Top 10 Board Games for Couples
One of the side effects of the global pandemic has been the rise of the board game industry. More and more people have been turning to the hobby to pass the time while being stuck indoors enduring lockdowns and being unable to meet with people to try to curb the spread of the virus. For us, board games have helped us keep our sanity (unless we are playing Mansions of Madness!) when we haven’t been able to meet up with friends and socialise like we used to. Many of you, like us, are now spending a lot more time with your partners than you have even spent before, and many of you, like us, like to spend that time playing board games. We have played a lot of games over the last year especially, and we thought it would be good to share a list of the best games we have been playing, to help give other couples who are into board games an idea of what games could be good for them. These games are not necessarily specifically 2-player games, but all of them play very well at the 2-player count so they will all be good to play with your significant other! This list is based on games we have played over the last year. Let us know what games you would put on this list!
Spirit Island
The first game on our list is Spirit Island. Spirit Island is a cooperative game often described as the opposite of Catan, where the island fights back!
Invaders have come to the island, building towns and cities and blighting the land with their vile presence. You and your partner will be spirits using your powers to instil fear into the hearts of the invaders and with the help of the indigenous Dahan, drive them screaming from the island, never to return.
Each player controls a spirit who has unique abilities and varies in complexity. You will start off with a small amount of presence on the board, and some weak abilities that might allow you to push invaders or Dahan around, and maybe cause a little bit of damage. However, as the game progresses your spirit will grow in strength, and abilities will be unlocked culminating in new devastating powers such as city destroying Tsunamis, terrifying Talons of Lightning and Pillars of Living Flame.
At the start of each round, your spirit will grow, adding presence to the board, learning new powers or reclaiming power cards they have played before. When you add presence to the board, you have a choice of taking it from one of two tracks on your spirit board – the “Energy Gained” track or the “Card Plays” track. As you open up spaces on these tracks you will increase either the amount of energy you will gain each round to spend on using your power cards, or the maximum number of power cards you can play in a round.
Next you will gain energy, based on the number of spaces open on the Energy Gained track, after which you will choose and pay for the power cards you will play this round.
Power cards have either fast or slow abilities, depicted by either a red bird icon for fast powers or a blue turtle for slow powers. The fast powers will take effect before the invaders take their turn and the slow powers will take place after the invaders turn. The slow powers are usually more powerful but they mean that you need to plan at least one turn ahead, which adds another level to the strategy of the game. Cards also have elemental icons on them, and if you play enough of these icons to match the symbols of the innate powers that are printed on your spirit board, you will also get some bonus actions to help you repel the invaders.
During the invaders phase, invaders will explore, build and ravage the island. Ravaging is where they attack you, the Dahan and the land and this can cause spirits to lose presence, Dahan to be killed and the land to become blighted. The game comes with 8 different spirits, and each one has different abilities. Because of this, you will constantly have to discuss tactics with your partner which makes the game extremely interactive. You are always trying to find synergy between your spirits so one of you might push a bunch of invaders into a space where the other pulls out their big power to wipe them out and stop them from building or ravaging. As they spirits powers are so different from each other, every game is different and this gives the game a huge amount of replay value.
Spirit Island comes with some optional scenarios and adversaries which you may use when you become more experienced at the game, and the back of the game boards also have a more thematical map which is less balanced but looks more realistic. The map size is different depending on the number of players, and the amount of fear in the fear pool as well as the amount of blight on the blight card also scales to the number of players making it ideal for couples.
Mansions of Madness
If you are a couple who are into story-driven games then it is hard to do better than Mansions of Madness. Mansions of Madness is an epic game of lore in which you are investigators investigating bizarre occurrences in H.P. Lovecraft’s world of Cthulhu. The companion app, without which you cannot play the game, manages the whole world for you, telling you which tiles to place to create the map as you go along, what happens when monsters and cultists act and what information you find when you rummage through papers on a desk. It provides puzzles to unlock chests or reveal clues and so much more. The world has a subtle touch of magic, and your investigators may have the ability to cast spells, though not without consequences.
