The Two-Player Problem

Realistically, most of the games that actually get played in my house are two player games, because most nights it’s just me and whoever I’ve dragged into it that week, not some full table of five regulars showing up on schedule. That’s a completely normal situation and yet a shocking number of games I get excited about, on paper, quietly assume you’ve got four or five bodies to work with and just… don’t say so clearly on the box.

I’ve gotten a little annoying about this, I’ll admit it. I check player count scaling now before I check basically anything else, before theme, before complexity, before the art on the cover. Learned that lesson the hard way with Kemet, which I’ve already written about elsewhere, a game that’s genuinely a different and worse experience at two than at four or five, and nothing on that box warned me clearly enough that the two player mode was going to be the weak version.

What I’ve come to appreciate, and appreciate more the older I get into this hobby, is a game that was actually designed for two from the ground up instead of scaled down as an afterthought. Netrunner’s the obvious one, that’s not a four player game wearing a two player costume, it’s built for exactly two people and it shows in every part of the design, the asymmetry, the pacing, the way information hiding actually matters. That’s rarer than it should be. A lot of games treat two players as the minimum they’ll tolerate rather than a mode they actually built for.

I don’t think this makes me right about anything, plenty of people have full regular game nights and never think about this at all. But if you’re in the same boat I am, mostly two-player nights, do the homework before you buy. The box art won’t tell you. The scaling section buried in the rulebook usually will, if you’re willing to go looking for it before you’re already committed.