The 8 Best Two-Player Board Games of 2025
Air, Land, & Sea is a quick, card-based battle game in which players try to gain control over the three titular theaters of combat. Gameplay is a bit like that of the card game War, with players strategically deploying cards in their hand to win battles. These battles continue until one player reaches 12 points and wins. It’s a fast and easy little game, but in our testing it wasn’t as interesting as Star Realms or as relaxing as The Fox in the Forest.
Blitzkrieg and Dogfight are two games produced by the publisher of Caesar, and they fill a similar niche: sub-30-minute wargames that are easy to learn and play. They each tackle slightly different themes—Blitzkrieg focuses more on the tug-of-war battle in the theaters of World War II, while Dogfight is themed around World War I biplane combat. Ultimately, though, they all have a similar action structure and feel. All are fun to play, but we think Caesar is the best of the bunch.
Boop is a game about cats pushing each other off a bed. It’s similar to tic-tac-toe, which makes it very simple to teach, but the added wrinkle here is that every piece you place pushes every other piece (including your own) one space directly away from you. It’s fun, cute, and great for younger players, but we found it a bit simple in comparison with our picks.
Catapult Feud is a dexterity game that does what it says on the tin: Each player controls toy catapults and uses them to knock over fortresses that the other player has assembled. In our research, we found the gameplay to be a bit too simplistic for most adults, but this could be a fun game for younger players.
Caper: Europe is a tug-of-war card drafting game that casts players as thieves who need to get gear to one of three different locations to pull off heists. As in one of our favorite kids’ games, Sushi Go, in this game, after you play a card, you and the other player trade hands. This creates a fun push-and-pull dynamic as the game progresses and players vie for points from each location. However, we found the game didn’t hold our attention after a playthrough or two as doggedly as our picks did.
Claim is a trick-taking card game with a multi-round twist where players use their cards to gather supporters to their side in a quest to take a murdered king’s throne. This one is well reviewed, and it looked like a good game in our research, but on BoardGameGeek it didn’t rate as highly as the card games we opted to play-test instead.
Codenames Duet is a two-player version of one of our favorite party games, and unlike our picks here, it focuses on cooperation. Players alternate giving one-word clues to their partner to get them to correctly guess which word in a grid is an “agent”—without accidentally selecting the hidden “assassin” card that ends the game. It works well enough, but it mostly just reminded me of how much I like the original game.
Crokinole, a dexterity game invented in the mid-1800s, features a wide, circular wooden board and small discs, and its gameplay is like a mix of shuffleboard and curling. Players alternate flicking discs, attempting to land their own in a center ring while bashing their opponent’s out. It’s widely popular, but the smallest playing boards are around 27 inches in diameter and cost more than $60. That’s a big investment of both money and space for just two players.
Cryptid: Urban Legends casts one player as a mysterious cryptid trying to escape a city and puts the other in the role of a scientist trying to track down and capture them. Players use cards to move three colors of cubes between the squares of the ever-shifting board. The cryptid player’s goal is to create a recognizable pattern, while the scientist wants the opposite. The game’s concept and play style are unique, but the experience never really clicked for me or anyone I played with. It’s difficult to manipulate the cubes without alerting your opponent to your plan, which they can easily squash, leading to a stalemate—which makes the very short play time feel like a slog.
Fog of Love is a role-playing experience designed to be the board game equivalent of a romantic comedy. Using hidden objectives and situation cards that make each playthrough follow a familiar act structure, the game seems to build a good framework for role-playing choices. But Inhuman Conditions is slightly less intimidating in terms of time commitment, and its role-playing can be less emotionally fraught, so we think it’s a better game of this type to try first.
Just like 7 Wonders Duel, Imhotep: The Duel is a scaled-down version of a popular multiplayer game. But while it’s enjoyable enough, Imhotep’s gameplay doesn’t condense as effectively as that of 7 Wonders. In my testing the two-player experience felt smaller and less substantial, and the few options you have on your turn don’t feel as impactful, which made strategy choices straightforward to the point of being dull.
