Category: Two player

Games for two people

Crazy Ates

Yes, you read that right. Crazy Ates, not Crazy Eights. Most of you know the original, Crazy Eights, with the boring numbers, but Crazy Ates steps it up a level: each number has a food allocated to it!Crazy Ates

Possibly my favorite is 10, the banana split. But what’s really fun is when you add the colors. You know how in Crazy Eights, there are colors as well as numbers to match? Hopefully, you know what I’m talking about. Anyways, something my cousins and I like to do is think of a food of that color and add it to the dish of that number. For example, a blue number 3 could be the blue cheese burger. Or a purple 9 could be an eggplant quiche. It adds just a little more flavor to the original play.

8 stands as the wild card, depicted by a steak with ice cream on top (please don’t ask). If you don’t have a matching number or color to the card in play as of your turn, you can play your favorite dead cow topped with dairy to get you out of drawing! The goal of the game is to be the first person without any cards left.

Both the Crazy Eights and Crazy Ates are simple and good for little kids while not being brain-numbingly boring for the adults. There’s still a level of strategy involved, even if it is pretty small.

 

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Terraforming Mars

One of those things that we all love to fantasize about. Or at least, I do. Because honestly, who doesn’t want to imagine turning a desolate, uninhabitable planet into a technological wonder?Terraforming Mars

In Terraforming Mars, each player represents a corporation that is helping in the terraforming process. They are competing to help the most (tracked as points) in order to gain more government funding.

The terraforming process itself has three necessities. Oxygen, heat and water. To make these, you play cards out of your hand that increase your steel, titanium, plant, energy, heat and money productions. You use the money to do this, which is why you (of course) want as much money as possible.

Some cards just require money, but some require specific things that you have to discard or simply have in front of you.  This is where you have to be really careful and smart about how you play (Munchkin skills help with that). Other cards can only be played when the conditions are right. For instance, some cards (Livestock, I believe) can only be played when there is at least 7% oxygen. The game ends when the planet is technically habitable, or -if you’re playing alone- when you hit a certain amount of generations (turns).

If there was one thing I could change about this game, it would be to add a cooperative version. As fun as it is to be competing corporations, I would like to believe that in the event of a terraforming mission we would work together.

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Time to go to the Robot Lab!

This week I’d like to introduce a Kickstarter game called Robot Lab. I’ll give you one guess on what it’s about: yup, it’s about robots!

In Robot Lab, you each choose a color for the body of your robot. As you draw cards throughout the game, you have two goals: get a head, two arms and two legs of your robot’s color attached to your robot, and stop your opponent from reaching that goal.Robot Lab

You can do this by using your “attach” turn to attach a piece you don’t want onto their robot. For instance, if they’re building an orange robot, and you’re building blue, and they had no head, you could use your turn to attach a red head from your hand onto their robot.

This game could theoretically be adapted to be cooperative or single-player, but I think that would take a lot of the fun out of it. One of the best parts is that it takes the Munchkin aspect of stabbing your friend in the back to simplest form. No fancy, triple-card moves, just a wrong colored arm and a turn to spare.

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Eyes of the Jungle

Eyes of the Jungle is a cooperative game where there are 8 artifacts that all have to get back to their spaces, but they’re blocked by obstacles. This little difficulty is especially amplified by the way the board is set up: the obstacles, remedies and artifacts are all mixed together and then placed face-down, so you don’t know whether you’re going to pick up an obstacle, which then has to be placed in its numbered space, a remedy, which is saved until you decide to use it in order to remove an obstacle, or an artifact, which stays in place and must move one space at a time towards its destination.Eyes of the Jungle

I enjoy the mechanics of this game, particularly the remedies. We did end up adding a couple obstacles to some of the remedies so that they made sense, and so that each obstacle had at least 1 way to clear it. That said, even with the additions, it’s still pretty hard.

The reason it is so challenging is because there are way more obstacles than remedies. I appreciate that, even as a game meant for young(ish) children, it’s actually pretty easy to lose.

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Harry Potter Trivia!

For all of the Potterheads like me out there, it turns out there is now a Harry Potter Trivia game! I found it at Hot Topic when I was spending some gift cards I got for my birthday.Harry Potter Trivial Pursuit

The questions were in six categories, each assigned to a different color: The Dark Arts: Purple; Hogwarts: Blue; Magical Spells & Potions: Pink; Magical Objects: Orange; Magical People: Yellow; and Animals & Magical Creatures: Green. Questions in a category could range from “What creature did Hagrid introduce to the class during his first lesson?” to “What type of dragon does Cedric Diggory face in the first task of the Triwizard Tournament?”.

For my first game, I played with Mom, but then she had to go make dinner. Luckily, one of the perks of this game is that you can play it by yourself, too. Be forewarned: some of the questions are very hard.

