Best board games for couples

7 Wonders Duel is a tight two-player game that challenges you to build the most advanced civilization possible. It’s a condensed version of the original 7 Wonders, but it’s no less entertaining for having shrunk.

The core gameplay involves taking turns to choose cards from a limited central collection. You’ll then play cards (and maybe coins) to construct buildings, which in turn grant you resources and other benefits. There are three ways to win – steamroll your partner in a military victory, acquire all six science tokens, or have the most victory points when three rounds are over.

You gradually work your way to the resources you most desperately need, so you better hope your significant other doesn’t snap them up first. We may recommend this game, but we aren’t responsible for any arguments that ensue. The randomness of the game may feel a little mean at times, but 7 Wonders Duel makes up for these minor annoyances by offering tons of variation and replayability in each game.

Read our 7 Wonders Duel review.

Azul is a tactile drafting game that casts you and your opponent as rival interior decorators, vying to impress the King of Portugal with intricate mosaics. Each turn, you’ll choose your desired tiles from shared pools, then use your picks to create the highest-scoring patterns you can on a five-by-five grid. Better patterns mean more points, and the player with the most points wins.

This game strikes the perfect balance of ‘easy to learn, hard to master’. It’s also a feast for the senses. The gorgeous, patterned tiles are endlessly pleasing to the eye, clack together satisfyingly in their bag, and give the game a calming energy. Even when you’re losing, you can still enjoy the thoughtful process of arranging beautiful tiles – and cheekily drafting those you know your other half is keen to grab.

This low-stress experience might not feel strategic enough for some, and this may limit how many times you bring it to your table. Regardless, Azul is an ideal approachable board game for casual nights in.

Read our full Azul review.

Codenames: Duet is a budget-friendly staple thanks to its snappy and simple gameplay, which is easy for a board-gaming newbie to pick up. As in the original Codenames, players face a grid of random code words. You and your partner both have a secret card that shows which words represent your allied field agents, which are innocent bystanders, and which is the deadly assassin that’ll lose you the game.

You must work together to identify all field agents, but you can only give each other single-word clues to drop hints. Plus, with only nine turns to find all 15 of your compatriots, you’ll need to hint at multiple cards with a single clue, linking the disparate cards together with whatever tenuous connection you think best.

The united effort to win, as well as the fun wordplay puzzle mechanic, makes Codenames: Duet a winning choice for any pair. However, with such simple gameplay, you might not want to spend every date night speaking in code.

Expansive and immersive, Frosthaven is a lot like playing a DnD campaign without the need for a Dungeon Master. Over several (hundred) sessions, you and your teammate will work together to restore the wintery town of Frosthaven and drive back any monsters in the surrounding tundra.

You’ll play as a particular class of characters, each with unique ability cards that are played two-per-turn to fight and loot your way through a dungeon. Between dungeon crawls, you’ll return to Frosthaven to level up, craft, add new buildings, and plot your next move. Frosthaven is a legacy board game, meaning that stickers and sealed envelopes will also change the board and rules over time.

If you and your partner share a mutual love of board games, and you’re happy to make a serious financial investment, Frosthaven is one of the best board games you can spend your money on. However, like all big commitments in a relationship, you must agree to go on this adventure together.

Read our Frosthaven review.

Romantic trips away are great excuses to game, but not every title in your collection is travel-sized. That’s the beauty of travel board games like Hive Pocket. Its simple, compact design and handy drawstring bag lend themselves to on-the-go gaming – plus it comes with some perfectly portable expansions that are missing from the base game.

By laying tiles decorated with different creepy crawlies, Hive Pocket players compete to surround their opponent’s queen bee, without breaking up the pattern of tiles already placed down. Each bug tile has its own rules, and every play will leave you and your partner obsessing over possible new tactics – as well as all your previous mistakes.

This is a game you could compare with Chess or Go, and it comes with a lot of the same pros and cons. There’s no real theme or room to use your imagination, just a pure game of wits. If you and your partner get a taste for it, though, Hive will prove as addictive as nectar to a bee.

