I play a lot of boardgames. I’ve been hosting game nights for a long time and the last couple years in particular have taken me down a rabbit hole that, in the past, I never thought I’d be much interested in: the world of games designed specifically for two players. As is true for many boardgamers, over time I’ve found that smaller gatherings were much easier to organize and arrange versus the scheduling conflicts of trying to get a big group together. Many people live with a partner, and if you can enjoy playing games as a couple, suddenly the frequency of game nights can increase exponentially.
This was the initial impetus that led me down the path of investigating the world of two-player games, and I quickly came to realize the designs in this realm were just as varied, engaging and fascinating as the rest of the scene. I played many one-on-one games this year that I could write about, but I’ve chosen to feature two new titles that debuted in 2025 and work great as compact, portable, light and quick couples games while still containing some satisfying thinkiness.
High Tide is a small abstract tile-laying game from designer Marceline Leiman. The game received some attention and coverage after showing up at PAXU's Indie Games Night Market last year in handmade DIY form and quickly selling out, and publisher Underdog Games snatched it up to do a big official print run that was shipped out this summer.
This is a strategic game of stacking and moving your own tiles to cover and climb above your opponents (the game board comes to visually resemble the topography of a little tide pool on the table as high points and low points start emerging throughout the game) and when all the movement is settled, whoever has the most pieces showing from a top-view of the board is the victor.
The game comes packed in a little drawstring bag filled with hex tiles (reminiscent of the portable two-player classic Hive Pocket) and you can easily ditch the box and just throw the bag into your tote or backpack. Dumping the wooden hex tiles onto the table, you’ll then arrange them into a board, following some rules about how the three different color tiles are distributed in the center of the hex-grid.
You’re playing either pink starfish or blue seashells, but rather than only having the ability to move your own pieces, there’s an interesting second option: the sand-colored shells are a neutral set of pieces that either player can manipulate. As long as a piece isn’t your opponent’s color and has the freedom of movement to climb and stack on an adjacent pile higher than where it’s starting, you can move it. That’s the golden rule of High Tide: things must always move upwards, and when that’s no longer possible, the game is over.
The combination of quick, relatively random setup, restrictive movement rules and the intriguing addition of the neutral pieces makes for a contemplative yet snappy experience. You’ll consider the current shape of this little reef on the table, notice available options for raising up your pieces and think about what that might open up for your opponent… but there are quite a limited set of possibilities each turn.
Before you know it, someone will be locked out of any more moves, because their pieces have either been covered or cannot break out of the spots they’re stuck in, you’ll count tiles and someone will win a shiny best-of-three gem. High Tide goes quick, and I have a lot of space in my life for a thinky, tactile, abstract style game that doesn’t overstay its welcome and doesn’t make someone feel bad for not seeing ten moves ahead.
For the Emperor is a tiny-box card game designed by Whitney Loraine with art from the endlessly charming Sai Beppu. This comes from AllPlay’s line of super small boxes, just under the dimensions of Oink’s compact games. Here we have perhaps the smallest and quickest installment I’ve seen yet in a subgenre that is very much in vogue within the card games world: a lane battler, where you’ll play cards of various strengths in a tug-of-war with your opponent, hoping to win battles in the right places and secure victory.
Your slim deck contains cards of strengths 1 to 9, but you’ll only have access to a hand of a few of these at any time. In addition to their value, which directly contributes towards you winning any lane the card is played to, most cards also have a special ability: your archer card (the Kyudo) can add strength to a distant battle, while your Empress has only 1 strength but doubles the power of other warriors near her.
The game has a fairly typical theme of old-world Japanese armies, including the expected Samurai, but both the art style and the names of the figures represented contain more detail and interest than western games often bother with: cards like the Wokou, Yamabushi and Ashigaru were unfamiliar names to me, and the illustrations intrigued me enough to look into some history and learn about what the cards were representing.
Probably the most interesting choice present in the design of For the Emperor is that the battlefields (lanes) you’re fighting over sort of shift size and value as the game goes on: as opposed to a game like Hanamikoji (a classic Japan-inspired game in the same category) in this one you don’t know how many cards will be played into a given lane from the start. Instead you perform checks after each turn to determine if a banner must be placed, which dictate the maximum capacity of a particular location.
There have been many card games in the last few years taking after the classic Battle Line/Schotten Totten formula and tasking you with juggling multiple “battlefields” where your various cards might be more or less effective: the recent combo-filled Compile was hugely hyped and sold out everywhere, and before that Air Land & Sea helped inspire the AAA production of the mobile game Marvel Snap which uses very similar mechanics.
Placing For the Emperor on this spectrum of games is relatively easy, because it sits all the way to one end: I haven’t played a similar game that plays as quick and breezy as this one. The abilities of the cards are kept quite tame and you only play 8 of them each game, so it’s over as fast as it begins. After my first play or two this felt slightly disappointing, and I wished for more complexity and deep interaction between the powers of the cards.
But playing a couple more times I realized that this was a wonderful quality: me and my partner frequently find ourselves sitting together in a cafe with a few minutes to spare, and any bigger or deeper card game doesn’t make much sense to pull out and start setting up in these brief windows. For the Emperor, however, by being so very small and staying relatively simple, fills the niche in a lovely way. It’s satisfying to be able to have this flavor of strategic experience in a truly lightweight format.
High Tide & For the Emperor are two recommendations for new games that are easy to take with you and are very good for fitting in between other happenings in your day. If you’re looking for more recent, small, two-player recommendations, I’d suggest checking out some of Button Shy’s new wallet card games from 2025: we’ve been loving Dionysia, their Converge line has lots of mix-and-match potential, and Casinopolis is their latest cooperative city-building game. The miniature baseball bluffing game Hits & Outs from itten is a lovely example of the cool stuff coming out of the Japanese scene these days. For something with a little more meat, I’m fascinated by the trick-taking-duel Tango, and Toy Battle is the latest from two-player-design expert Paolo Mori and has been getting lots of attention.
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