Designing Twilight Struggle, the top-ranked board game
fivethirtyeight.com
fivethirtyeight.com
I'd wager there's a sort of selection effect: the sort of person willing to sit down for a 2 player game in the first place is probably the sort of hard-core gamer who enjoys highly complex brainburners, and thus is more likely to rate it highly.
Compare that to the sort of moderate/casual boardgamer who prefers something along the lines of 7 Wonders. The former will play 7 Wonders and (may) give it a mediocre rating, while the latter aren't even going to try TS. Just a theory.
And for the record, the last time I played, TS took 5 hours, but neither of us were fluent and were thus often consulting the rules and/or stuck in analysis paralysis.
Spoiler: Twilight Struggle still #1.
So sad, since there are so few great two player games. I was really hoping this would be one of them.
For both types, card sets with little interaction usually have one or two good strategies, and luck plays a large-ish role in whether you or your opponent(s) can execute the strategy faster.
Card sets with more interaction are IMO strategically more interesting with more than one opponent. Usually, everyone will focus on keeping the strongest player from winning, who in turn gains less from further weakening a single opponent already weaker than him. In 2-player games, the stronger player can just lash out at the only other opponent, which directly increases his chance of winning.
So the chance of turning a game around after half the time played is much slimmer in a 2-player game than in a 4-player game, from my experience.
Anyway, Dominion is a great game that packs a lot of strategical depth in a rather short playing time!
Do you have any specific examples of how this happens? One of the design goals of Dominion is that there are no "kingmaker" mechanics, so you never have a choice of which player to attack or help. Cards that allow interaction usually target either the player to your left, or all other players.
I would disagree with you on TS, as it is one of the simplest two player games with any depth I have ever played. My wife owns a game store; I have played a great many two player games.
I love to play Coloretto, Battle Lines, Hive, and lately Innovation.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7atuZxmT954wz47aofSl...
(I am not affiliated with twilightstrategy.com in any way)
It's like the kid who owns the only copy of Street Fighter II in his class and, after a few weeks, can't find anyone who will play it with him.
I liked it because it was probably the first turn-based game I played that really made great use of Mac graphics featuring great interactive maps and mock newspaper headlines summarizing the reaction to actions, along with a frustratingly tough AI opponent.
Crawford was of an era where the interesting games were much more about teaching and conveying the designer's worldview, and less about creating Skinner boxes for maximizing IAP or expansion pack sales, or franchises.
The reason the missiles would always fly had a lot to do with the fact that as a player, you had to really view it not as a confrontational game, but as a cooperative game (with the AI) where mutually assured survival meant concessions were more important than aggression. This is pretty much antithetical to the conditioning in every other game of playing to win.
Some good history on the game here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game)
I can give some insight into why 2-player games are popular. (ETA: when I wrote this, I missed that 3-player games do slightly better.)
I'm a guy who engineered (optimized?) the fuck out of a 4-player card game (to minimize card-luck in a trick-taking game) called Ambition: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhH...
I succeeded in the design challenge, and I think it's a damn good game, but the game hasn't caught on and player-number (or, for math people, player arity) is almost certainly the biggest culprit. It takes exactly 4. (There's a 3-player variant, but it's not as fun and I'd rather just play a game designed for 3, like Skat.) The reason I bring this up is that I have insight into what 2-player games do so well. It's cultural. A 2-player game (or a 2-party game, like Bridge which has 2 teams of two players) is a showdown and it's decisive. It develops a "mind sport" culture. There's less of a feeling of decisivity in a 3- or 4-player game because you can't always separate "A outplayed B and C" from "B played best but C's mistakes unintentionally advantaged A over B and A won".
Game outcomes generally have four components: Chance, skill, strategic interaction, and flux. Flux is minute-by-minute engagement in the game (which can be modeled as a fluctuation in skill). Skill and flux are what we care about. The "strategic interaction" term might seem odd, because "strategy" and "skill" are often used interchangeably, but it actually refers to the scenario in 3+ party games where A, seeking his own strategic goals, unintentionally advantages B over C. This is sometimes called "strategic luck". (Or, it can devolve into a king-maker scenario. Or it can become an influence of table position, as in Puerto Rico, that some dislike. Or it can be made a part of the game, as in Diplomacy, where people pre-arrange interaction effects-- but might defect.) It's inevitable if you have more than 2 parties. And it makes it easy for people to feel "screwed", just as chance does, so while you can have that element and still have a good game (just as I'd argue that random chance doesn't make a game "bad", even if the Euro aesthetic eschews it) you're not likely to develop the "mind sport" culture of Go, Chess, or Bridge if that's the case.
I don't know for sure if this explains 2-player games getting higher ratings, but 2-player games and variable-player games (like Texas Hold 'em, which accommodates varying player number better than, say, a highly-engineered trick-taking game) do the best job of catching on and developing a reputation. A 2-player game is a showdown and a variarity game accommodates a group of unplanned size; exactly 3, 4, or 5 limits the audience and "catch on" speed.