Two-player games are attractive for a couple of reasons. First, by definition, half the players win. People like winning, and are likely to replay and rate high

Two-player games are attractive for a couple of reasons. First, by definition, half the players win. People like winning, and are likely to replay and rate highly a game they think they have a chance to win. Also, with just one opponent, there is little downtime. You don’t have to wait while the turn gets passed around the table to three, four or five other players. That’s boring. I can give some insight into why 2-player games are popular. (ETA: when I wrote this, I missed that 3-player games do slightly better.) I'm a guy who engineered (optimized?) the fuck out of a 4-player card game (to minimize card-luck in a trick-taking game) called Ambition: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhHZh5IEKBDf56ExgErv4o/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhH... I succeeded in the design challenge, and I think it's a damn good game, but the game hasn't caught on and player-number (or, for math people, player arity) is almost certainly the biggest culprit. It takes exactly 4. (There's a 3-player variant, but it's not as fun and I'd rather just play a game designed for 3, like Skat.) The reason I bring this up is that I have insight into what 2-player games do so well. It's cultural. A 2-player game (or a 2-party game, like Bridge which has 2 teams of two players) is a showdown and it's decisive. It develops a "mind sport" culture. There's less of a feeling of decisivity in a 3- or 4-player game because you can't always separate "A outplayed B and C" from "B played best but C's mistakes unintentionally advantaged A over B and A won". Game outcomes generally have four components: Chance, skill, strategic interaction, and flux. Flux is minute-by-minute engagement in the game (which can be modeled as a fluctuation in skill). Skill and flux are what we care about. The "strategic interaction" term might seem odd, because "strategy" and "skill" are often used interchangeably, but it actually refers to the scenario in 3+ party games where A, seeking his own strategic goals, unintentionally advantages B over C. This is sometimes called "strategic luck". (Or, it can devolve into a king-maker scenario. Or it can become an influence of table position, as in Puerto Rico, that some dislike. Or it can be made a part of the game, as in Diplomacy, where people pre-arrange interaction effects-- but might defect.) It's inevitable if you have more than 2 parties. And it makes it easy for people to feel "screwed", just as chance does, so while you can have that element and still have a good game (just as I'd argue that random chance doesn't make a game "bad", even if the Euro aesthetic eschews it) you're not likely to develop the "mind sport" culture of Go, Chess, or Bridge if that's the case. I don't know for sure if this explains 2-player games getting higher ratings, but 2-player games and variable-player games (like Texas Hold 'em, which accommodates varying player number better than, say, a highly-engineered trick-taking game) do the best job of catching on and developing a reputation. A 2-player game is a showdown and a variarity game accommodates a group of unplanned size; exactly 3, 4, or 5 limits the audience and "catch on" speed.