The five best board games for two players

Two is the most demanding count to design for: there is nowhere to hide, no politics, and no third party to absorb a bad decision. Games that handle it well handle it deliberately.

Every game here has two as its own minimum, so two is designed for rather than tolerated. Solo-capable games are on the one-player shelf instead. If it is nearly always just the pair of you, this is the best shelf in the hobby.

How this list is chosen

These five come from the same query that powers the finder, run with one filter pre-set. Expansions are excluded, so everything here is a game you can buy and play on its own, and only games with at least a hundred ratings are eligible.

Ranking is by community rating adjusted for how many people voted, not by raw average — otherwise a game rated 9.0 by a hundred devotees would outrank a classic rated 8.6 by forty thousand. The full method is here, and you can set your own filters to narrow this further by age, complexity or player count.