My son and I play a lot of board games together and we’re always looking for games that play well with two players. Here are a few…
Bohnanza: The Duel
In this brand-new addition to the hugely popular game, two players grow various varieties of beans and harvest them to earn Gold coins. Each player can “gift” their opponent beans they don’t want ( and their opponent may not want!). Bohnus cards help earn additional Gold coins if the players can plant specific beans in specific orders in their bean field. The player who earns the most Gold coins wins.
The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game
Play Harry Dresden and his friends as they take on the cases from the bestselling Dresden Files novels in the ultimate what-if scenario—what if Harry was on the scene with allies who weren’t there in the books? The core game includes Harry, Murphy, Susan, Michael, and the Alphas and plays through the first five novels as well as Side Jobs, a random scenario generator based on the short story collection of the same name.
Steampunk Rally
Steampunk Rally is a strategy game that incorporates steampunk as more than just a bit of chrome. Using a unique dice-placement mechanic, players take on the roles of famous inventors like Nikola Tesla and Marie Curie constructing fantastical contraptions that make use of steam, heat and electricity in an attempt to win a no-holds barred race through the Swiss alps!
1960: Making of the President
In 1960: The Making of the President, you take on the role of Kennedy or Nixon vying for the right to lead the United States during the heart of the Cold War. However, it is not just foreign policy that poses a challenge to American leadership; the year 1960 is synonymous with great social upheaval and progress. The candidates must contend with the question of civil rights and balance their positions on social justice against the need for valuable Southern electoral votes. Of course, the ever-present issue of the economy also rears its ugly head, and both Nixon and Kennedy will compete to be the candidate with the voters’ pocket books in mind.
Dark Souls: The Board Game
Dark Souls™: The Board Game is a cooperative dungeon crawl board game for 1–4 players. To win the game, players must work together tactically to learn how to defeat enemies before finally confronting the boss. Players will find specific attack patterns and weaknesses of the enemies, but they will have to be careful. If a player’s character dies, the game does not end, but starting over comes at a cost. Each time a character falls in combat, the whole party must return to the bonfire, and all enemies reset. Use your resources sparingly, learn quickly, and prepare to die.
The Captain is Dead
The Captain is Dead puts you and up to 6 friends onto your own starship, under attack from hostile aliens and systems going down left and right. Worst of all, your heroic leader, the Captain, lies dead. It’s up to you and the various skills you bring to the table, to repair the ship enough to escape while also holding off the alien onslaught. From the Chief Engineer to the Janitor, you never know which combination of survivors you may have, making each game a unique challenge!
Yokohama
Once Yokohama was just a fishing village, but now at the beginning of the Meiji era it’s becoming a harbor open to foreign countries and one of the leading trade cities of Japan. As a result, many Japanese products such as copper and raw silk are collected in Yokohama for export to other countries. At the same time, the city is starting to incorporate foreign technology and culture, with even the streets becoming more modernized. In the shadow of this development was the presence of many Yokohama merchants.
The Blood of an Englishman
In The Blood of and Englishman, players take on the role of either Jack or the Giant. The Giant must maneuver the Fee, Fi, Fo, and Fum cards while Jack tries to create three bean stalks to steal the bag of gold, the Golden Goose, and the Singing Harp. Each player has different available actions and must carefully arrange the cards to achieve their goal. Are you brave enough to face your fate?
ELEMENT
Element, the latest release from the creative minds at Rather Dashing Games, is a unique strategy game for 2 to 4 players, ages 14 and up. Players take turns drawing and placing Element stones to encircle their opponents’ Sages (player pieces). Each Element has unique properties used to block an opponent’s movement. Feed walls of flame, move raging rivers, raise impenetrable mountain ranges and even bend wind to your command.
Pixel Tactics
Pixel Tactics is a head-to-head card game that’s small on size and big on strategy. Build your unit from 25 different hero classes. Rally around a leader that will affect everyone’s capabilities, and go to war with your opponent in a fast-paced battle of strategies!
Railways of the World: The Card Game
Railways of the World the Card Game is a fast paced card game adaptation of the highly popular Railways of the World board game series. Players use track cards and city cards to build a series of railroad routes and deliver goods. As the game progresses, players work to connect more cities, upgrade their engines for larger carrying capacity and deliver goods through a network of routes.
