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Love and War and Gin (A couple play some board games)

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My girlfriend and I have just returned to university after a long summer and have decided to try a new hobby, board gaming. The idea sprung from our desire for an activity which would allow us to relax together after a long day without looking at a screen. It can be too easy to fall into negative patterns as a couple. Churning through a West Wing box set can be enjoyable but it doesn't really do much for the relationship.

Our experience of board gaming up to this point is limited to Cluedo, Monopoly and Guess Who. Abi, my partner, has never even played a game of chess. Going to Boardgamegeek.com was a bewildering and unhelpful experience. Abandoning our research we decided to take a trip to the book shop and ended up with a copy of Carcassonne. Why did we choose it? Well, it was £20, I had heard of it Abi has been there in real life and the box said "ideal for two players".

Unboxing our new game was remarkably exciting. I had never considered that element of the hobby before. Full colour instructions, little wooden people, thick printed cardboard, it was really a joy to dig through our little treasure chest. As Abi napped I read the instructions and internalised the simple rules in about half an hour. So it would fall to me explain the game, a daunting prospect. My fear was unfounded, after three turns the rules were shared. We could start playing for real. Building our little world was fantastically rewarding and the rules are simple enough for us to drink our G and Ts with impunity.

So our first tentative steps into board gaming have been a success (more so for me as I won our first game handily). I may talk a little more about Carcassonne once we've had more time to explore the depth of the strategy. We will continue to play it for the the next month or so, but we really need advice as to what our next game should be. We are open to any theme or style, war game or strategy game, the only condition is it must be suited to two players.

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Carcassonne is a great game to play with your other half. I strongly recommend getting either/both of the first two expansions. [The King and Scout micro-expansion is also great.] They add a bit more variety and depth to the game.

The other game I play all the time with my girlfriend is Dominion. plays quickly, great with two players, and also works well with 3 or 4. Very easy to learn. Although some people complain that it's boring/too abstract.

My current fav two player board game is War of the Ring, but, this is a very different beast. While my other half occasionally agrees to play, I think it's only cause she feels sorry for me. And the next game i was to get is the new addition of Descent: it doesn't look too complicated and should work well with one player acting as evil overlord, and the other controlling a 2 or 3 heros.

I'd be interested to hear any other good suggestions for two player games that are arn't much more complicated than Dominion/Carc?

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Hah, that 3MA podcast a few episodes back mentioned that research by some people discovered that unboxing is actually the most exciting part about playing a board game :P

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would anyone else back 1960? or is it too much too soon?

If you kept the tone light, I could certainly see 1960 working. I'm also going to recommend Pandemic, if only because it's a great game to recommend to newbies, whatever the situation.

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Yeah, I've been getting my girlfriend into stuff recently as well, and Dominion and Carcassonne were our first two. Pandemic is also great, but you need a bigger group for it. She's been inviting co-workers over to have actual game nights now and is getting excited about it. I picked up Power Grid for our next one, as it's pretty simple from the games of it that I've played in the past and people should be down. She's also super excited to play Arkham Horror, but I fear it may be a bit too much for so early in her board gaming career. I've found that stuff that riffs off of better known games has gone over well. She really liked Kill Doctor Lucky, for example (reverse Cluedo. Everyone is competing to kill the doctor without being noticed by the other guests). I'm also in pretty early stages with her though, so I'll be keeping an eye on the thread for any other ideas.

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These suggestions are great. Getting into a pastime which spans thousands of years of human history can be intimidation. We may stick with Rio Grande Games for a while, they are cheap and many seem to be well suited to two players. I'd say Dominion will be our next venture. We may also make the switch from gin and tonics to gin Martinis, gin is a universal constant.

Our Carcassonne games are becoming a bitter battle for agricultural dominance, the last game was won by my placing a farmer on the final tile. The final score was something like 80-70. We have also started to read some social commentary into the farmers. Their permanence on the board has lead to a few theories as to their symbolic meaning. The downtrodden working classes or a noble constant constituting the backbone of a developing society?

Quick update on teaching and learning games; chess, I taught Abi chess. Yesterday we were hanging out in her house. There happens to be a chess set belonging to one of her house mates set up in the living room. I suggested she learn how the pieces move just because it is such common knowledge, I internalised the rules as a child and they live in my brain with bicycle riding and writing my name. The process of sharing this deeply ingrained information with her was very rewarding. We played a game and by the end she understood precisely as much as me, which is to say very little. I never knew how much pleasure I could draw from the leaning phase of games. Too often in video games the learning phase is just an annoying barrier to enjoyment, however when it is collaborative and systems opposed to reflex based it becomes its own little pre-game treat.