Fog of Love is a one-of-a-kind narrative experience that asks you to roleplay as a fictional couple, and its mechanics help you play out the story of their romance. Over several chapters, you and your real-life partner will play out sweet, serious, and dramatic scenes for the imaginary pair.

You’ll keep and reveal secrets, learn more about each other, and tweak your character’s personality traits as time goes on. All of this will influence the satisfaction scores of your character – and influence whether the relationship survives until the game’s finale. Like in real relationships, you’ll have a better time if you avoid trying to ‘win’ the scenarios, instead focusing on playing out the story in an authentic way.

This is a truly one-of-a-kind game, but that also means repeat games can start to feel a little same-y. It’s also important to note that Fog of Love can be quite an intense experience for real couples – if you’re looking for a lighthearted game night, maybe pick something else.

Wavelength is essentially a guessing game. It all starts with a big red dial, which is spun so that a random slice of it is highlighted in bright colors. Only one player at the table knows the true location of that colorful section, and they must use their binary card (featuring phrases like ‘hot’ and ‘cold’, or ‘funny’ and ‘unfunny’) to create a clue that’ll get the rest of the players to correctly guess its location on the spectrum.

Wavelength’s prompts are hyper-specific and often silly, which leads to comical debates and entertaining surprises. At the same time, you might learn something new about your beau based on the judgement calls they make.

If you want a game that breaks the ice or gets you chatting, Wavelength is an excellent option. There are points to score and ways to win, but games will often last well beyond the moment of victory. That’s all thanks to the quirky and interesting conversations Wavelength creates.

Co-op board games allow couples to spend time together without the pressure of competing, but they can still be tense affairs. Sky Team, a two-player game that turns you into a pair of pilots, is a co-op experience that’ll still have you on the edge of your seat.

You’ll work together to land your jet, assigning your separate pools of dice to various tasks that keep the plane in the air and help it descend safely. There’s a catch, though. You can discuss how you want to spend your dice before you roll them for the round, but after that, you can’t speak to each other at all. Your dice results are hidden from the other player, and you must place them in silence, hoping your fellow pilot makes the right decisions.

Landing a plane is a precarious process. Assigning the wrong value die, forgetting to complete essential tasks, or failing to complete linked tasks at the same time can all end your game immediately. This creates a tense, thematic game, where quick and simple rules don’t make things easy.

Quacks of Quedlinburg is a fabulous family board game, but it’s also perfect for fun-loving couples. This explosive push-your-luck game has a low barrier to entry and a high dose of chaos. You may be competing to win the most points, but this is a highly random game that won’t leave anyone too sour when they lose.

In Quacks of Quedlinburg, players take on the role of potion brewers. You’ll craft your concoctions by pulling ingredients from a bag and placing them on your personal board. The more ingredients you can add to a brew, the more points you can rack up. These can then be used to buy better ingredients at the market, ready to use in future alchemical experiments.

But beware – every potion you mix is at risk of exploding. Pull too many white tokens from your bag of ingredients, and the cauldron blows up in your face, scuppering your chances of scoring well that round. To make things even more nail-biting, players pull ingredients from their bags simultaneously, putting pressure on their opponents to make risky pulls from the bag.

Read our Quacks of Quedlinburg review.

Fox in the Forest is a simple and beautiful trick-taking card game for two players. Each round, you’ll take turns playing cards from your hand, with the highest value card from certain suits winning the trick. There’s a twist, though – you don’t always want to win a trick.

At the end of a round, you’ll score points based on how many of the 13 tricks you won. Seven to nine wins means that you’re victorious, and you gain a tasty six points. However, zero to three tricks gets you the same number of points. Ten to thirteen wins also means that you’re labelled ‘greedy’, and you get no points at all.

This, combined with cards that shake up play with special abilities, turns Fox in the Forest into a careful, strategic card game, where winning is never simple. It’s easy for players of all experience levels to pick up. You and your significant other may not feel like exploring the game’s fairy tale forests every date night, but it’s a wonderful way to fill many evenings.

Generally, seasonal-themed, reskinned editions of existing board games leave us cold, but Patchwork: Valentine Edition is an exception. The theme of delicious-looking Valentine’s day chocolates and sweets is just the right level of sickly-sweet overdone-ness to be cute and funny rather than nauseating.