Inhuman Conditions is a former pick. We still love its theme and how good it is at introducing new players to role-playing, but it has been in and out of stock since we named it as a pick. As a result, we’re removing it from our list of recommendations for now. We’ll update this guide if and when it becomes more widely available.
Ironwood is an asymmetrical wargame set in a steampunk world where the industry-driven Ironclads and nature-connected Woodwalkers battle for control of their land and the valuable crystals it contains. The two factions are distinct enough that players are presented with unique strategies and different goals, but the gameplay is similar enough that it’s not hard to switch between factions. It’s a solid two-player wargame, but we thought it lacked a bit of depth, and the convoluted rule book made learning the game more complicated than it needed to be.
Klask resembles a tabletop air-hockey table built by a particularly entrepreneurial woodshop teacher. It’s a dexterity game that combines magnets and reflexes, with your aim being to get a little plastic ball from your side of the board into your opponent’s goal. You do this by moving a pawn-like striker that is magnetically attached to a handle beneath the board. Little plastic magnets in the center of the board can attach to your striker and gum up the works. Klask is an exciting game to play and watch, and when I brought it to a game night with three of my friends, we had a good time setting up a quick little tournament. But it’s also quite large and fairly expensive for the amount of play time that most people are likely to get out of it.
The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle Earth is based on another one of our picks, 7 Wonders: Duel. It follows the same game flow, revolves around the same card-drafting mechanic, and plays in a similar time and style. It makes a few tweaks, including a “walk the ring to Mt. Doom” tug-of-war mechanic, but mostly it adds beautiful art and cohesive theming from Tolkien’s world. The playing experience is pretty interchangeable with the original, so unless you’re a big Lord of the Rings fan, we recommend sticking with 7 Wonders.
Lost Cities is a card game where you push your luck by funding risky expeditions into various harsh environments. It’s an engaging concept, and games are quick, but we found several of the other card games we tested more fun to play—and almost all of them were easier to travel with than this game and its comically oversized box.
Memoir ’44 is one of the most accessible war games in production. It pairs the childlike fun of playing with little green army men with the feeling of a more involved battle game like the Standard Combat Series. Set in the European theater of World War II, this game is a great introduction to more tactics-heavy games like Undaunted. But it takes a long time to set up (it has a lot of little green army men), and it isn’t well balanced. And its frustrating movement system too often leaves you unable to control distant troops.
Odin’s Ravens is a card-based race between Huginn and Muninn, two ravens that serve the Norse god Odin. It’s quick and easy to get into, but the gameplay is shallow. The other card games on our list simply have more replay value.
Onitama is a quick and easy-to-learn chess-like game with just four pawns and a king. The main difference from chess is that instead of each piece having its own unique move, they’re controlled by cards. As you use these cards, they pass to your opponent, so the two of you are in a constant push-pull as you trade moves looking to get the upper hand. It’s a quick game—my playthroughs lasted about 15 minutes—but we enjoyed the depth of Hive more.
Patchwork is one of our beginner board game picks because of its simple and speedy play. The quilting-themed puzzler is easy to learn, and it has a 20-minute play time, so you can zip through multiple games of Tetris-like placing and arranging. But our picks here are better options for intermediate players.
Quoridor (pronounced like “corridor”) is a quick abstract puzzle in which players place walls and move a pawn between them. Each player has a supply of 10 walls and the goal of moving their pawn to the far side of the board first. On each turn, you can either move your pawn or place a wall to block your opponent. The game goes from friendly to cutthroat very quickly, and the simple concept makes it easy to teach and fun to play, but in our tests the shine wore off after only a few plays.
Raptor is an asymmetric card-driven tactics game that has players take the roles of a mama raptor and her hatchlings and the humans hunting them (or is it the other way around?) Each turn, players choose a card from their hand and reveal it; whoever revealed the lowest-value card takes the action listed (like setting fires or hiding in bushes), while the other player gets action points equal to the difference between the two cards to use on movement or attacking their opponent. It’s a quick and fun game, and we like the Jurassic Park-esque theme (there were a lot of “clever girl” quotes during our playthroughs) but we preferred a game like Summoner Wars or Undaunted for this genre.
