I know you suggest avoiding dice games, but I strongly suspect that Roll Through The Ages: The Late Bronze Age would fit the bill quite nicely.

Reasons:

1) The box it comes in acts as a nice sound-dampening dice-rolling tray, making it far less disruptive than your average dice game. I can imagine playing it on a train without disturbing other passengers.

2) Packs small, plays small, resistant to jostling.

3) Plays two players just fine, and scales to three or four (just in case).

4) On that note: It's relatively quick to teach (to gamers).

Good travel games for two players, especially for playing on trains?
One of my concerns before purchasing a car is how expensive repairs are going to be down the road. For example my car up until recently was a Volvo 850, and the air conditioner didn't work in it; the cost of getting it fixed was significantly higher than other cars because of the way the A/C unit is installed in the car, so I went on without air conditioning. Another example is the service light in the car - while the car had a standard OBD-II port which could read error messages, it required a special Volvo reader to reset the service light.

I know a lot of generalizations can be made about one make versus another, but those are obviously not allowed on this site (in fact, I hope this question is allowed at all...) - so that's not what I'm looking for. And I know there is a wide range of problems a car can encounter, and many of them are universal - replacing tires, for (a bad) example.

So, just like I can go to KBB and look up the recommended price of a car, is there someplace I can go to look up a make &amp; model of a car and see what proprietary, extra-expensive parts are in the car? Something that, for example, I could have put in the Volvo 850 and it would have told me about those above-mentioned peculiarities alongside undoubtedly a number of other proprietary bits that I didn't have problems with.