The base game comes with 4 scenarios to start off with and there are a ton of expansions with new stories and scenarios to keep you going. Mansions of Madness is like one of those Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, and the narrative draws you along as you make all of the important decisions. You get to explore the world, interact with NPCs and make all of the decisions that determine how the plot unfolds. The music from the app is super atmospheric and the tension is tangible as you perform your horror checks, or roll the dice to see if you have the Willpower to keep your sanity when confronted with one of the plethora of hideous creatures. You have to interview NPCs, gather clues, fight terrifying monsters and do your best to hide from a riotous mob intent on ripping your limbs off. The components are awesome, the stories are compelling and from the very first minute you are pulled into this world of intrigue and mystery led by a beautifully enthralling narrative.
The first time you play a scenario, you know literally nothing. There is very little setup time, which is surprising given the size of the box! You just put out the cards and tokens, shuffle the horror and damage decks, choose your characters and then leave everything else up to the app.
The rounds are split into the Investigator Phase, where players take 2 actions each to try to advance their agenda, and the dreaded Mythos Phase, where all the bad stuff happens. Your available actions include moving, searching, opening doors, solving puzzles, fighting, lighting fires, extinguishing fires, talking to NPCs and using items among others. Your movement allows you to move up to 2 spaces, and you may interrupt your movement to take your second action in the middle of it.
The app will tell you what monsters appear and when, as well as their movements and attacks. It will tell you what the NPCs say, what you find when you search, which stat you need to test to complete actions and it will take care of the general management of the game. Stories will always have the same overall content, but enough details will be changed up by the app to add to the replay value of the game.
The game works well at any player count, though you may find it to be a bit more difficult with 2 players as you will not have the same number of actions, special abilities or clues as you would with a higher player count. Even still, the stories are so engrossing that it is a wonderful experience with any number of players. There is nothing like getting lost in this world with your partner and working together to investigate mysteries, defeat cultists and solve puzzles using your wits and a bunch of clue tokens.
Agricola
Agricola is a very charming game and scales nicely to 2 players so it is a perfect game for couples who are looking for a gaming experience with a beautiful theme and feel-good mechanics. But don’t let those cute little animeeples fool you – Agricola is a pretty heavy game. This is a worker placement game and depending on the number of players, there are different numbers of action spaces available to you. You will play as farmers in 17th century Europe, and you will have to balance ploughing fields, sowing crops and raising animals to earn victory points to win the game. You will need to collect wood, clay, reeds and stone to extend your home, build fences and stables to keep the animals from running away and make major and minor improvements to your farm and home. You will play Occupation cards to give yourself advantages over your partner, and you will beget children to increase your number of workers and take more actions on your turn. The game takes place over 14 rounds split into 6 stages, and each stage ends in a harvest. At this time you will get to reap what you have sown, and then feed your family with food you have collected from the fishing space, baking bread from your grain or cooking your animals in your Fireplace or Cooking Hearth. If you cannot feed your family, you will have to beg for food, and that means you will lose valuable VP for each food you are short, so you have to always keep this in mind as you take your actions. After the feeding stage, your animals will breed if you have 2 or more of a type of animal, and as long as there is space for the new animal to live in.
I mentioned feel-good mechanics, and what I mean by that is that there are a ton of options on each turn, so even if your partner takes what you want, there are still any number of things you can do to improve your farm. This leads to a very pleasant feeling every time you make a move. However, you do get negative points at the end for not having any of a particular animal type, for having no grain or vegetable or for any of your farmyard space you didn’t use. This means that each player is trying to get something of everything and that in turn leads to more interaction when taking your actions than if everyone had different agendas.
We highly recommend trying this one out, and if you want to add more depth, try the Farmers of the Moor expansion, which adds forests and moors to your farmland, as well as some new mechanics, and you will also have to heat your home as well as feeding the family at the end of each stage.
Brass Birmingham
Next on our list is this beautiful game from Roxley Games called Brass Birmingham. You will play the part of an entrepreneur during the time of the First Industrial Revolution in Britain back in the 18th and 19th centuries. Each character has a background story and is based on a real life historical figure. The game is played over 2 eras, the Canal Era from 1770-1830 and the subsequent Rail Era from 1830-1870. You will develop industries such as cotton mills, pottery, the generically named manufactured goods and beer breweries and you will build coal mines and iron works which you will use to fuel your industries and develop your products.
