![]() ![]() What it's really about, though, is two players trying to score points through careful hand management, a judicious amount of luck-pressing, and knowing when to cut your losses. The game is nominally about explorers setting off on expeditions to discover mythological cities lost to time. The best two-player games are titles that could only exist as two-player experiences. But you need to pick your strategy carefully, because specializing in a faction will reward you hands which feature multiple cards from the same faction will usually generate killer bonuses. Oh my, those factions! Each has a different color, a different art style, and a different play style. What elevates the experience is the speed and elegance of the gameplay, the rapid progression from weakling starter deck to the owner of killer dreadnoughts, the existence of "bases" that persist across turns, and the factions. The first player whose health (inexplicably called "authority" here) drops to zero loses. Then you discard those five cards, draw five more, and sit back to absorb some incoming photon torpedoes during your opponent's turn. ![]() ![]() On each turn, you will play all five cards in your hand, collecting money to buy new cards from the central market and dishing out attack points on your opponent. The game is the distilled essence of deck-builders + direct combat. Sometimes you just want to blow up your spouse's galactic empire, you know? And at moments like those, the discerning interstellar tyrant-in-training turns to Star Realms for a visceral, adrenaline-fueled battler. Some of the solo and co-op scenario cards that come with the standalone version of Star Realms: Frontiers. Star RealmsĢ players (1-4 players with Frontiers edition), 30 mins, ages 10+, $22 on Amazon Schotten Totten got a lovely 2016 reprint from Iello with some nice (if goofy) art, but if you don't like the aesthetic, pick up an earlier edition of a copy of Battle Line (the same game, but themed with Macedonian warriors). Games can be bashed out in 15 minutes, so this is a terrific weeknight "after dinner" game, made even better by the fact that it works well with kids (8 and up, unless your child is a prodigy, which I'm sure yours is). Like many Reiner Knizia games, this one is clean, simple, and largely themeless, and it makes a fabulous two-player filler. A set of optional "tactics" cards grant the holder special powers to manipulate cards after play they're fun, but I prefer the straightforward base game. Claim enough stones and you win bragging rights over the size of your Scottish territory. The best three-card hand wins, so numerical runs and identical colors are essential if you want to claim stones. On each turn, you can add one card from your hand to the space in front of any stone once each side of that stone accumulates three cards, a "battle" is fought over the stone. A two-player gem, Schotten Totten sees players battling over "boundary stones" arranged in a line across the center of the table. ![]()
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