Boardgames Are Awesome
(despite two-player woes)!
OK, maybe I'm not a huge boardgame player, but I do enjoy getting together with friends for the occasional evening of play. This most frequently takes the form of La Roja and I getting together wih Guillotina and El Topé to play something like Settler's of Catan, Starfarers of Catan, Puerto Rico or Carcassonne.
However, there are plenty of evenings and weekends when it's just the two of us and we'd still like to spend an hour or two at the gametable. So, we've recently been looking into the games that are out there which support two players. We already have a copy of the two-player Puerto Rico spinnoff San Juan - however, I think I'm fundamentally not that into card games, so we haven't really ended up playing much of it.
But we have picked up a couple of games recently that support some two-player action: Power Grid and Ticket to Ride: Europe. We're still getting a feel for them, but initial experiences are generally positive. One consistent drawback we've noticed so far is that the games tend end in pretty close scores. This may be due to our both ramping up at the same time and using a similar playing style or it may be that playing with two players fundamentally precludes some of the more interesting interactions and strategies you might see with more players. Investigations shall continue. And maybe one day we'll work our way up to having as extensive a game collection as El Perdido's!
On a final note, I've found it interesting that you can get online access to a lot of these games - for instance, you can play Ticket to Ride and other games online at the publisher's site. I also found an online version of a purely two-player game I was looking into, Hive. And then there's the recent addition of Carcassonne and Settlers to Xbox Live Arcade. Too bad my Xbox 360's out of service at the moment, being repaired for an out of warranty DVD failure :-P
However, there are plenty of evenings and weekends when it's just the two of us and we'd still like to spend an hour or two at the gametable. So, we've recently been looking into the games that are out there which support two players. We already have a copy of the two-player Puerto Rico spinnoff San Juan - however, I think I'm fundamentally not that into card games, so we haven't really ended up playing much of it.
But we have picked up a couple of games recently that support some two-player action: Power Grid and Ticket to Ride: Europe. We're still getting a feel for them, but initial experiences are generally positive. One consistent drawback we've noticed so far is that the games tend end in pretty close scores. This may be due to our both ramping up at the same time and using a similar playing style or it may be that playing with two players fundamentally precludes some of the more interesting interactions and strategies you might see with more players. Investigations shall continue. And maybe one day we'll work our way up to having as extensive a game collection as El Perdido's!
On a final note, I've found it interesting that you can get online access to a lot of these games - for instance, you can play Ticket to Ride and other games online at the publisher's site. I also found an online version of a purely two-player game I was looking into, Hive. And then there's the recent addition of Carcassonne and Settlers to Xbox Live Arcade. Too bad my Xbox 360's out of service at the moment, being repaired for an out of warranty DVD failure :-P
Labels: boardgames
1 Comments:
Good two-player games are, indeed, the toughest kinds of games to find, but there are several great ones out there.
My wife and I played a *lot* of backgammon during our courtship (which tells you a lot about us, I guess), with her convincing me pretty quickly that there was lot more strategy to that game than I'd originally thought.
More recently, our favorite two-player game has been Lost Cities, but you may not go for it, since it's pretty much entirely a card game. (Though there is a board, it's only used very superficially.)
There are good two-player variants of Settlers of Catan, too. Some friends of ours in the Bay Area used to play such a variant more-or-less constantly, racking up an impressive running score across literally hundreds of games. I can get you their variant rules, if you like.
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