Neuroshima Hex 3.0
Neuroshima Hex! is a strategy game set in the post-apocalyptic world of Neuroshima, a Polish role-playing game. Each player leads one of four armies: Borgo, Hegemonia (Hegemony), Moloch, and Posterunek (Outpost). Each army deck consists of 34 tiles: soldiers, support tiles, and special actions. You win when all enemy headquarters are destroyed or when your headquarters is the least damaged at the end of the game.
Risk Legacy
Risk®Legacy is different than any other board game, choices players make during gameplay are permanent and affect every future game. The board is written on, stickers are attached to the rule book, secret envelopes are opened. Game pieces will be destroyed. Ripped up. Gone forever… Critically acclaimed twist on the classic game of Risk! This 2012 BoardGameGeek.com – Golden Geek Award winning game has received praise for its unique features, including hidden rules and intriguing options that become available the more it’s played.
Millennium Blades
Millennium Blades is a board game about a fictional collectible card game, which is also called Millennium Blades. You begin the game on pre-release night with just your starter deck. You’ll open new packs, form collections, and sell your junk cards on the aftermarket to buy hot new cards. Trade with your friends, build up your deck, and prepare to compete at Millennium Blades Worlds for the title of World Champion!
Zombie Dice
Quick & easy game for gamers & non-gamers alike. The 13 custom dice represent victims. Push your luck to eat their brains, but stop rolling before the shotgun blasts end your turn!
New Bedford
Set in the mid-1800s, the historical age of whaling, New Bedford gives 1 to 4 players the chance to build the Massachusetts town of the same name into a thriving community. Gather resources to add buildings with new actons, and launch ships to go whaling. Go out longest for the best choice, but wait too long and the whales become harder to catch. And don’t forget to pay your crew when ships return! Carefully balance risk management and tming to become a leader of industry in this medium-weight worker placement and resource management game.
The Battle of Five Armies
Based on the acclaimed mechanics first used in the War of the Ring boardgame, The Battle of Five Armies merges action dice and event cards, to make each game a unique experience. The system has been further enhanced by the addition of the “Fate Track” mechanic, handling the arrival of the allies and the triggering of special events. All the key characters in the battle; Bilbo, Gandalf, Thorin, Dain, the Elven King, Bard, Beorn, Bolg, are featured with powerful special abilities and unique sculptures.
The Manhattan Project
A revolutionary new technology has been discovered. Immediately, every major military power recognizes its destructive potential. Can your nation take the lead in this new arms race and become the world’s dominant superpower? In The Manhattan Project, you are the leader of a great nation’s atomic weapons program in a deadly race to build bigger and better bombs. But this is no peaceful race! You must not hesitate to use clever espionage and military force to advance your plans to secure your nation’s place!
War of the Ring
The War of the Ring has begun… The WAR OF THE RING is a grand strategy board game that allows its players to immerse themselves in the world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s THE LORD OF THE RINGS and experience its epic action, dramatic conflict, and memorable characters.
Roll For It!
Roll for it! is everything you want in a game. It’s fun! It’s easy! It’s fast! And it has lots of dice with cards to boot! At its heart, Roll for it! is a resource management game that blends the luck of the die roll with a decision making process that will bring smiles and laughter to everyone at the table.
Onirim – Collection Oniverse
Onirim is a solo/cooperative card game: you must work against the game, and find the oneiric doors before you run out of cards. Will you wander in each room, hoping to find the door that will take you further, or will you let chance sort things out and trust in your luck? In both cases, you will have to deal with the slithering nightmares that haunt the hallways of the labyrinth.
DC Comics Deck-Building Game
Play as Batman™, Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, The Flash, Green Lantern, or Cyborg. The Justice League of America is ready for action! Each Super Hero has a unique special ability that will open up different strategies to the player. Follow that strategy or break away with a plan of your own. Card combos, strategy, and fun abound in this game where every card is a well-known, fan-favorite card with amazing art.
Twilight Struggle
This Deluxe Edition of Twilight Struggle seeks to capture the feeling of that earlier era.Twilight Struggle is a two-player game simulating the forty-five year dance of intrigue, prestige, and occasional flares of warfare between the Soviet Union and the United States. Twilight Struggle recreates the conflict between the most powerful nation states the world has ever known. The scope of the game covers the entire world as it was found in 1945.
Onitama
Onitama is a two-player, perfect information abstract game with a random starting set-up. Each player has two open cards that each display a possible move for any of his pieces. There is a fifth card that cannot be used by either player. On a player’s turn, he chooses one of his cards, moves one of his pieces according to the chosen card, then replaces the card he used with the fifth card. The other player then chooses one of his cards, moves accordingly, and exchanges that card with this fifth card – which is, of course, the card the first player just used. Taking the opponent’s main pawn, or moving your main pawn into your opponent’s main pawn’s starting space, wins you the game.