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Let’s build a Treehouse!

Treehouse is another Pyramid Arcade game from Looney Labs. In Treehouse, you have one trio of pyramids each. You also have one in the center. Over the course of the game, you are trying to change your trio to match the trio in the center (or, occasionally, vice versa).Treehouse

I love how simple this game is. There are rules for how you are allowed to move the pieces, but, on principle, the actual gameplay is quick and easy.

That saying, it does take a little while to get acquainted with the movement rules. They are, however, very similar to the other Pyramid Arcade rules.

Because of the many colors of pyramids, we played with light blue trees. This can be amusing, to say that you had ice trees, or trees on fire.

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You need a Ticket to Ride

Ticket to Ride is a train game, and the particular one I bring you today is in North America. You get tickets, showing you what route to make, then attempt to match train cards of the same color* and build tracks.

Ticket to RideI think this game is a good geography lesson. You get to see where the cities are in the grand scheme of things. It’s also a good lesson in building off of what you have, since you only have a limited amount of train tracks. Thus you reuse tracks a lot. I did get lucky, my three initial tickets were New York to Atlanta, New York to Dallas, and New York to Los Angeles.

At the end of the game I also unintentionally got New York to Seattle. I had 2 train cars left, which would signal the end of the game, but we each got one last turn. I had a track from New York to Los Angeles, and, because of other tickets, I also had a track from Las Vegas to Seattle. Not because I realized I could get the ticket, but because I wanted to have one large train line.

* For those who are color-blind, each color of train card also has a symbol and a different style of train car.

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World War 5

Yep, that’s right. We’re skipping 3 and 4 (we know 3 is the Giant Cockroaches from Chrononauts – same creators) and heading straight into World War 5, at which point the 6 main continents have all been divided into 3 equal parts. Each continent is a nation-state in the war, and you are trying to wipe out the other nations. You wipe them out by a) actually destroying all of their pieces or b) leaving their continent uninhabited by any of their pieces. You can’t fight a war if you don’t even have a base anymore!World War 5

This is one of the Pyramid Arcade games. Thus all of the pieces used in the game are pyramids. Each continent is a different color. I suggest strategically picking your continent, instead of picking by color. We played one game where my cousin picked Africa for the red, and my other cousin and I picked South America and Australia. That wasn’t smart for any of us because any two of us could have teamed up on the other one, but luckily for me my cousin on South America agreed to let me win if we took out her brother together.

I really appreciate that they have connectors attaching the Americas to Asia and Australia, because I know there are games where you have to go West across Africa and Europe to get to the Americas when you could logically just go East.

Once you get the hang of it, World War 5 is a great game to play whenever you have a little bit of time. It generally takes about a half hour to play, but that half hour is jam-packed with invasion, invading the invaders that are in your nation, invading your opponent’s nation while they invade yours, making obscure plans, making alliances, stabbing your allies in the back (I have a very Munchkin strategy for this game), and chasing enemy pyramids around in circles because you didn’t block off their escape route.

Or, in simpler terms, its a half hour of sheer amusement.

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Max

Max is a cooperative kids board game where you are trying to get the little critters (Chipmunk, Mouse and Bird) to the tree before Max (the cat) catches up to them. It was one of my first games and my first cooperative board game.Max

I like the aspect of choice. A lot of kids’ games, you just pick up the card and hope it goes in your favor. In Max, you get to choose which critter to move on a given turn.

I think, if you put your mind to it, it’s pretty hard to lose. I wouldn’t know, because recently my goal has been to make the cat win. Meanwhile the other player (my cousin) has been trying to get the animals to the tree. Thus, it can also be a competitive game. In the picture above, my cousin had successfully gotten the chipmunk to safety when I rolled double black, so Max ate the other two.

I think the treats and trails are cute. There are four cat treats, so if Max gets too close to the critters for your comfort, you can call him back to his starting point. There are also trails, one for each critter. When they land on their trail, they take the trail to wherever it ends. They’re effectively shortcuts. Unfortunately, Max, if he lands on it, will also take the trails.

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Zoodoku

Zooduku is the alternative game in Sudoku Challenge. It is pretty much Sudoku with animals… and a couple new rules.Sudoku Challenge

I love that people have made an animal version of Sudoku. I think it’s adorable. What’s funny is that this isn’t the first Zoodoku I’ve played. I used to play Zoodoku with stickers on little cards. So what makes this unique?

Simple: it has a point system. It takes a lot of creativity to take a solo game like Sudoku and turn it into a multi-player competitive game with points.

I do find it strange that Zoodoku is 6 boxes of 6, not 9 boxes of 9 like Sudoku. It certainly simplifies things, though. I have been told that it is meant for younger children, and that is why it is smaller.

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