The game has a very elegant design, and the components are top quality – the board feels like silk and the art is superbly thematic. You can choose to play on the “day” side of the board or the “night” side. There is no difference in the gameplay – this is just more of the lavishness the game bestows upon you. Although Brass Birmingham is quite a heavy game with lots of decisions and deep strategies, the mechanics are pretty simple and after a few rounds you and your partner should get the hang of it. After every action you take, including passing, you will discard a card and so each game is played out over a fixed number of rounds.
On each turn you will have a plethora of options, and it really feels great when you get a combo to come together, allowing you to flip your industry tiles and generate income as well as victory points. You will be able to build industries, expand your canal or rail network, develop industries, sell your products, take a loan (which you never have to pay back!) or discard cards to get wild cards if your cards aren’t helping you to do what you want.
The game half resets after the canal era, with older industries and all your canal links becoming obsolete and all of the cards being reshuffled ready for another set of rounds, this time more powered by coal and beer – what’s not to like about that!
The industries each work in a slightly different way but all of the parts come smoothly together into a cohesive unit to create a wonderful playing experience and a truly great time. Coal is used to build some industries as well as for railway lines, iron is also used to build some industries and to develop them to higher levels, and beer is used when you want to sell your goods – back in those times clean water was hard to come by in expanding settlements and beer was often the purest and safest drink available. Sometimes I think we might have been born in the wrong era!
At lower player counts, less location cards are available and there are less open markets to sell your goods, so in a 2-player game you will mainly play in the lower half of the board. It is still possible to expand into the upper half but the benefits usually do not outweigh the cost of going there. Because of this, the game scales perfectly to 2-players and is therefore perfect for couples.
Brass Birmingham is a really engrossing, thematic game and comes highly recommended by All Aboard.
Gloomhaven
Gloomhaven is the top-rated game on Board Game Geek, Reddit and almost anywhere else you look, and for good reason. This campaign-driven dungeon crawler is absolutely massive, and if you and your partner are fans of fantasy, and you have a lot of time on your hands, then this could be the game for you – and oh, what a game!
The first thing you will be hit by is the sheer volume of content in the box. There are hundreds of tokens and standees, teasing envelopes with messages such as “Open this envelope when you feel you deserve it”, boxes of miniatures for the player characters (most of which you are also not allowed to open from the start), a world map and stickers to place on it when you unlock scenarios, decks of cards, terrain tiles and so much more. It really does feel as if you have a world in a box!
Your crew is a band of mercenaries based in the city of Gloomhaven, and your adventure starts when you are approached in the Sleeping Lion tavern and offered gold to track down a thief. Before embarking on a scenario, as long as you are in Gloomhaven (where you may visit after each scenario) you will have an option to complete a City Event. This is a situation on a City Event card where you will be given a scene and you will have 2 choices. After making your choice, you flip over the card and read the consequence of your choice. For City Events the result is usually positive for the party. You may also visit the shop in Gloomhaven where you can spend the gold earned on your adventures to buy all sorts of items and upgrades. Next, you will take a Road Event if your next scenario is outside of the city, and this works in the same way as City Events. These events can have positive or negative outcomes for the party.
Then your adventure starts. The scenario book will show you which map tiles to use and if there are any special rules in the scenario. It will also tell you which monsters, traps, obstacles and terrain tiles to prepare for the scenario, and what you need to do to complete the mission.
The bulk of the game takes place in these dungeons. Players will start with a set number of cards – the number depending on their character, and these decks can be upgraded as your character levels up through experience gained during the scenarios. This experience is gained by performing certain actions on your cards, and there is also an experience bonus for successfully completing a scenario. Other events that occur throughout the course of the game can also give you experience.
