please let me correct that pantheon expansion if you're going to get one expansion get pampered sure because pantheon does let you actually have a lot more control over that staggering choice of cards like ryan was talking about because in the base game there are times where you get to a point where you're like well he's going to get that card right there's no way i can do anything about that because there are some limitations to what you do on your turn because effectively in the base game you're always taking a car but in pantheon it does gives you the action to do something else potentially yeah and when you do that you don't change the card draw it's interesting the way it flows you're like seating these these god cards and then in the second round you're getting to potentially buy one of the ones that you seeded in the first round so it gives you more to do and yeah more more control and it's i've played this with all sorts of people too like people who are not enthusiast gamers it's not exactly i wouldn't call this incredibly accessible this is not like jaipur jaipur is super accessible this takes you you put this on the table it takes the commitment of the other player to go okay because even as small as it is there's a lot to look at and a lot of icons to kind of take in but i will say that it is a great game if you are a board gamer in the hobby playing with somebody who's casual because if you're there if you already know the game well enough to answer their questions to help guide them through their turn if you have a partner or somebody that's just like doesn't really want to play games with you i bet you could get them to play seven wonders duel because it's quick it's simple and you're you're building something you're building this tableau you're building these wonders it has this sense of progression and this feeling of like oh this is cool i have my own little civilization here which is really neat yeah and last but not least it is also number two on my list well do you want so seven one more to say i don't have too much more to say it is probably with reason i think it's probably other than the other one you listed it is so high among all enthusiast gamers uh and there were people who i think weren't into it at first but with some of the expansions it made it a little bit more interesting and even the third expansion if you're an enthusiast gamer and you thought 7 wonders duel wasn't doing enough for you by the time you get that the second expansion agora yeah there's a lot going on agora is like a really meaty like it has area control and you're influencing these senators it's really cool uh pantheon does some things in the game that really perfect it agora do some things that really expand it too right a much meatier game so if you've tried it and you thought try it again with all those things if you get the chance this there's a really good reason why this is so high on everybody's list yeah so we are finally here to number one ryan i'm gonna let you go first with your number one we put seven wonders duel at number two so i think it's interesting to see what we both have at one only because my number one game is also one of the greatest games ever made oh boy magic the gathering i mean i i can't talk about two-player games without talking about magic the gathering this is the game that started so much for our hobby and for me and for me too and for a lot of people i think we played magic before i ever touched my first real board game yeah but coming from a background of having played magic growing up played magic all through college i play magic now it has just made heavier games easier because there's just so much in magic that has influenced game design over the past decade or two since it came out and it's really evident when you go back and play magic especially as someone who's never played you've seen all these other card games like yu-gi-oh and pokemon and any of these ccgs i mean magic kind of started that craze and it's still around for good reason because the game is super solid and they keep reinventing what magic is every couple years with new magic sets and while it might seem like it's impossible to keep up with all of that you can play online i play with magic arena which yeah is phenomenal it really helps you get into magic it helps you get started and it's free to play you don't ever have to spend any money playing it or you can spend money playing it which you would spend money playing paper magic anyway so you can kind of make that call on your own but there's just something about magic um that just constantly appeals to me and yes it is a game that can be played with more players there's tons of other game modes i'm not going to forget about games modes like commander which is like a wild mode where you have huge decks in the crazy powerful combos that's i mean people play this mode a lot it's purest form but in its purest form especially in tournament play best of three 1v1 it's just such a pure experience and it's really a really mental game i mean the the deck building and the crafting of these cards and the countering your opponent and figuring out what the meta is at any given time it's super interesting that meta i am not a magic the gathering player but the interesting thing about it is one of the few games sort of in our sector if you will that comes closest to sort of video games that are on the esports right exactly because when i watch people who really know how to play maggot magic did you say maggot maggot magic when i watch people do that or youtubers who are talking about it or even you talking about it it's like you're talking about it like you're a microbiologist who knows everything about microbiology and you're like i'm like what are you talking about there's a level of that when you really really know magic really well i mean there are people i mean i know magic but they're people that know magic yeah they will tell you about cards from 10 years ago and they'll tell you the value of those cards and that's another thing too it's become such a collector's item some of these cards are incredibly