The regular Patchwork it’s based on is already a brilliant, quick, easy-to-learn game specifically designed for two players. You and your partner are competing to fill out your board efficiently with randomly shaped tiles, Tetris-style – but to do so, you’ll have to choose tiles from a limited selection each turn, each time spending from a limited supply of tokens and moving your pawn a number of spaces along a shared track, depending on the tiles you choose.

Where the original had you place patches on a patchwork quilt using buttons, this one sees you packing arrangements of chocolates, candies, and tiny cookies into a love-heart covered Valentine’s chocolate box – and paying for it with pralines. It’s adorable – just don’t eat them, they’re cardboard.

Mycelia is marketed as a family board game, but gamers of all ages can appreciate its unique deck-building mechanics and gorgeous components. The game gives you control over a patch of forest terrain, and your aim is to keep it clear of pesky dew drops. To do so, you’ll need to recruit a variety of mushroom-inspired allies who can shift dew drops around or generate ‘leaves’ to help you buy new cards.

The person with the most leaves and a board clear of dew drops in the final round is the winner. This double victory condition adds an extra layer of strategy to the standard deck-building experience, but the clear premise keeps things approachable for younger or less experienced gamers.

A two-player game of Mycelia can be surprisingly cut-throat, as open information combined with some explosive card abilities can tempt you towards an aggressive playstyle. If you love affectionately bullying your significant other, this is a board game that’ll absolutely encourage the habit. Maybe go easy on your children, though.

Learn more in our full Mycelia review.

Ark Nova is a complex mishmash of resource management mechanics, and it’s a surprisingly accurate recreation of managing a zoo. Newcomers may be intimidated by its complexity (and ruthless scoring system), but for more experienced players, it can be addictive.

Every turn, a player can draw cards, build enclosures, populate said enclosures with animal cards, play sponsors to raise money, or deploy association workers to boost your reputation or join a conservation project. Your action’s potency is decided by its position on a tracker, and most actions give you multiple possible activities to pursue. Will you focus on completing lengthy projects to generate Conservation Points, or will you spend this turn adding animals to boost your Appeal, which dictates the zoo’s cash flow?

The trackers for Conservation and Appeal run in opposite directions on the board, and the endgame is triggered once a player’s Appeal and Conservation scores cross on the tracker. Your final score is the difference between these two variables, meaning it’s possible to have a negative final score.

Learn more in our full Ark Nova review.

War of the Ring is a sprawling wargame and an authentic adaptation of Tolkien’s iconic trilogy. Players fight on the side of the Free Peoples of Middle-earth or the Shadow that serves Sauron. Everything you do in War of the Ring, from combat to movement, from hunting the Fellowship to convincing a city to join your cause against Sauron, is determined by Action Dice.

Either army can clinch a military victory by occupying enough of their opponent’s strongholds. However, if the Fellowship can reach Mount Doom with The One Ring, the Free Peoples win instantly. The Fellowship can also be thwarted by corruption points – gain too many before completing the mission, and that’s a win for the Shadow.

Despite its asymmetrical design, War of the Ring is perfectly balanced, which means you’re guaranteed some nail-bitingly close head-to-heads. However, like any large board game, War of the Ring requires a lot of commitment from both parties. But if you love Lord of the Rings, this is the perfect way to spend time with a loved one – you could even watch the extended edition while you play.

The Castles of Burgundy combines the careful strategy of a eurogame with the reactive planning of a luck-based dice game. Its complexity level falls somewhere between the two board game types, and the final result is approachable enough for beginners without alienating crunch lovers.

As you’d expect from a dice game, the round begins with a roll of your dice. The actions you can take depend on the results of these die, as each action area is marked with a specific number. You can modify your results by spending worker tokens.

There are four actions to choose from here. Choose a tile from the game board to add to your display, move a tile from your display to your estate, sell goods, or gain worker tiles to spend on future rolls. Completing parts of your player board with tiles in specific orders can rack up some serious points – combine this with a high number of goods, mined silverlings, and high-value tiles to ensure a win.