On your turn, you will play 2 cards from your deck, one for the top action and the other for the bottom action. Each card also has a generic attack move as an alternative to the top action, and a generic movement as an alternative to the bottom action. Each character has different abilities and you and your partner will have to work together to combine your talents for the best effects. You will fight monsters, avoid traps, cast spells, pick up treasures and summon allies along with a whole bunch of other actions as you pick your way through the dungeons in your quest to complete your goal before you run out of time. After each round, you will discard the cards you used, and when you have no cards left in your hand, you will have to rest to get them back. This always results in you losing a card for the rest of the scenario, which works as a built-in timer for the game. Your more powerful actions also usually result in the loss of that card. There are no dice, but each player has a modifier deck that affects their attack moves. This deck can also be upgraded when you level up or complete personal scenario goals.
Gloomhaven is more of an experience than a game, and if you and your partner are fans of the fantasy genre, you will be hard pressed to find a better game on the market. The number of enemies changes with the number of players, and it works very well at the 2-player count. You also have the option of changing the difficulty level if it is too hard, or too easy for you. We really love it.
Everdell
Everdell is an adorable game in which small animals known as Critters build a city of Constructions using twigs, pebbles and resin all under the shade of the giant Ever Tree. The aesthetics are outstanding, with some beautiful art on the cards and an over-the-top tree that stands at the head of the board. All of the components have a great feel to them from the linen finish of the cards to the soft berries and smooth pebbles. The Critters are incredibly cute, as are the Constructions in which they live and work. But don’t be fooled by the charming cosmetics… this game is filled with strategy and moving parts that come together beautifully to make this into a very satisfying and quite deep experience.
On your turn you can take one of three actions – you may place a worker, play a card or prepare for a season. At its heart, Everdell is a worker-placement game, but you will play your cards without actually using any of your workers. There are a number of fixed basic action spaces on the board and extra Forest Locations are dealt from a deck of cards. These spaces will allow you to gather resources or cards, or to achieve events if you can meet the requirements needed to fulfil them. Some of the cards that you play into your city, known as Destination Cards, also have spaces for workers and give you the abilities specified on them.
To play a card, you must normally pay its resource cost and then place it in front of you into your city. You can choose to play a card from your hand, or from the Meadow where there are 8 communal cards. Although each card has a resource cost, every Construction is the perfect home for a specific type of Critter who will move in there for free if you have it built and can obtain that Critter card. This is one way to help you make the most of your resources, and a lot of the strategy in the game is attaining the right balance between collecting and generating your resources, and spending them in such a way that you can generate more resources and discounts for the other cards you wish to play.
There are 6 different types of cards, and they will either give you an immediate bonus, a production that activates immediately as well as when you prepare for spring and autumn, a worker space with an ability when you place your worker, ways to get bonus points at the end of the game, a bonus for playing certain card types or a discount to play other cards. Your city can contain a maximum of 15 cards, so you have to plan ahead to make sure you are going to maximise the number of points it will generate for you.
After you have placed all of your workers, and cannot or do not wish to play any more cards, then you must prepare for the next season. This just means that you take back all of your workers and get the bonus that is written on the Ever Tree. For spring and summer you will get 1 new worker and for autumn you get 2. There will be a production in spring and autumn, so all of your production cards will give you resources at this time, and in summer you will get to draw 2 cards from the Meadow.
The game begins in late winter and ends as the next winter approaches. The first round of the game is very quick as you start out with only 2 workers, and as you prepare for spring you may feel as if the game is going to finish very quickly. However, as you play your Critters and Constructions, and move through the seasons the game comes fully into bloom and you will find that there are many actions and choices you will have to make throughout the game.
The flow of Everdell is very smooth at 2-players, and there is never a feeling that there is something missing as compared to higher player counts. During setup, you place less Forest Locations for 2 players, and the second space found on some of the locations are not available when less than 4 players are playing. This helps scale the game for an enjoyable 2-player experience.
Terraforming Mars
Next up we have a heavy economic euro game where you will play a corporation tasked with the responsibility of making Mars inhabitable for future generations by increasing the temperature and oxygen levels of the planet while covering its surface with essential oceans. In Terraforming Mars, you will crash asteroids into the red planet to increase its temperature, create green areas to produce oxygen, tap subterranean reservoirs and aquifers to form oceans, introduce microbes into the ecosystem, develop science, mine for steel and titanium and all sorts of other activities on your way to completing this monumental task.
