Category: 1-2 Player Games

Defrag

It’s 1995…you’ve got a paper due first thing in the morning and your trusty computer has chosen tonight to slow to a crawl. You reboot, you task kill, you pet the monitor gently, no dice. You’re filled with dread as you realize you have only one option left. That’s right.

Clear your schedule, baby, it’s time to D-D-D-DEFRAG!

Defrag is a hand management grid puzzle game in which you are attempting to rearrange and consolidate various file fragments before exhausting your resources. Defrag has several solo and multiplayer game modes, including a series of increasingly difficult challenges with unique goals.

Game Mechanics:

  • Cooperative
  • Hand Management
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 2 Players
  • 15 – 25 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.00

Deep Space D-6

You are a Captain of the UEF! Your RPTR class starship was on routine patrol of the Auborne system when a distress call was received. Upon warping in you quickly realized it was a trap! With the help of your crew, you must survive until a rescue fleet appears.

Deep Space D-6 is a solitaire dice game about surviving the cruel depths of space. Each turn you’ll roll Crew dice and assign them to stations. You must plan carefully to take care of internal and external threats to your ship. Survive to win.

Game Mechanics:

  • Dice Rolling
  • Worker Placement
  • Solo/Solitaire

Game Specifications:

  • 1 Players
  • 30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.66

Dead Eye, the

Buckle up your Rad Suit.
Fire up the Rig.
Beware the Tox.

The Dead Eye is an adventure card game for one player.

Assume the role of a lone thermo-bandit downed on a hostile backwater planet.
Your mission? Find the next safe haven before you lose all hope and strength… and maybe, just maybe, find a way off of this desolate rock.

Cards in The Dead Eye represent Encounters that can have one of two Outcomes: Good or Bad. A Bad Outcome is triggered by a buildup of dangerous Heat while a Good Outcome is triggered by a buildup of valuable Juice. Your starting Draw Deck includes 6 cards with Juice and 6 cards with Heat. As you play through the deck, some of these cards will raise your Heat and Juice levels, while at other times the cards will be used as the Encounter itself.

Face dangerous Encounters, salvage useful Parts and reach safe Haven.

The Dead Eye includes a 12 page prelude comic book, 20 page rule-book, 1-fold double-sided game board, 2 pairs of stereoscopic-3D glasses, 1 pair of “hook-behind” stereoscopic-3D glasses and 54 unique cards.

—description from the publisher

Game Mechanics:

  •  Deck Building
  • Hand Management
  • Multi-Use Cards
  • Solo/Solitaire

Game Specifications:

  • 1 Player
  • 15 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.08

Curious Cargo

I stumbled upon a midnight market. It wasn’t selling flowers or farm goods. It was a more curious sort of cargo: energy capacitors, strange crystalline material, and something green and jiggly. Since then, I’ve been dragged into it, deep into the thick of it.

I paid a stranger more than I should have for manufacturing plans I hardly understood. Worse yet, they sold the same stuff to my best friend. Now, I have to get my supply lines up and running to prepare for shipping my cargo — and if my friend starts shipping some of this curious cargo, I’ll have to intercept their trucks and corner the market that way.

By hook or by crook, I’m going to be the king of curious cargo…

Curious Cargo is a two-player game in which you go head-to-head against your opponent by building up the infrastructure of your facility, calling in trucks at the right moment, all while perfectly timing the shipping and receiving of cargo to score the most points. Connect an interweaving web of lines to your shipping and receiving spaces. Play with two-color conveyor tiles, or step it up for an advanced experience and play with all three colors. Ship your custom-shaped cargo tokens to your opponent to interfere with their logistics plans!

The puzzling nature of Ryan Courtney’s Pipeline comes alive in Curious Cargo! With six unique player boards for each player and two game modes, a skillful challenge awaits even the sharpest competitor.

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Network and Route Building
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 Players
  • 30 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.18

Cryptid: Urban Legends

There’s something hiding among us: an elusive cryptid is prowling our city streets. The evidence is clear but, without definitive proof, the scientific community will never believe you. There’s nothing else to be done – you must track down this cryptid yourself!

Play as a determined Scientist manipulating heat, movement, and sonic sensors to scan the city, identify your quarry’s true location, and capture them. Or take the role of a Cryptid, snaking your way through the shadows and back alleys of the metropolis that surrounds you, eliminating all evidence of your existence as you go, desperately avoiding capture. Emerging victorious in this high stakes cat-and-mouse chase, played out across a sprawling urban landscape, will require all your ingenuity and foresight.

Cryptid: Urban Legends is a tense asymmetric game of competitive deductive reasoning for two players from the creators of Cryptid.