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Inspired by this review of Key to the Kingdom, me and my friends bought and brought along the game to our vacation in France.

The game was very pleasantly visual and exciting, but super broken and will require some serious house rules to make it playable a second time.

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I used to love Key to the Kingdom when I was younger, but I haven't really played it with a critical eye as an adult. Do you recall which parts you considered broken?

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Our Carcassonne games are becoming a bitter battle for agricultural dominance, the last game was won by my placing a farmer on the final tile.

Oh yes, that sounds very familar! :D

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Quite late to the party on this thread, but here are some suggestions for you, these are in a vague 'difficulty curve' order to aid in progression but are all 2 player recommended (some of them 2p only!), welcome to the hobby :):

Battleship Galaxies - Don't be put off by the name, this is a great, fun reimagining of the original Battleship game that has some strategic depth. My only complaint is that the core game is a little unbalanced and it's in dire need of expansions. As new gamers you should easily get a lot of plays out of it before either of those things becomes an issue, though

Khet - A bit of a 'boardgame nerds chess', I found this enjoyable for a few games, my GF refuses to play me now because she made a really embarrassing move once and she has now decided the game hates her!

Ticket to Ride: The Card Game - A set collection game that can be brutal on your powers of recall. When playing this with my GF, we both get quieter and quieter as the game goes on as you have to 'card count' the piles you have scored that you aren't allowed to look at any more! Fun

Agricola: All creatures great and small - the 2 player version of a great boardgame, I'd probably put this a bit further down the list, it's not very complicated but uses some mechanisms that might be tricky to get used to if you haven't played other, similar Euro style boardgames. One that might be best taught to you rather than reading from the rulebook maybe?

A few acres of snow - Excellent 2 player, slightly abstract card driven wargame. Play this online at Yucata.de first and see what you think

Washington's War - Very simple 'large scale' game representing the American War of Independence, I can't play this with my GF as the war theme doesn't interest her at all, but it's very well done.

Twilight Struggle - One of the best two player strategy games there is, thoroughly enjoyable.

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Hey, I didn't see you there.

I've been absent from the forums for a while (final year project has had me trapped in the lab). In the meantime a lot has changed. We are now playing A Few Acres of Snow! It really does feel like quite an achievement to graduate to a Euro/war game from our humble beginnings.

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Nice to hear that you picked up A Few Acres of Snow! That's a great game especially in that it's one of the few new games that actually managed to incorporate Dominion's deckbuilding in a non-clone way, actually using it to simulate supply liens, which I thought was a great touch. It's a bit unbalanced but from what I heard in an interview (I think it may have been Three Moves Ahead!) the designer basically expects everyone to just house-rule the game a bit to fix those.

I found the Hunters & Gatherers version of Carcassone to be a vast improvement over the original, as well as more charming in art and theme. You might want to check that out!

One of my favourite two-player games is Thud! - a discworld boardgame. It's asymmetrical with very simple rules and still balanced, which I think is quite the accomplishment.

I also love Avalam not so much because of its depth of strategy but because the beautiful wooden board and simple rules make it a great game to unwind by.

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The second edition of A Few Acres feels quite well balanced to me. It could be that the asymmetry is misinterpreted as a lack of balance. Mathematically the board is weighted toward the French, however the British have a stronger empire deck. If the game stagnates and neither player makes much headway the French will win but the British player is given the tools to punch forwards.

The 3MA interview is great and worth going back to (152: A Few Minutes of Show With Martin Wallace).

I'm unfamiliar with the Carcassonne variant you mentioned. Do you have a link to it?

We took Carcassonne to my mum's at Christmas. It went down very well, as it has with Abi's housemates. The really nice thing about that game is a single turn explains almost all the rules, with the exception of farms.

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As usual the 'geek got your back:

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4390/carcassonne-hunters-and-gatherers

I thought of this too late for the holidays, but if you're ever in a situation where you want a group of non-gamer people to enjoy a game together, Dixit is the best I've found. It's all about predicting and interpreting people's interpretation of pieces of art. Really fun.

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Hunters and Gatherers is great, and was actually my introduction to Carcassonne. I would have bought it for my girlfriend and I to play instead of the vanilla one, but it also seems to be a lot harder to find.

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