You will start out with few resources and you will have to buy patents to develop projects which you will use to build your engine to generate Mega Credits to pay for more projects, steel and titanium for building, plants, energy and heat. All of the parts integrate beautifully, and you can really pull off some awesome combos as you progress through the game.
Each round begins with players being dealt 4 cards, which are the patents for potential projects. The players can choose to keep as many of these cards as they like, but they must pay 3 Mega Credits for each one that they keep. Later, if they are not used, they can be sold on for just 1 Mega Credit. There is a drafting variant, which we really believe you should use, to reduce the luck factor of the card draw.
Next, players take turns taking one or two actions, and this continues on until everyone has passed and the generation ends. Actions include playing your cards, using one of the standard projects available to everyone at any time, taking repeat actions on your blue cards, funding awards or milestones, converting your plants to greeneries and using your heat to increase the temperature of Mars.
Terraforming Mars is mainly a card game but there is a board where you will build your cities, plant greeneries and place your oceans. The Standard Projects are printed on the boards, as are the oxygen and temperature tracks. Milestones and Awards are also found there and up to 3 of each of these can be funded for some bonus points at the end of the game. When you play a card, you must pay the Mega Credit cost, after making sure you meet all the requirements of the card. This greatly adds to the theme, which is probably the most appealing thing about this game. All of the cards make sense, and work very well together. You need a bunch of science tags to develop Anti-Gravity Technology or to build that Interstellar Colony Ship, and to get those tags, you need to play other science cards, such as Research and Fusion Power, so to get enough of them you really do have to focus on your science. You cannot play Worms until the oxygen has been increased to at least 4%, but when you do play them they will process your soil increasing your plant production. You need 6 Ocean tiles on the board before you can do your Kelp Farming, but the minerals in these new oceans are perfect for food production and therefore increase your plant production and income, and Immigrant City will cost you energy production and Mega Credit production to place, – taking care of immigrants is not cheap! But each time a city is placed, your investment will start to pay off by increasing your money production as the immigrants start working in the growing society.
The winner of Terraforming Mars is the person with the most victory points at the end of the game, and these points can be earned on cards, by raising the basic parameters of heat, oxygen and oceans, for Milestones and Awards and for greeneries and the cities attached to them. Your base victory points, or Terraforming Rating, is also your base income each generation and so it benefits you to increase this as early as possible. The game ends at the end of the generation where all of the basic parameters have been maxed out.
The resource design is very clever – the same cubes are used for everything and their designation depends on where they are placed.
There are over 200 project cards in the base game which gives it great replayability, and each time you play you will use different corporations with different abilities that can shape your strategy.
Some people say that Terraforming Mars is too long with only 2 players because it is possible that nobody is concentrating on maxing out some of the parameters. We have found the game to be a bit longer, but Terraforming Mars is so engaging that this has never been a problem for us. You are also free to use the World Government Terraforming option from the Venus Next expansion, even if you are not using Venus Next, in order to speed things up a bit. This just means that each round, the starting player chooses one of the parameters to increase by one. Also, “take that” cards are more effective at 2-player – when there are more players you are better off getting something that benefits yourself, rather than something that hurts one other player. We like that this adds to the interaction of the game. The only strict rules change at 2 players is that only first place is awarded for Awards.
Terraforming Mars is a deep and heavy game, with lots of decisions to make and lots of paths to victory. It can take anywhere from 90 minutes to over 4 hours, depending on how prone you are to analysis paralysis, and how much terraforming is actually taking place, but it is a lot of fun and one of our favourite games.
*Please note that the 3D pieces in the photo above are not part of the base set and we bought them separately.
Pandemic
Working together with your partner to figure out how to beat a game can be very satisfying, and that is why we have this fourth cooperative game on our list. In Pandemic, we are scientists working together to try to cure 4 infectious diseases that are wreaking havoc across the globe. Each character has a different ability, and one of the great things about this game is the discussions you will have while trying to use these abilities to get the most out of them and beat the game.
