There are a lot of great board games that only work with three or more players, either because that’s how the rules are designed or because the games just aren’t that good with two. As a result, we’ve seen a steady run of standalone two-player versions of existing games in the last few years, taking advantage of the previous title’s popularity but in most cases changing something significant about the game to make it work well as a two-player game. The best duel board games offer a new angle on what made the originals work in the first place, and the ones that don’t often just feel unnecessary. There has to be some give-and-take, or just plain take, in a two-player game; my all-time favorite, Jaipur, all but demands that you try to trap your opponent into taking a bad set of cards from the market, giving you a fresh draw of new and, you hope, more valuable cards.
Azul Duel is another game in this line, the fifth standalone Azul game and the first designed strictly for two players. As much as I love the original game, I don’t think Azul Duel comes close to the first one’s magic, and I’m not sure why it needs to exist because Azul plays very well with two people.
Azul Duel adds all kinds of needless complexity to the game. The way you take tiles is much more involved. You build out the board on which you place those tiles by selecting two new 2×2 dome pieces in each of the first four rounds. These 2×2 pieces have three colored spaces on them that you must match with the tiles you take, plus one more space that’s either a wild (any color works) or is a ‘special’ (which counts as filled once you fill the other three spaces). And there are bonus tokens that become available near the end of each round; you can put two together to count as one tile of the matching color, or put any three of them together to make any color.
It’s all way more complicated than it needs to be, which matches where the original series went with the fourth title, Queen’s Garden, which was by far the longest and most involved to learn. The first Azul game is a great two-player title; it’s just more take-that than the game is with three or four, because with more players you’re just trying not to get stuck, whereas with two you want to stick it to your opponent. I would absolutely recommend the original Azul over the Duel version.
Azul Duel
So what two-player, Duel-style versions of other board games do work?
Splendor is fine with two players, so you may reasonably argue that Splendor Duel also doesn’t need to exist. In this case, it justifies its own existence by virtue of the new mechanics, which make the game more directly competitive between the two players. Rather than taking the various tokens from the supply, you take up to three adjacent tokens from a shared board, so what you take affects what your opponent can take on their next turn. There’s a new scarcer resource, pearls, and some cards have powers on them beyond just giving you value for future purchases. There are three ways to win: 20 total points on your cards, 10 points on cards of a single color, or 10 crowns on your cards.
7 Wonders Duel is the game that kicked off the duel craze. 7 Wonders is, in my opinion, still the best board game ever designed, but it requires three to seven players, with a two-player variant that I don’t think works well at all. 7 Wonders Duel reimagines the game entirely, keeping the theme and some core mechanics (notably how you gain and use resources), and giving players three ways to win, two of which are directly competitive: by pushing the military marker all the way to your opponent’s end of the track, or by getting a complete set of science symbols. Otherwise, it’s whoever gets the most points at the end of the game. The cards you select are laid out in a different pattern in each round, and only cards that are completely uncovered by other cards are available to buy or use to construct a wonder. It’s true to the original game’s feel, but rethought the game in a way that makes it something totally new as well.
The original Tokaido isn’t great with two players, although it does work; there’s just not enough competition along the pilgrims’ path for the various types of scoring spaces to make it as challenging as it is with three to five players. Tokaido Duo brings some drastic changes, not least of which is that you have three workers to place and move, each of which scores in a different way: the pilgrim gets points for visiting more sites, the merchant gets points for crafting and selling more wares, and the artist gets more points for painting more scenes and giving them away. It’s probably the most different from the original of any of the games I recommend here.
Imhotep the Duel is the only Duel version I like more than the original; Imhotep is great, but it has some quirks around the use of the boats that I don’t love, whereas the Duel version strips it down to the essence of the game, maximizing your score across four different areas of worship. Players place their workers on a 3×3 grid that corresponds to six ships, three on one side and three on an adjacent side, that either player can ‘launch’ once there are at least two workers in that ship’s line. If your worker lines up with a launched ship, you get the tile matching its space on that boat, placing it in one of the four scoring areas in your play area or, if it’s a special tile, using its power when you wish. It’s extremely tense, as in the original, because you have to decide when to try to get more out of a ship and when to launch one to gain for yourself or maybe disrupt your opponent’s plans.
King of Tokyo specifically requires three to six players in the base version, because with two it devolves into a game of attacks. In King of Tokyo: Duel, players compete to move trackers on two different tracks; if either one reaches your end, or both trackers get into your hot zone at the same time, you win. Attacking the other player without doing anything else won’t work, so it recaptures the spirit of the original KoT (not the King of Town, sorry, Homestar fans), which remains one of my all-time favorite family games.
Some others worth noting: Wingspan works at any player count, but the Wingspan Asia expansion adds a standalone two-player variant that’s more of a duel. The White Castle was my #1 game of 2023, and there’s a duel version coming out later this year.
And if you just have to have an official numbered ranking of the best Duel board games, it’d look something like this:
Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.