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John Look and I have spoken about doing a 2p game theme night some time. I went over my games and targeted some games that excel at 2p that I think would fit the bill. The nice thing about some of these games (which I’ve marked with *) is that they’re not exclusively 2p.

Abalone
Ark of the Covenant, The*
Battle Line
Battleball
Battleground: Fantasy Warfare*
BattleLore
Blue Moon
Cathedral
Chess
Clans*
Cribbage
Dreamblade
Dungeon Twister
Fairy Tale*
Glory to Rome*
HeroScape Master Set: Rise of the Valkyrie*
Hey! That’s My Fish!*
Hive
Jambo
Lines of Action
Lord of the Rings – The Confrontation: Deluxe Edition
Maelstrom (a Vortex game)
Magestones
Memoir ’44
Micro Mutants: Evolution*
Navia Dratp
Nexus Ops*
Pente
Pylos
Quoridor
Samurai*
Scripts and Scribes*
Through the Desert*
TwixT

One of the problems with a 2p game night is people who aren’t comfortable with just picking up a game and learning it with someone. I have absolutely no issues with that, and I know Paul and John are both cool with it too, so I figure that we can get at least 6 people involved in a 2p game night, and perhaps each person could play a game and then teach it, further easing the growing pains.

That’s a lot of games. I’ll need to bring it down to a more reasonable bring list.

Tentatively, I think a good list may be: Battle Line, Battleball, Blue Moon, Cathedral, Dreamblade, Dungeon Twister, Fairy Tale, Glory to Rome, Hive, Jambo, Lines of Action, Lord of the Rings – The Confrontation: Deluxe Edition, Maelstrom (a Vortex game), Micro Mutants: Evolution, Navia Dratp, Pente, Pylos, Quoridor, Scripts and Scribes, Through the Desert, TwixT¹.

Computer geek talk

As an aside, generating and linking this game list was less painful than it looked. First I went to my collection and clicked on Export Collection, which generates a CSV of my collection. Then I opened it in Excel and filtered (using Autofilter) on all games with a min of 2p and sorted by name. I added a column and set the column heights (since they got messed up), and game that column name “2p excellence” and started putting 1s in for the games I chose to single out.

Then I cut and paste the gameid and the gamename into PSPad, which is a text editor that allows the use of regular expressions. I selected everything and did a search and replace (CTRL-H):

Find: ^(\d{1,5})\s(.+)$
Replace: [ bggid:$1|$2 ]

the bggid format is a custom interwiki filter I created a while back. A small primer: ^ is the start of a line, and $ is the end of a line. Anything in between () can be “backreferenced” using $1 and $2 (etc) for use in the replacement string. \d means a digit, and {1,5} means 1 to 5 digits (ie 0 to 99999). \s is a space, and “.” is anything. + (eg .+) means repeat with at least one instance. So match something, and match it until the end of the line ($).

So this expression means “Starting from the beginning of the line, find and remember 1 to 5 digits (the bggid), then look for a space and discard it. After the space, find and remember everything until the end of the line, and save it by default to $2.”

¹ Again, PSPad to the rescue.