My wife and I play Legendary, a deckbuilder with Marvel superheroes. It’s fast paced, semi or fully co-op, and plays in about 30-45 minutes (sometimes less if the villains stomp you bad). We also play Dead of Winter, a co-op with a traitor mechanism. It plays in 30-60, depending on the scenario. Even if your reaction to a zombie game is a heaving sigh, it’s worth a look. Finally, we play 7 Wonders Duel, which plays in 15-30. It’s 2-player game based on the 7 Wonders game but you’re picking resources to build from a pool of community cards.
If you’re mostly playing 2 player games, I recommend the Rahdo Runs Through series on You Tube. It’s a series of run throughs (not really reviews) from a gamer who mostly plays two player games. He shows how a game is played for about 45 minutes then gives his thoughts on it. His criticism is very mild when he doesn’t like an element of a game, so pay more attention to the run through and think “will I like this” than attention to whether he comes off as liking it.
Lots of good recommendations already. I’ll add my vote to the following: Splendor, Ticket to Ride (various maps), Pandemic, Forbidden Island/Desert, and Targi. Love Letter is ok with two people if you want something quick. Carcassone is also good.
And if she likes Pandemic you might want to try Pandemic Legacy. We burned through that in about 1.5 weeks over Christmas and New Years.
Lately I’ve been playing a lot of Dominion and Legendary, both mentioned above. They’re not so much board games as deck-building games and involve a lot of shuffling. But they both work well with two players. On the other hand, neither gives a lot of opportunity to screw with your opponent (unless you start with Dominion: Intrigue, a standalone expansion. Legendary is mainly cooperative, although there is a scoring system to identify the overall winner.
Both those games suffer with more than three people, I think, but work great with two. Legendary can even be played solo.
Those both look fun, but they’re pricey. $74 US for Carcassonne: The Castle and $99 for Ra: The Dice Game. I’m going to have to do a bit of price hunting I think.
Lots of games that are acceptable for 2 players are actually kind of dull that way and really need more players to be truly fun. That’s the issue that I’ve had. However, hubby and I are having a good time playing Pandemic lately. It’s fresh in that you have to collaborate rather than compete.
The OP sounds like they prefer competition, though. It’s not technically a board game, but they could try Uno Attack. For a year or so we had fun with that one, and it’s pretty competitive.
Of the Forbidden games, my preference is Desert. It improves on the first one (which learns from Pandemic, so these recommendations are an incestuous little family). Ticket scales well, but 2P is not my preference for the game. Splendor is a solid game, but the flavor is virtually non-existant, IMO. Carcassonne is great, and the first two big expansions are great too, but they add tiles that increase game length linearly (i.e. 1% more tiles means a 1% longer game).
I’ve started a fair number of people out on Settlers of Catan. It’s best for three or four players, but it works okay for two. There’s enough randomness in it that the result won’t be obvious till late in the game.