Ananda Gupta would go on to be a principal designer behind the 2012 XCOM reboot at Firaxis. Twilight Struggle, by designers Ananda Gupta and Jason Matthews, is a tour-de-force of card-driven strategy gaming. One of the best board games ever made, this strategy epic has one player as the United States and the other as the Soviet Union as each attempts to win the cold war.

(if you get really into it, there's even a campaign mode to link together multiple matches.) It's a simple, light, and enjoyable game, and one that nearly anyone can figure out how to play. Each player has a card showing which cards on the grid they need the other player to pick, and they alternate giving clues to try and pick all the words before they run out of time. I pick a secret assassin word, we lose right then.Ĭodenames Duet takes that formula and turns it into a cooperative two-player experience where we trade back-and-forth to find all the agents on the board. If I pick wrong the round is over for our team. If I pick at least one of the right ones and no wrong ones, we keep playing.

You might say 'Frost, 2' and hope I pick Snow and Tundra, but not Russia. The point of Codenames is simple: You say a clue word, and how many of the words on the board that clue word relates to, in order to get me to pick particular words. Codenames is a brilliantly fun word game for nearly anyone.

Best two player card and board games