Great Western Trail
In Great Western Trail, you are rival cattlemen in 19th century America, herding cattle in a circular trail around the state of Texas. Your cattle are then shipped by train, earning you money and victory points. Hire capable staff, such as cowboys to improve your herd, craftsmen to build your cattle posts, or engineers for the railroad line. Upon each arrival at the destination station, have your most valuable cattle in tow. The winner is the player who manages their herd best and exhibits good timing in mastering the opportunities and pitfalls of the Great Western Trail.
Aeon’s End
Aeon’s End is a cooperative game that explores the deckbuilding genre with a number of innovative mechanisms, including a variable turn order system that simulates the chaos of an attack, and deck management rules that require careful planning with every discarded card. Players will struggle to defend Gravehold from The Nameless and their hordes using unique abilities, powerful spells, and, most importantly of all, their collective wits.
Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle
A cooperative deck-building game that is progressive, allowing rich game play experiences to unfold with varying levels of difficulty.
13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962
For thirteen days in 1962, the world stood at the brink of atomic destruction as the United States and Soviet Union faced off over missiles which had been placed in Cuba. Would the USSR back down and remove the missiles? Would the US push forward with a full invasion or send bombers towards targets within the Soviet Union? Who would blink first?
Viticulture: Essential Edition
In Viticulture, you find yourself in rustic, pre-modern Tuscany, where you’ve inherited a meager vineyard. You’ll have a few plots of land, an old crushpad, a tiny cellar, 3 workers…and the dream of owning the best winery in Italy. Your job is to allocate your workers and helpful visitors to complete various tasks throughout the year. Each season is different on a vineyard, so the workers have different tasks they can take care of in the summer and winter. There’s competition over those tasks, and often the first worker to arrive at each one has an advantage over the rest.
Lost Cities: The Card Game
Who will discover the ancient civilizations? Two explorers embark on research journeys to remote corners of the world: the Himalayan mountains, the Central American rainforest, the Egyptian desert, a mysterious volcano, and the bottom of the sea. As the cards are played, the expedition routes take shape and the explorers earn points. The most daring adventurers make bets on the success of their expeditions. The explorer with the highest score after three rounds of expeditions wins. The rules of the game are simple, but beware: The lost cities hold many unseen mysteries!
Valley of the Kings
In Valley of the Kings, 2-4 players are Egyptian nobles at the time of the pharaohs, preparing for their death and burial in the Valley of the Kings. In the Egyptian religion, when you die you can take it with you! Egyptians therefore stocked their tombs with food, shabti (statuettes of servants who will work for them in the afterlife), canopic jars (to preserve their organs), statues of the gods, household items, and amulets. You compete with the other players to accumulate the best artifacts for your tomb. At the end of the game, you score the artifacts stored there – the player with the most victory points wins!
Bottom of the 9th
It’s the bottom of the ninth inning. The game is tied. It’s down to the home team to score one run to win it all. Unfortunately, the home team is staring down the league’s best closer. A dice and card game for two players, Bottom of the 9th brings all the excitement of the final three outs of a baseball game into a compact 5-20 minute game session. With variable player strengths, bluffing/deduction, and die-rolling, only the pitcher knows what’s coming and the batter needs to keep his eyes peeled.
Tiny Epic Galaxies
A thirty-minute game of galactic conquest, Tiny Epic Galaxies is driven by an exciting dice-rolling mechanism that rewards thoughtful programming of the results. Players control a home galaxy and a fleet of space ships. As players upgrade their galaxies, they gain access to more ships and more dice.
Dungeon Roll
The Dungeon lies before you. How far will you go to seek glory and fame? Will you risk losing everything?
In Dungeon Roll, your goal is to collect the most experience points by defeating monsters, battling the dragon, and amassing treasure.
Fabled Fruit
Once upon a time there was a marvelous forest full of gorgeous fruits. These fruits could be squeezed and mixed into the most delicious juices. You live in this forest and are in search of the most savory fruits. Friendly forest dwellers will help you in different ways. You are greedy and thirsty. Who will be the first to satisfy their appetite for Fabled Fruits? This is a “Fable Game”, a new and unique concept in game experiences, where the gameplay changes over time.