Rivals for Catan is a two-player card game set in the world of the wildly popular Catan. It seemed promising in our initial research, but it got lower scores on BoardGameGeek than the other card games we looked at, so we decided to exclude it from our testing.
Royal Visit is a tug-of-war in which each player uses cards in an attempt to convince a monarch to visit their duchy instead of the other player’s. But it didn’t rate as high as several other card games we saw in our research, so we opted not to play-test it.
Sail is a cooperative trick-taking game where players work together to navigate their ship through Kraken-infested waters. Each round (there are up to five), players get dealt a hand of cards and then trade one with the other player (without seeing what the other player is giving them first). Players are not allowed to communicate for the rest of the round. As the round progresses, each trick will control the ship’s movement, depending on who wins the trick and the symbols appearing on the cards played. Players will need to anticipate what their teammate will play and how best to achieve their shared goals based on that assumption. It’s a fun limited communication game, but we like Sky Team better for that particular genre. Though if this idea sounds fun you may want to also check out The Crew, another game worth considering in our guide to card games.
Schotten Totten is a bit like an expanded Air, Land, & Sea in which you play cards from your hand with the goal of playing a higher-value set of three cards than your opponent, to win control of nine different control points (stones, in the game’s theming). It’s snappy, and the added tactic cards allow for plenty of strategic replayability, but we liked all of our duel picks a little more.
Star Wars: The Deckbuilding Game offers a lot of interesting twists on the classic deck-building format. It plays a bit like Star Realms, but in this case each player picks a side (dark or light) and is allowed to purchase cards only from the market that’s associated with their side. In addition to using cards to attack your opponent directly, you can spend damage to eliminate opposing cards from the market, which leads to some fun strategic play. This game is a great pick for a die-hard Star Wars fan, but everyone else is likely to have a better time with Star Realms.
That Time You Killed Me is an abstract game about two time travelers attempting to eliminate one another. They do so by jumping through three time periods (past, present, and future), which are represented by three small game boards. Each player’s goal is to trap their opponent’s pieces from various timelines. It’s an interesting concept, with actions on one board affecting the others in fun ways, and it includes a campaign mode of sorts that reveals more complex mechanics as the game progresses. However, it never really clicked with our testers as our picks did.
Till the Last Gasp is a two-player role-playing exercise that adds a few thoughtful design touches to help ease people into the role-playing experience. Through the course of the roughly 90-minute game, players spend dice to accomplish individual objectives that they’re given at the start. The game encourages dramatic storytelling but stops short of requiring it, focusing instead on manipulating the game area and one’s opponent with the dice. It’s plenty of fun with the right opponent, but Inhuman Conditions is a better intro to the genre.
Twilight Struggle is a fantastic game—one I really enjoyed learning during my initial testing for this guide—but its appeal faded quickly. Though I’ve revisited every other pick in this guide, I’ve never found myself coming back to this one. Long-term testing feedback from other Wirecutter staffers indicated that I’m not alone. It’s still a great game, but we’ve concluded that most people will get more play time and fun out of our other picks.
Undaunted: Battle of Britain takes the deck-building wargame mechanics of Undaunted: Normandy and focuses the action on the skies as the Luftwaffe and Royal Air Force dogfight over the British Isles. It follows the same basic structure of the other Undaunted games but adds new mechanics for aerial combat, all of which are well thought-out and evocative. We believe that most people will prefer to start with the first game of the series, but if you’re a dogfighting geek, this is a great game to get.
Watergate is a densely themed game that’s rich with historical research. Players assume the roles of President Richard Nixon and Washington Post reporters and engage in a tense tug-of-war in which the reporters try to expose the president’s wrongdoings before he accumulates enough political momentum to avoid consequences. It’s a great game for the right pair of players, and it can be fun to play over and over to create various alternate histories, but we wouldn’t recommend it for most people. Games don’t always have to be escapism, but during our playtesting in 2023 and 2024, we preferred games that weren’t so … relevant.
