by Justin Bell

Late last summer, I had dinner with an industry contact, and we got to talking about life, love, and the pursuit of tabletop happiness over a handsome buffet of cheap prosecco, garden salads, and chicken fingers. (Extra honey mustard, please.)

Eventually, our conversation turned to one of my favorite questions. “What’ve you been playing lately?”

The contact answered with a grin; like many, this contact mostly talked about games that they are not involved with professionally, since industry folks are usually playing games in development at their own company most of the time. One of their answers really intrigued me.

“I’m actually playing one of these games ‘two-handed’ a lot recently. In fact, sometimes on weekends, I pour a glass of wine and intentionally do that with titles that I can’t get to the table with my game groups.”

I paused for a second, making sure I heard this correctly: the contact was intentionally playing multiplayer games as two distinct players, alone?

“That’s right,” they replied. “Sometimes, I like to take longer turns thinking about what I would do as the active player, and it’s easy to imagine playing as someone else in a game that I know really well.”

We moved on, but the thought stuck with me. I digested it along with those tasty tenders, and let the thought marinate for most of the last few months.



As a media member, I “two-hand” review samples all the time, playing as two distinct players to get a feel for how the game plays. I always do this with games I receive that have not been released yet. Designers are often unavailable to teach their upcoming creations directly to peasants like me, so I usually have to grind through a rulebook on my own to learn a pre-production copy (PPC) of a rulebook before a video content creator has been contracted to produce a formal teach video.

Two-handing (or, “dummy-handing”, in my personal parlance) is a necessary tool for my efforts. I take teaching new games seriously, so the two-handed or three-handed plays really help me suss out the potential questions I’m going to face from other players. Usually, though, I don’t two-hand an entire playthrough…I might do two or three rounds in a four-round game, especially in a game that has mid-game scoring elements or pre-round steps that evolve over the course of a longer play.

But intentionally two-handing a game all the way to the end? Playing a game from my collection, for fun, by myself, pretending to be multiple players? I’ll be honest: I never even considered it. These days, half the games I review have a dedicated solo mode that simulates a two-player game, or—in what is becoming my growing preference—automas, geared by difficulty level, that can be added to multiplayer games to simulate a higher player count.

And many of the board games I want to play have a dedicated app or an implementation on Board Game Arena or Yucata, so if I really want to play, say, Race for the Galaxy by myself, I don’t have to two-hand it…I can just pull out my iPad and play against three bots of varying difficulty.

But there is something to the idea of putting a board game on the table, handling the fancy components, and playing a game live. I already play a lot of video games and I already play a lot of app-based board games, so maybe that industry contact was onto something.

I looked in my game closet and considered a couple of games on the Maybe Pile. It was virgin territory for me, playing some of the games in my collection two-handed. The results surprised me.



The current game on the top of the Maybe Pile is Evacuation, the Vladimír Suchý title from a couple years ago. Evacuation is a game I enjoyed when I reviewed it on Meeple Mountain, but it’s a game that has only hit the table once since my review plays in late 2023 when I bought a copy at SPIEL Essen that fall.

Evacuation’s play mode bit is divisive in my circles. Some players only want to play Evacuation in Race Mode, the rule set that is the main play variant in the game’s rulebook, while others prefer Points Mode, where a full four rounds have to be played to determine a winner. But I think the game hasn’t come out as often as I expected because it never got an expansion (not that it needed one, since there are 3-4 game variants and mini expansions included in the base game) and Suchý fans I know prefer some of his other titles, such as Pulsar 2849 and Underwater Cities, over Evacuation.

I decided to embark on a two-handed game night with Evacuation in tow. I passed on the glass of wine, but bourbon was handy. One refresher of the rulebook and I had the rules down again—a compliment, for a game that I hadn’t played in more than two years—and setup was a breeze. I set up a Race Mode game for two players, and I was up and running in just a few minutes.

I went through the motions on my first few turns, in part because I hadn’t played in a while. Evacuation’s big hook is the game’s goal: over a series of rounds, players have to evacuate their population from the “Old World” and settle them on the “New World” on the other side of the main board’s map.

As it turns out, what players REALLY have to worry about is the production level of the game’s three main resources (food, energy, and steel) on both worlds, tracked with three small discs on each player’s personal board. You start the game with a fully-functioning economy, but then you have to break that economy and rebuild it through settlement on the other side of the board…and, fast. All the while, players have to manage an action point system that gets very expensive very fast, as players spend energy from one or both sides of their personal board to get everything done.

