Classic board and 2-player games

What counts as a classic game

A classic is a game that survived without a patch note. The rules fit on the inside of a box lid, the equipment is a board, a deck or a piece of paper, and two people who have never met can still agree on how a turn works. Nothing here needs a tutorial, an account or an install: every title on this page opens in the browser, loads in a couple of seconds and can be abandoned mid-turn without losing anything.

This shelf collects the turn-based and table games from across the catalogue. Arcade titles, word puzzles and logic puzzles each have their own sections of the catalogue, and the short-session picks are on the catalogue page. What is here is the slower half of the site: games where the interesting decision happens before you move, not after.

Board games against the computer

Seven of the titles here are single-player board games with a computer opponent. Each one uses a search that looks a few moves ahead, which is enough to punish a careless move but not so strong that a first-time player loses without understanding why.

• Checkers is English draughts on an 8 by 8 board: twelve pieces each, diagonal moves, captures are compulsory, and a piece that reaches the far row becomes a king that can move backwards. The computer searches four moves ahead, so it will happily trade pieces to reach a better structure.
• Battleship hides five ships of different lengths on an 8 by 8 grid. Both sides call shots one square at a time, and the first fleet to be sunk loses. It is the only game here where luck does most of the work in the first ten shots and skill takes over afterwards.
• Reversi, also sold as Othello, starts from four discs in the centre and flips every enemy disc trapped between two of yours. The score after twenty moves tells you almost nothing; the four corners decide the game.
• Connect Four drops discs into seven columns, six rows deep, and the first line of four wins. The computer searches four moves ahead, which is roughly the point where a human stops calculating and starts guessing.
• Mancala is the sowing game: six pits per side, four stones in each, and a turn that scoops a pit and drops one stone in every following pit. Land the last stone in an empty pit on your side and you capture the opposite pit.
• Dots and Boxes asks you to draw a line between two dots and claim any box you complete. The trap is that the box you complete hands the next move to your opponent, so the whole game is about who is forced to open the board first.
• Tic-Tac-Toe is the three-by-three original. It can be played against a computer that never loses, or against a friend on the same screen. Perfect play is a draw, which makes it a good five-second warm-up rather than a real contest.

Card games without a deck to shuffle

Solitaire is Klondike with a mouse instead of a table: deal the shuffled deck, build four foundations from ace to king, and use the seven columns to hold cards you cannot place yet. It rewards patience over speed, and it is the one game in this collection where you can lose a deal through no fault of your own.

Gearbloom is the odd one out and the most modern: a brass-and-vine deckbuilder built for this site, where you climb three acts of beds in a clockwork greenhouse and try to stop the Rust Engine. Nothing about it is cosy. It borrows the deckbuilding loop from modern card games and leaves the fantasy setting behind.

Two players on one keyboard

Four titles are built for local multiplayer: no matchmaking, no room codes, no second device. Two people sit at the same screen and the keyboard splits down the middle, with one player on the left-hand keys and the other on the arrows. On a phone or tablet both players use the touch surface instead, which works surprisingly well for air hockey and badly for nothing.

Table Tennis is first to eleven, Air Hockey is first to seven, and Reaction Duel is a single press: wait for the light to turn green, then hit your key before the other person does. A false start hands the round over, which is why the game is mostly about not flinching. All three run at full speed on a laptop and need no controller, and Table Tennis and Air Hockey each offer a computer opponent as well as the two-player mode.

Playing on paper instead

Battleship and checkers both have a printable sheet: the battleship board comes with two 8 by 8 grids and the five-ship fleet, and the checkers board is a standard 8 by 8 with the dark squares filled. Both are free to print and free to photocopy, which makes them more useful than a download for a classroom or a club with no spare devices. The full set of sheets is on the printables page.

Choosing by the time you have

If you have two minutes, play Reaction Duel or a single round of Tic-Tac-Toe. Both finish before a kettle boils and neither punishes you for leaving mid-game.

If you have ten minutes, Connect Four, Battleship and Dots and Boxes are the right length. They have a clear end state, they do not need to be saved, and a single game is a complete unit of play rather than a slice of a longer one.

If you have half an hour, Checkers, Reversi and Mancala are the ones that reward staying. All three have a middle game that decides the result, and all three are more interesting on the second play than the first.

Strategy that carries across the whole shelf

These games look unrelated, but the same five habits win in most of them.

• Take the centre early. In Reversi, Connect Four and Tic-Tac-Toe the centre squares belong to more potential lines than the edges, and the player who owns them has more ways to win.
• Force the reply. A move that threatens something is worth more than a move that gains something, because it takes the initiative away from your opponent. Checkers is the purest version of this: a capture that must be answered is a free tempo.
• Count before you commit. Battleship and Reversi are both counting games in disguise. In Battleship, each sunk ship removes its length from the pool of unknown squares. In Reversi, the last move is worth more than the first thirty.
• Do not hand over the board. In Dots and Boxes the losing move is the one that completes a box too early. In Checkers it is the trade that opens a lane to your back row. Same mistake, different board.
• Play the position, not the score. Reversi is the clearest case: a player can be ahead by thirty discs with ten moves left and still lose, because the discs they own are the discs the opponent gets to flip.

Phones, tablets and shared screens

Every game on this page works with touch as well as a mouse, and the layouts reflow down to a 360 pixel wide phone. Two-player titles are the exception worth planning around: a split keyboard is comfortable on a laptop and impossible on a phone, so local multiplayer is best on a tablet or a desktop. If you want the game on a projector or a second monitor, each title has a full-screen button in the player bar and an embed code if you would rather host it on your own page.

Questions people ask