7 wonders duel is a lot of fun. Feels similar to regular seven wonders but tweaked enough to be it’s own game.
Cribbage.
Is cribbage a board game or a card game with a wood board? 🤔
Here are my top 5 2 player specific games:
- Radlands. Mean as nails card based lane-battler with amazing components and art, easy rules, and tons of cool abilities on each card.
- Beer and Bread: easy to learn resource management and hand-passing to bake and brew even amounts of bread and beer. Simple components and tons of fun!
- 7 Wonders: Duel. Perhaps the best 7 wonders iteration ever
- Boop: simple rules but very thinky game with cute components, cats pushing each other off a bed. Much deeper than you’d think!
- Patchwork. It’s basically a meme to recommend this one but it’s a fantastic polyomino game that’s tougher than it looks.
Jaipur and patchwork
Jaipur is a lot of fun. They have an android app and it’s great when stuck waiting somewhere.
MageKnight plays well with 2 players
Don’t know if it counts as a board game, but Hive is great.
Hive is totally a board game! And you can make it yourself really easily with a 3D printer or even just paper!
My wife and I have been playing a lot of the 2 player varient of The Crew this month. Works really well with the “Jarvis” third player and makes for a good quick game to reel through a few missions of.
Everdell or Ticket to ride.
Battleship
It almost feels like cheating to say so, but Chess.