That race in the base game mode ends when a player has bumped their three resource trackers to space eight or higher, at which point some final calculations are done to come up with a winner. And since I was playing by myself, I took my time feeling out what I remember liking about the game.

And as I took my turns, trying to build up a profile of what each of the game’s two players should do on their turn, something weird happened…I noticed I was having fun.

Not just a little fun, mind you; I really enjoyed puzzling out the best way to optimize each player’s board. These medium-weight Euros, the ones that feature tech tracks or personal milestones, make playing a game two-handed very straightforward. So, I used the two different sets of technology tiles to drive each player’s strategy.

If a tech gave me production powers for, say, steel, I leaned hard in building more “prefab” steel factories. When a tech gave me an ongoing power that provided additional rewards when I built stadiums—in a funny nod to all things sports, Evacuation provides “happy faces” to players who build stadiums, and each player has to build three stadiums for the New World by the end of the game—I went even harder on building more stadiums for that player.

I tried my best to pretend I was the purple player (purple being my favorite color) and to pretend that the yellow player was my hated rival. Still, I always gave yellow the benefit of the doubt, taking chances to stab the purple player whenever I had the chance. When yellow was the first player at the end of a round (turn order changes only between rounds), I always tried to block purple from getting the best bonuses, the technology upgrades, or the symbols they might need to build new population centers in a future round.

It felt weird to snipe myself…but hey, I’m a two-hander now!

The game experience just got better and better. Whether it was purple’s turn or yellow’s turn, it was always MY turn, so downtime was…zero. I experienced all the highs of putting together a solid plan. I’m not the kind of player that usually suffers through “analysis paralysis”, or AP, so I took my time on some turns and breezed through others. But since no one was waiting on me to finish turns, I never felt the burden of other players looking over my shoulder.

Undoing an action? All good, it’s still my turn, since I’m the only one taking turns! I spent time feeling out how each tech upgrade would benefit future strategy, so it was fun to explore the game in a bunch of different ways, but all during the same game. Having the chance to take so many turns made all the systems click faster, since I had more space to get so much of it wrong.

I had so much fun that, when the Race Mode game was over (Justin beat Justin thanks to a slight edge in minimum production levels), I decided to run it back. For my second play, I did Evacuation in Points Mode, using the Advanced Action variant as well as personal goal cards, which made it even easier to focus both purple and yellow on their distinct strategies.

After setting up the second game, I switched out the nine tech tiles from each player board and swapped in a new set for each player. The Points Mode game went the full four rounds, with yellow taking home a much deserved victory and a greater appreciation for the system Suchý created here. By essentially playing the game four times—maybe it’s better to say that I got to explore the system from four different perspectives, rather than doing four complete plays—I finished with my highest set of production levels and took much better advantage of the advanced action system than in previous plays.

These two plays cemented my belief that Evacuation should stay in my collection. It also left me wondering why I had not tried to two-hand any other games in my collection before now.



As it turned out, that industry contact was onto something.

The ol’ two-hander might have legs. I consider myself lucky to have 3-4 game nights a week with friends and family, but I think I will complain a little less often that I cannot get some of my favorites to the table. Those plays of Evacuation only took about two hours in total, so time certainly was not an issue. I’ve got some favorites that are getting a little dusty on the shelf; carving out time for a two-hander once a month is very easy to do, especially on a weeknight where I want something to do while watching the NBA playoffs in the background.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not about to spend entire weekends intentionally trying to play a heavy strategy game by myself as two or three other players. But I’m open to salvaging plans to play with other humans by just playing a game by myself instead. On nights where I set something up and players bail last-minute, I’m now a bit more open to the idea of playing that game on my own instead of angrily putting the game away.

A new pile of games is now building, next to the Maybe Pile in the game closet. This pile, the Two-Handed Stack, now serves as an activity to attack solo, especially when the eyes have burned out from staring at a screen for too long.

My early-to-bed in-laws recently spent the weekend, and that meant I needed a couple of quieter activities I could mess with after everyone went to bed…enter the Stack. Sometimes, I want to show the kids new-to-them favorites from the adult game collection, but they get a better offer to hang out with their buddies for another round of Fortnite. All good…I’ve got the Stack. My pile of review copies runs out early each summer, and using review nights to tackle the Stack sounds good to me.

Old dog, new tricks? Sounds like my two-handed game nights for the next few months!