Pandemic is far from easy, but the challenge can lead to some really intense discussions about what you are going to do. There are three different ways to lose – you will lose if 8 outbreaks occur which causes a worldwide panic, if there are not enough disease cubes of a particular colour when you need to place one on the board – in this case the disease has spread out of control, and you also lose if there are not enough cards left in the player deck when you need to draw them – your team took too long and has run out of time. You can only win by discovering cures to all of the diseases before any of this happens.
At the start of the game, you will draw cards to infect 9 cities and these cards go into an infection discard pile, and will come back to haunt you numerous times throughout the game. Then, after each player gets a starting hand of cards, these nasty Epidemic cards will be shuffled into the deck using a genius mechanic that allows them to be spaced more or less evenly throughout the deck. You can increase or decrease the difficulty by choosing to include either 4, 5 or 6 Epidemic cards.
Players start at a research station in Atlanta which is supposed to represent the CDC. They will then take turns to perform 4 actions, draw 2 cards from the player deck, and then infect cities based on the current infection rate.
On your turn you will move around the board treating diseases and trying to collect the cards you need to discover cures. You can take multiple movements, each one costing an action, and you may either move to an adjacent space, travel for one action between research stations, or you can spend one of your city cards to use as a flight ticket to go to that city, or to go to any city in the world if you play the card of the city you are in. However, you need to be careful not to waste your cards as it is these same cards that you will need to spend to discover cures. To discover a cure, you must collect 5 city cards of the same colour, get to a research station, and then spend an action to discard the cards and cure the disease. The hand limit of 7 adds an extra complication here, so you can’t just go around picking up as many cards as you like until you have enough to cure the diseases. Hand management is a huge part of the game.
Scattered throughout the player deck are also some Event cards that give you one-time abilities that can be performed at any time, even on another player’s turn, and they do not cost an action to play. The Events include One Quiet Night, where you will skip the infection step for a turn, Government Grant, which allows you to place a new Research Station anywhere you want for free, and Resilient Population, where you can remove one of the city cards from the infection discard pile ensuring that it will never come out again.
As we mentioned, there are also Epidemic cards in the player deck and this is where most of the bad stuff is going to happen. When one of these cards is drawn, the first thing you do is increase the infection rate. This can lead to an increased number of cards being drawn during the infection phase of your turn. Next you will infect a new city, using another ingenious mechanic where you draw a new city from the bottom of the infection deck and place 3 disease cubes on it. Finally, you will intensify, where you shuffle the infection discard pile and place it back on top of the deck, and this is how the infection deck comes back to haunt you! The next time you draw from the infection deck, you are going to draw cities that have already been infected and this increases the chances of an outbreak!
The infection phase of your turn is where you draw a number of cards from the infection deck equal to the current infection rate and place a disease cube on each city that comes out. An outbreak occurs when you go to place a cube but find that there are already 3 cubes of that colour on the city. Instead of placing a 4th cube, you will instead move the marker one space forward on the Outbreak Track, and then place a cube of that colour on every adjacent city. In the case that an adjacent city already has 3 cubes on it, then a chain will occur and you will once again move the Outbreak Marker forward on the track and infect every city adjacent to that one, except for cities that have already had an Outbreak while resolving the current infection card. If you reach the end of the Outbreak track you will lose the game.
The other actions you can take on your turn are building research stations by discarding the card of the city you are in, treating diseases by removing a cube from the city you are in for each action you spend doing so and sharing knowledge, which means meeting another player in a city and then giving them that city card or taking it from them.
The characters you use each have a unique ability and this adds to the variety every time you play the game. There are 7 different characters and you will randomly draw 1 character at the start of the game. These abilities will make your very difficult task a little bit easier, and you should use them to your advantage if you are going to win the game. To give you some examples of the abilities, the Medic can treat all cubes of a disease in a city for one action, the Scientist only needs 4 cards of a colour instead of 5 to cure a disease at a research station and the Quarantine Specialist can prevent both Outbreaks and the placement of disease cubes in the city she is in and in all cities connected to that city.
Once a disease is cured, it becomes easier to treat, and if you manage to remove every cube of a cured disease, then it is eradicated, and will never come out again. This is not necessary to win the game, but it can certainly make things a bit easier.