valuable yeah well that's that's a whole nother it's a whole other conversation and that brings me to my number one which is also not magic i'm going to caveat it again uh magic is a game that i admire but it's probably not something that i'll ever get into but but it's easy to see why it would also be on a top 10 two-player games list i mean we owe a lot to that energy but my number one is quarto yeah i should have seen this one coming absolutely could have seen this one coming i guess i've talked about porto a lot on the channel it's even been it's in my top 10 games of all time this is a game that will often just be sitting out in the middle of a table in my house for anyone to just say hey you want to play game of chordo because it can be played very easily now if you've not played quarto i'm going to give you a brief description the beginning of that description is going to make you go uh that doesn't sound very good but i'm going to do it nonetheless it's like tic-tac-toe on steroids right exactly but if you play this once i guarantee you especially if you lose you're going to want to play again immediately steroids part that really makes it make sense yeah for sure so it's a very beautiful wooden board and there's all these pieces uh and the pieces are tall they're short they're square they're round some have holes in them some are flat uh and then there's dark ones and there's dr seuss book you can play with a fox you can play in a box uh no but there's all these different pieces and the common mistake including ryan has ever made is you think oh well mine are these pieces no if you read the rules you'll realize all the pieces are in one pool and all those different variables and the differences between them are what you have to kind of take into consideration while you're playing the other hook is on your turn effectively the other player is going to give you your piece to play so we talked a lot today about not letting the other player win this game is nothing but not letting the other player win because when you pick up a piece and it's your opponent's turn and you're giving it to them to play you better make sure that they can't win with that piece yeah that's the hard like that's the part that really twists your brain yeah and and the way you win with the pieces you're getting four in a row uh or you know orthogonally in one row or diagonally across the middle of the board it's a very simple board but when you get four in a row of either for dark for light for round four square basically four in a row that have this one similar variable you win the game so that means you could have four in a row that have some lights and darks some rounds and squares but they're all flat or they'll all have a hole in them or they're all short or they're all tall those sorts of things and it has just enough variables like that to make any gamer have to go oh there's one there's one too many variables for me to have a mastery of this and then you're and the best part about it is when your opponent wins it's because you gave them the win every time yeah it's so delicious because you'll be playing and you know you're about to win and you see your opponent put their finger on one and you're like yes yes go ahead give me that one and then you take it and you go yep and boom right there it is such a fun game and it rarely if ever ends in a stalemate a lot of people will think okay games like this they often understand that like tic-tac-toe almost never does that happen now there will get to a situation where you have so many pieces on the board that kind of like seven wonders duel you'll look at the pieces that are left you'll know the cycle of the turns that are left and you'll go oh if unless they screw up right i'm dead right like if we both make good turns every turn i am dead or but that happens really late game the beautiful thing about this game is you can teach it to someone and i'm pretty ruthless in this game i don't usually uh go all in when i'm teaching a game but this game is unique in that when you beat someone quickly they want to play again right because now that you kind of understand how the game plays and and when you go back with a little bit of a better grasp yeah and beating someone quickly happens in two and a half minutes right i mean this is like checkers chess that you style the game like so you just have a long game well you just i guess chess can be long chess can be a long game but you're just giving pieces back and forth and as soon as you win you're able to kind of point out like oh yeah you didn't see these are all flat or these are all dark um i can't recommend quarto enough it's been around for a while now it's from gigamic uh so they have a line of all those wooden games i for my money quarto is by far the best of those games and that is the last that's it of our top ten two players we almost had a full 20 i think we only we only had a little bit of overlapping we had two games over 700 duel land versus sea watergate oh three great three games overlapping was not not a good uh not a bad not a good sign not a good sign oh there's there's so many good two-player games out there yeah we and we could give honorable mentions but we'll be here for another hour talking so we're not going to do that there were so many that were just like so close but let us know what you think of our top tens let us know what your top tens are at least just some of your favorite two player games and the ones that we met the ones that we missed oh and there's there's plenty i'm sure there are and if you have any questions about any of the games that we didn't cover too thoroughly ask them down below until next time make sure everyone has fun at the table and we'll see you then you

Channel: Man vs Meeple

Views: 60,902

Keywords: Board Games, Boardgames, Tabletop Games, Games, Card Games, Euro Games, Strategy Games, Family Games, Kids Games, Gen Con, Best Games, Top 10 Games, Watch it Played, The Dice Tower, Good Games, Top 10 Board Games, 2-Player Games

Id: LCCs7qnyyCs

Length: 58min 54sec (3534 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 09 2021