Nerdlab Games are best known for their popular Mindbug game. Their Agent Avenue, however, is a card game designed by Christian and Laura Kudahl entirely built around the 'I split, you choose' mechanic. Art is by Fanny Pastor Berlie.
Tho' there's an option to play Agent Avenue as a team game with four players, it's essentially a two-player game. The players start off on opposite sides of a track. You win by being the player that catches up with the other (ie: land your meeple on the same space as your opponent). Players have a hand of four cards and on your turn you play one card face up and the other face down. Your opponent then chooses which card to take and apply to their meeple. The cards indicate movement forwards or backwards but most cards have different effects dependent on how many similar cards have already been accumulated in a player's tableau. And some cards give an immediate win or immediate loss when you have a third identical card in your tableau...
The game then is one of bluff, double-bluff and deduction. You can play it in this basic version or flip the board and you can play using special cards that players can draft from a display when their meeple ends a turn on one of the corner spaces. These offer opportunities to manipulate the cards and their effects; greatly spicing up an already exciting two-player tussle.
Card-driven games often carry the pitfall of players being at the mercy of a lucky or unlucky card draw. Agent Avenue offers mitigation of mere luck of the draw by giving players a limited number of discards. These help to make Agent Avenue a game of strategy for players that optimise their use of discards to manipulate their hand.
We first encountered Agent Avenue at Spiel Essen 2024 and it's become an immediate favourite as a fast filler-length two hander that typically plays in just 10-15 minutes.