Pandemic is a very intense game, but you will find that the tension goes in waves. There are turns where things start to go crazy and you are scrambling to jet across the board to prevent Outbreaks in South America, then back to Europe to try to calm things down there, and then suddenly things go quiet, and you have time to breathe, though always with the looming threat of a new Epidemic card causing more chaos. Communication with other players is key to winning the game – you cannot win if you do not coordinate your moves and figure out between you what the best way to deal with the situation is. This makes it a great game to play with your significant other, and the game works really well at 2-players. You will always either be dealing with a crisis, or preparing for what you know is coming, and that really adds to the fun of this game. It is definitely worthy of a spot in our top ten.
7 Wonders Duel
7 Wonders Duel is the only game on our list that is specifically for 2 players, and it is phenomenal! You would never expect to get such a big game in such a small box. In 7 Wonders Duel, each player is building a civilisation and you will construct buildings and Wonders in your quest to be the first to attain one of the 3 victory conditions – scientific, military or civilian.
The game takes place over three ages, and during each age you will build facilities to produce resources, improve your economy, expand your military and develop your civilisation’s science as you try to overcome your opponent.
Each age consists of a pyramid of cards in a different layout, and players will take turns drafting cards, which in turn will reveal other cards hidden behind them. About half of the cards are face down in the pyramid and three cards from each age are returned unseen to the box during setup, so there is always uncertainty about what cards are going to show up which can really add to the tension of the game.
The cards get more powerful as each age advances, and cards that you built during earlier ages can benefit you through special link symbols that allow you to build the upgrades for free if you can get the right combinations.
There are 7 types of building and you will have to choose carefully which ones to build to advance your own civilisation while at the same time thwarting the efforts of your opponent. These buildings are colour-coded – the brown cards produce raw materials to use as resources, grey cards produce manufactured goods, which are also used as resources, blue cards are civilian buildings and give you victory points, green cards are scientific buildings and help push you towards a scientific victory, yellow cards are commercial buildings which improve your economy, red cards are military buildings for intimidating your opponent and pushing for a military victory and you have purple guild cards which come out in the third age and give you victory points based on specific criteria.
Some cards in the first two ages are free, but most cards have a resource cost, and these can be paid for using the resources that your civilisation produces, though you can trade for the resources you don’t have in order to build them. One of the genius things about this game is the cost of trading, which increases depending on the amount of that resource produced by your opponent, so producing resources not only helps yourself, but also can hurt your opponent’s economy when they go to buy the resources they need to construct buildings. As we mentioned earlier, starting in Age 2, some buildings have a free construction condition along with a resource cost, and if you have the linked building from an earlier age, you can build it for free. Other buildings have a cost in coins, and coins can be generated by discarding cards instead of building them, by commercial buildings or by bonuses found on Wonders.
Each player starts with 4 Wonders which they can build to get special bonuses, but only 7 of these Wonders can be built which can lead to a race to see who can benefit from having more of them.
A Scientific victory can happen at any time as soon as one of the players gathers 6 different scientific symbols on their cards. However, even if you are not able to collect enough of these symbols to win, there are still good reasons to develop your science. For every 2 of the same symbol you get, you will be able to claim a Progress token from the game board. These tokens can give you a permanent benefit for the rest of the game, and can be very powerful depending on the situation. Most of the science cards also give you victory points to add to your tally at the end of the game.
A Military victory can also happen at any time. The conflict pawn starts in the middle of the military track and gets pulled back and forth throughout the game in a literal tug of war. Each time a military building is constructed, the pawn moves one space towards their opponent’s capital for every shield icon represented on the card. If it manages to reach the end of the track, the game ends immediately in a Military victory. Along the way, the track is split into zones, and the first time the conflict pawn enters one of these zones, the token is removed and the defending player loses the number of coins depicted on the token. Even if a Military victory is not achieved, there are victory points to be attained from the military track if you are closer to your enemy’s capital than you are to your own.
The third way to win the game is by Civilian victory. If nobody has attained either a Scientific or a Military victory, and the last card in the pyramid of the third age has been played, then players add up their victory points and the player with the most points wins. These points come from the buildings in your civilisation, victory points on Wonders, Scientific Progress token victory points, Military track victory points as well as the coins in your treasury – every 3 coins being worth 1 VP.
