Schotten Totten

You fight over nine boundary stones lined up between you, laying cards on your side of each. Win five stones, or three adjacent ones, and the game is yours. Cards come in six colours numbered 1 to 9, and you hold six. On your turn you play one card in front of a stone, then draw. Once each side of a stone has three cards, the stronger set takes it, ranked like poker hands: a run in one colour beats three of a kind, which beats three of one colour, which beats a plain run. You may claim a stone early if the visible cards prove it cannot be beaten. One of the lighter two-player card games on our shelf, and one of the best. Twenty minutes, rules explained over the first hand, and more bluff-reading than you expect. It sits well beside Lost Cities for a couple collecting duels.