If you choose a single player game, you are going to have to carefully calibrate the level of difficulty and the type of difficulty. However, if you pick any two player comptetitive strategy game you can focus on the type of difficulty, as the level of difficulty will be calibrated automatically to “half your participants will win.”
My recommendation would be to rig up a way to randomly sample from the two player board games on boardgamearena.com that neither player has every played before (can be as simple as putting 20 names on index cards, the players remove any cards they recognize, then shuffle and draw).
If you choose a single player game, you are going to have to carefully calibrate the level of difficulty and the type of difficulty. However, if you pick any two player comptetitive strategy game you can focus on the type of difficulty, as the level of difficulty will be calibrated automatically to “half your participants will win.”
My recommendation would be to rig up a way to randomly sample from the two player board games on boardgamearena.com that neither player has every played before (can be as simple as putting 20 names on index cards, the players remove any cards they recognize, then shuffle and draw).
To add explore / exploit, just start the game’s chess clock before allowing the players to start reading the rules.