7 Wonders Duel plays in about 30 minutes or less, and every decision you make has ramifications further down the line. You always have to be aware of what your opponent is doing, and if you ignore any of the three victory conditions, you can find yourself in trouble very quickly. This is a great game to play with your partner and we strongly recommend it.
Res Arcana
Tom Lehman is most famous for his epic card game Race for the Galaxy, but for us, Res Arcana is his masterpiece. In this card driven engine builder, you play the part of mages who use the essences of Life, Death, Elan, Calm and Gold to fuel their magic as they battle to become the most powerful mage in the land.
At the start of the game you each draw 8 Artifact cards, and this will be your entire deck for the game. There is a draft variant which we highly recommend, that makes it possible to plan your engine as well as ensuring that the draw is more fair. You also draw two mages each, and the mages all have unique abilities. After you have gotten all of your Artifact cards, you can then decide which of your 2 mages suits your plan best. You will know right from the start all of the cards that are going to be in your deck.
Although the 8 Artifact cards make up your entire deck, you are not just limited to these abilities throughout the game. There are a bunch of communal magical items, and you will choose one of these each round for an extra power, and you will be able to use your essences to collect Places of Power and Monuments to get new abilities and generate more essences. As part of setup, 5 Places of Power and 2 Monuments are laid out on the table. These will also be your main source of Victory Points.
The game is a race to 10 victory points, and once one of the players has reached 10 VP, the game will end at the conclusion of that round, whereupon the player with the most points will win.
The Places of Power are double-sided so each time you play you will randomly choose which side of each of these cards to play with. This adds a lot of replayability to the game. There are also 10 different Monuments, and you may or may not see all of these throughout the course of the game. The Artifact deck consists of 40 cards, and as you only use 8 per player for each game, this also adds replay value.
Players start with 1 of each essence, and after shuffling their Artifact decks, deal themselves 3 cards as a starting hand. This allows you to jump right in and adds to the high pace of the game. On your turn you will play just one action, and especially in a 2-player game, this leads to very fast and smooth gameplay. There is very little downtime, so you never find yourself sitting for long waiting for your go, and you will get your cards into play very early so things can escalate very quickly.
As with all engine builders, finding synergy between your cards is the key to winning. You will formulate your plan during the drafting phase, or if you do not draft, then when you are dealt your initial Artifacts and Mages. There are several ways to rearrange your deck, for example, by using the Divination Magical Item, or the Hawk Artifact, so you can make sure that the cards you want come out quickly. You do not have to play all of your cards, and part of the beauty of the game is that if you draw a card that does not fit in with your strategy, you can just discard it to take 2 essences (or 1 gold) to use somewhere else.
As I mentioned, the Monuments and Places of Power will be your main source of Victory Points, though some of your Artifact cards, such as dragons, also give you points. Places of Power tend to give more points, but they have a high essence cost. Each of the Monuments cost 4 gold, so if your engine allows you to generate a lot of gold, that is where you can put your focus. The first player token goes to the first player to pass in a round, and it also comes with 1VP, so even deciding when to pass can be a very important decision, especially in late game.
There are a number of dragon cards in the deck as well as other attack cards, and these usually lead to your opponent losing Life essences, or if they do not have any to lose, then they must lose 2 of their other essences (including gold) to make up for it. Many people do not like these cards but we find that they add to the interaction of the game, and even the threat of being attacked means that you have to think about how to protect yourself, which adds another layer to your strategy. There are many ways to protect yourself from attack so if you are prepared it is not usually a big issue.
Res Arcana is quite easy to teach and learn, and though the iconography can seem confusing at first, you will learn it pretty quickly and at that point it will all make sense. The art on the cards is outstanding and really helps pull you into this world of magic. The theme comes through strongly in the cards – you can throw Life into the Sacrificial Pit to generate VP for Death essences, you can destroy your Dragon Egg to place a Dragon at a massive discount and the Dwarven Pickaxe allows you to use your Elan, which is your Dwarven spirit, to mine for gold.
Because this game plays so well at the 2-player count, and because it is so well designed and so much fun, it’s place on our top ten list is well deserved.