Pandemic Legacy: Season 1
The world is on the brink of disaster. In Pandemic Legacy, your disease-fighting team must keep four deadly diseases at bay for a whole year. Each month will bring new surprises, and your actions in each game will have repercussions on the next. Will you let cities fall to the diseases? Will your team be enough to keep the viruses at bay for a whole year? Craft your own unique Pandemic experience with Pandemic Legacy.
Marvel Legendary
Like the Avengers or X-Men, players build their own super-team of spectacular Marvel superheroes, including Spider-Man, Iron Man, Wolverine, Hulk, and Thor! Players create their own powerful combos on the fly, combining their heroes awesome abilities to take down nasty Marvel supervillains like Venom and Mystique. Over the course of the game, recruit increasingly powerful Hero cards to add to your deck, building a stronger and stronger deck of the ultimate Marvel Superhero combinations. Easy to learn, with fast-paced gameplay. Features incredible original artwork of Marvel heroes and villains.
Blood Rage
In Blood Rage, each player controls their own Viking clan’s warriors, leader, and ship. Ragnarök has come, and it’s the end of the world! It’s the Vikings’ last chance to go down in a blaze of glory and secure their place in Valhalla at Odin’s side! For a Viking there are many pathways to glory. You can invade and pillage the land for its rewards, crush your opponents in epic battles, fulfill quests, increase your clan’s stats, or even die gloriously either in battle or from Ragnarök, the ultimate inescapable doom.
Evolution
In Evolution, players create and adapt their own species in a dynamic ecosystem with hungry predators and limited resources. Traits like Hard Shell and Horns will protect you from Carnivores, while a Long Neck will help you get food that others cannot reach. With over 12000 different species to create, every game becomes a different adventure. So gather your friends around the table and see who will best adapt their species to eat, multiply and thrive!
Dominion
You are a monarch, like your parents before you, a ruler of a small pleasant kingdom of rivers and evergreens. Unlike your parents, however, you have hopes and dreams! You want a bigger and more pleasant kingdom, with more rivers and a wider variety of trees. You want a Dominion! In all directions lie fiefs, freeholds, and feodums. All are small bits of land, controlled by petty lords and verging on anarchy. You will bring civilization to these people, uniting them under your banner.
King of Tokyo
Play mutant monsters, gigantic robots and other monstrous creatures, rampaging the city and vying for position as the one and only King of Tokyo! Combine your dice to gather energy, heal your monster or just slap the other monsters down! Spend your energy to trigger permanent or one-shot special powers: a second head, body armor, nova death ray…Stop at nothing to become the King of Tokyo… but that’s when the real trouble begins for you!
Concordia
CONCORDIA is a peaceful strategy game of economic development in Roman times for 2 to 5 players age 13 and up. Instead of luck of dice or cards, players must rely on their strategic abilities. Be sure to watch your rivals to determine which goals they are pursuing and where you can outpace them!
Harbour
Dockmaster Schlibble and Constable O’Brady cordially invite you to visit their bustling Harbour town. The denizens of this town are always wheeling and dealing! Collect and trade resources as you visit the various buildings of Harbour, and cash them in to buy your way into the town. Whoever has the most points worth of buildings when the game ends, wins!
Champions of Midgard
The old Jarl has died and his once prosperous port has fallen into a state of catastrophe. Fearsome creatures are coming in droves, driving chaos and destruction before them. Trolls attack the town, Draugr terrorize nearby villages, Monsters strike at travelers and merchants alike. The people are suffering and you could be their champion. Champions of Midgard blends worker-placement and dice-driven combat to create an exciting and strategic experience! Recuit warriors, gain powerful runes, and peer into the future – then send your faithful fighters on journeys to defeat fierce and mythical beasts.
Star Realms
Star Realms is a spaceship combat deckbuilding game designed by Magic Pro Tour Champions and Hall of Famers Darwin Kastle and Rob Dougherty (developer and cofounder of the Ascension Deckbuilding Game). The game offers all the thrills of traditional trading card game style combat, combined with the fun of a deckbuilding game. Play powerful ships, destroy enemy bases or blast your opponent directly on your way to victory!
Flash Point: Fire Rescue
Flash Point: Fire Rescue is a fully cooperative game, everyone plays on the same firefighting team – win or lose together! Every turn is filled with the tension of having to fight the fire back, rescuing victims or investigating points of interest. Players can ride the ambulance to safety or fire the engine’s deck gun in a desperate attempt to control the blaze. No two games are ever the same – and with two rulesets (family, & experienced) and 3 different difficulty levels there is a challenge to be had for all.