Game Mechanics:

  • Grid Management
  • Hand Management

Game Specifications:

  • 2 Players
  • 20 – 40 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.45

Classified Information

In the pursuit of political supremacy, knowledge is key. Since the revolution, two factions have been fighting for power in the dystopian, cyberpunk city of Intellexia. In order to break the years long deadlock and secure control of the city, each faction must uncover their adversary’s secret plans hidden inside their top secret, code-protected briefcase.

Your job, if you are to accept it, is to protect your secret code by cleverly deploying card abilities, by seeking help from the Guards, Assassins, and Sentinels at the local tech-noir guilds, and by encrypting information when you can. But espionage is a two-way street. While trying to deny your opponent information about your secret code, you must try to crack theirs.

Classified Information is a fast-playing (10-minutes or less), 2-player “iterative” deduction microgame that is fully contained within just 18 cards. Each turn a player plays a card from their hand in one of three ways (for its ability, for its guild affiliation or by discarding it out of the game). Once the draw deck is depleted players reveal their secret code and the single card left in their hand, if their card matches a number in their opponent’s code they may win the game, but things may not be so easy if their opponent also matches and has more guards, or has cleverly guarded their briefcase!

Will you be able to access your opponent’s Classified Information?

Game Mechanics:

  • Deduction
  • Hand Management

Game Specifications:

  • 2 Players
  • 10 – 15 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.25

Claim 2

The King is dead! What happened? Nobody really knows, but he was found face down in a wine barrel this morning. It could have been either foul play or his own thirst that did him in. Regardless, the King is dead without any known heirs, so it’s up to the five factions of the realm to decide who will be the new king: Will it be you or your opponent? Do you have what it takes to win over the realm’s factions?

Claim 2 is played in two distinct phases. In phase one, each player gets a hand of cards that they use to recruit followers. In phase two, they use the followers from phase one to compete and win over the five factions of the realms. Each faction has a special power that effects play, and powers can be different in each phase! At the end of the game, the player who has the majority of followers of a faction wins that faction’s vote, and whoever wins the vote of at least three factions wins the game!

Claim 2 is a standalone sequel to Claim, featuring five new factions that can be played on their own or mixed in any combination with the factions in Claim.

Game Mechanics:

  • Take That
  • Trick Taking

Game Specifications:

  • 2 Players
  • ~25 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.60

Brightcast

Brightcast is a fun, fast-paced, 2-player card game. It all starts with one basic rule: get one of each Spellcaster card or five the same Spellcaster card into play to win the game! Begin the game with 4 cards in your hand. Start each turn by drawing a card, then playing a card from your hand and performing that card’s action. Use your Spellcasters to claim victory and stop your opponent from trying to do the same!

Oh…and…watch out for Dragons!

Game Mechanics:

  •  Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 2 Players
  • 10 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.33

Caper: Europe

Your role as criminal mastermind is to recruit a crew of thieves, send them to locations across Europe, and provide them with gear. It’s your job to utilize your resources efficiently to steal goods, but being a great mastermind is about more than the things you walk away with. It’s the thrill of a well thought-out plan coming together: the set-up, the sting. Properly deploy your thieves and gear to dominate locations, outmaneuver your opponent’s plans, and win the night. You’ve got six rounds to plan and play your cards. Nothing like a tight timeline to up the stakes!

Caper: Europe is a two-player drafting game. You take turns sending thieves to famous locations across Europe, vying for control through special card powers. These thieves have tricks up their sleeves, which you can enhance by adding gear to them. And controlling the locations isn’t everything because priceless stolen goods await the thief who’s clever enough to snatch them first.

Your goal is to score the most points by winning locations, collecting stolen goods, and equipping thieves with their preferred gear. The mastermind with the most points, tallied at the end of six rounds, wins.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Majority / Influence
  • Closed Drafting
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 2 Players
  • 25 – 35 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.11

Botanik

In the hushed intimacy of her laboratory, the eminent researcher Beatrix Bury has just discovered a technology allowing to mechanically generate all kinds of edibles. Subtropical plants, stellar potatoes, Orion mandarins, this new technology opens a way to save the people of Forharms, prisoners of a world made of rust and toxic vapors. It’s in the urgency of a threatened world that the scientist puts two of her best teams in charge of developing her plan… that can seem quite demanding at times. Each team is engrossed in its mission and Beatrix’s laboratory becomes the battlefield of fierce competition to produce the best performing machine. You are promoted to the head of one of these two teams, and must prove yourself worthy of the head researchers’ trust. Rise up to the challenge!

Develop the most effective network of mecha-botanics, the combination of plants and science! Botanik offers fluid mechanics (one action per turn), in addition to an ingenious exchange system, associated with tiles of different groups/colours.

Game Mechanics:

  • Open Drafting
  • Pattern Building
  • Set Collection
  • Take That
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 Players
  • ~30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.76