Two-Player Showdowns: Settle It Tonight

The oldest multiplayer format needs no server, no matchmaking and no stranger: two players, one game, and a disagreement to settle. This theatre stretches from chess — the duel so old it has its own literature — to ragdoll soccer, where the literature is mostly laughing. What unites the shelf is immediacy: every file here can be explained to your opponent in one sentence and argued about for the rest of the evening.

Our notes pick out the fixtures we'd schedule first. The chess files reward the patient grudge; the random-physics sports games reward the household that prefers its victories at least partly accidental. Both kinds are free, all of them start in seconds, and none of them has ever once ended a friendship that a rematch couldn't repair.