Hanabi is a great cooperative card game where you can’t see your own hand and have to give your partner clues in order to play the right cards in the right order. I get it as a wedding present for people a lot and it hasn’t destroyed any marriages yet.

Jaipur is a lightly competitive trading game where you sell goods, you get more points for selling early and for selling more at once, so there’s a tradeoff. There’s also a camel collecting component.

Some games I like:

• Spirit Island - Co-op game that’s very complicated. You’re spirits working together in defending an island from colonizers. 1-4 players.

• Wingspan - A ‘euro-game’ where you add birds to your habitats to earn points. Competitive, but with only helpful interaction between players. 1-4 Players.

• The King Is Dead: Second Edition - A low-stakes ‘abstract strategy’ game that plays pretty quick. Players compete for influence between factions fighting for control of Britain. 2-4 Players.

• Paint Chip Poetry - Less of a game and more of a creative writing exercise. You combine paint chips to make poems responding to prompts. 1-6 Players.

• The Mind - Mini-game where you silently order cards numerically using telepathy. 1-30 Players.

• Tussie Mussie - Pocket-sized game about the meanings of flowers. 1-4 Players.

Hive is a fun little strategy game, it’s great for camping too: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2655/hive

If you want something giant to occupy you for a year or more, I love gloomhaven, and its sequels. Jaw of the Lion is the ‘pared down’ version that’s a good starting point, both for being more accessable and substantially cheaper. Frosthaven is the newest full game, and it is huge, to the point of maybe being too large, but me and my partner are into it. All of this is very RPG-like.

Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective is fun, very much a ‘try to solve cases like sherlock holmes’ game, so its pretty focused on those type of logic puzzles based on tracking the details of the case, but there’s a boardgame-y time managment aspect to it for how you go about collecting clues and interviewing people.

For more of a ‘classic boardgame’ in terms of just being single session, Spirit Island is great. Theme is being the spirits of an island, in tune with the natives, fighting off colonial empires coming to colonize the island, so that’s sick.

All of these are fully co-op.

Scrabble for the wordcels, Backgammon for the shape-rotators

Gosh, this is a huge space to explore, you have a lot of options. I would take a look at this game picker tool, which will show you some options at various play lengths.

For some relatively non-confrontational games, I would recommend:

• The Castles of Burgundy
• Troyes
• 7 Wonders Duel
• Clank!: Catacombs

A couple of good short card games:

• Sea Salt & Pepper
• Lost Cities

And then don’t discount standard deck card games as an option - you already have the components, and they’re great games! The standard two player recommendations would be:

• Gin Rummy
• Cribbage

…but there is a huge world of standard deck games out there, and I would recommend:

• East-West
• Haggis
• Court of the Medici

Splendor is great for 2 people. I personally love the simplicity of it and the fact that the coins are very tactile and it’s satisfying to interact with them and flip them around while you ponder your move. It scales up to more people very well and I’ve not found a single person who dislikes the game.

Jaipur was also already mentioned. Solid game designed for 2 players.

Ticket to Ride is very well designed and my dad loves it. Easy rules.🚆🚆 TRAIN GANG 🚆🚆. Good scoring system that keeps it interesting to the very end.

Small world is also fun but I’ve never played it as a 2 player game. People say it works well like that, though.

The following are easy recommendations based on my personal experience with playing games with my partner.

Micro Macro - Cooperative. It’s Where’s Waldo but you play as detectives solving crimes on a giant map.

Lost Cities - Competitive. The most play time of any game we own very light. Games last 10-20 minutes. Lighter on theme than I typically like.

Terraforming Mars - Competitive (less confrontational than Lost Cities). Heavy game. Long session 45 minutes+.

My brother and I play Onitama together whenever we visit one another.

It is like Chess, if you only had pawns and a king, where the pieces move in a way that is determined by a small pool of tiles you and your opponent both have access to.

Fungi

Chess is a classic 2 person game.

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Chutes and Ladders

Candyland

play the classics

If you like trick taking games check out Fox in the Forest. There is a competitive and a co-op version too.

Dominion works great 1v1 and scales up to 4 players in the base game, and up to 6 players with the Intrigue expansion or big box edition.

There are curse cards i.e. ways to reduce points from your opponent, but you can omit them from the game until you’re ready.

I also like to play these games 1v1:

• Colt Express
• Karuba
• Carcassone