CHENNAI : Two-player games have always enjoyed a certain status in the board game pantheon. There’s the prominence of games like chess, certainly, but there’s also an acknowledgement that many gamers tend to game with just one other person most often — whether that be their sibling, spouse or friend. Today, we’re taking a look at one of the most popular two-player games in my collection — Musée.

In Musée, you and your opponent are competing to build the grandest art museum possible. Each of your museums consists of three galleries, which can each hold six paintings. These paintings are represented by the deck of beautiful cards with which you play — each card featuring an actual historical work of art as well as details of the artist, which is a nice touch.

Wonderful artwork aside, there are two pieces of information you need to pay attention to on each card. The first is the colour — there are five colours (or suits) in the game, and playing cards of the same colour adjacent to each other is the main way you score points in Musée. However, you only have five cards in hand at any given time so it’s not always easy to tell what colour you should play in a given spot. Further complicating matters are the numbers on the cards — for a two-player game, the deck contains cards from 1 to 50, and the numbers determine where you can play those cards.

For example, let’s say I play the #20 card in the third spot in my upper gallery. I’ve now defined how cards need to be played to that gallery — every card to the right must be higher than that 20, and the cards to the left must be lower. Each gallery follows its own internal ascending order, and that makes it much trickier to play cards down as you go on. Each card you play is worth points, but it also places further constraints on you going forward.

That combination of calculated risk-taking and educated guessing is what makes Musée a great game. You have limited information at any given moment, the five cards in your hand, and the cards that have already been played into the two museums on the table. Everything else is potentially up for grabs. Furthering that tension is the fact that there are points on offer for whichever player manages to complete any of the galleries (upper, middle and lower) before their opponent, adding a racing element to the game as well.

While it can also be played as a three-or four-player (in two teams) game, I called Musée a two-player game in the introduction because that’s where it really sings. It’s been a massive hit with everybody I’ve introduced it to and, if you’re in the market for a great game to play with your significant gaming other, look no further.