Two 2-player games from the bow-tied master Reiner Knizia:
In "Schotten Totten," you play 1 of 6 cards in your hand towards 9 brag (3-card poker) hands facing off against an opponent doing the same. Then you draw back up to 6 cards. You must win 5 (or 3 in a row) of the various brag-offs to win. The tension is in not showing where you think you'll win (your opponent will then just concentrate their best cards elsewhere). At the same time, you don't know what cards you are still to draw into your hand. (There are various special power cards, but we'll leave that for now).
In "Lost Cities," you play 1 of 8 cards in your hand from 5 suits numbered 1-10 (plus some jokers). You can only play numbers higher than you played before in that suit. You score the value of the card played, and as soon as you start a suit, you get minus 20 points. OR you can discard a card, but maybe your opponent wants that card. Oh, and if the draw pile runs out, you can't play any remaining (usually high-scoring) cards.
Both games came out at about the same time and look/feel quite similar.
You have a line of "battles" between you. You don't want your opponent to know where you want to play because they will try to thwart you, but you have to play somewhere. Oh, and your hand size means that keeping cards just to spite your opponent really limits your other options. There is real pain in every card you play.
I LOVE both these games. We don't usually play 2-player games in our family as it's seen as a group activity (well, I force a game night on people), so these are pretty much the only 2-player-only games I still own. They are compact, easy to teach, and come with "ohhh" moments for newer players.
They epitomize Knizia's genius: such spare rules with so many implications for your next move.
Elegance.
I myself prefer Lost Cities, but that may be because I played it first. The countdown to the end of the game where you scramble to play your 10-point cards is another wonderful twist.
I would avoid "Lost Cities: The Dice Game" (aka "Lost Cities Roll and Write"). It's fine as a roll-and-write game, but misses some of the sharp edges from the original without being any more portable. There is alaso multiplayer version - "Lost Cities the boardgame" which I have never played. It apparently loses all that tension (partly by having 2 of each card so you can't block any more). I think its based on an older game called Keltis that I also haven't played and is out of print at the moment. Schotten Totten has many variations (including "Battle Line"), but the base play is pretty much the same in all of them.
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