To Duel or not to Duel?

This is part 1 of a 2-part article! I found so many 2-player conversions that I wanted to talk about that I couldn’t fit them all in to this one space so look out for part 2 coming soon!

The cards in the market are themselves more interesting, and the victory conditions more interesting.  In Splendour, you win at 15 points, every card gives you a discount on the cost of future cards, and some cards are also worth points. You can feel the symmetry throughout the deck, and that can feel bland once you’re used to it.

In Duel, you win at 20 points or 10 crowns or 10 points on cards of a single colour, giving you different directions to go in if you feel you’ve fallen behind. Some cards don’t give you discounts from future purchases because they are worth disproportionally many points or have a different ability that triggers when you buy them. That makes the turn of the mrket more exciting.

The gem collection part of Splendor Duel is completely different, with the gems arranged on a market board that you take 3-in-a-row from, meaning that you can’t always take the perfect combination of gems, and what you do take has a real impact on what your opponent is then able to take, raising the interaction level in a very satisfying way.

Verdict: If you’ll only ever play this 2-player go for Splendor Duel - it’s not much more complicated to get into and the extra additions are well worth it.  If you think you’ll play with more than 2 players, you’d be entirely justified in owning both Splendor and Splendor Duel.  Treat yourself.

7 Wonders Duel is a Wonderful conversion of that drafting game into a 2-player space. You’ll lay out cards in a grid formation, some face-up and some face-down, such that drafting available cards reveals new picks to your opponent, so you must at least consider when you take a card both how good that card is for you, and how good the card you reveal to your opponent may be for them.

Both games have in common the same 3-Act structure of building up resources through Act-1, utilising build chains through act 2 and 3 to get sneaky free builds, and topping out with Guild cards rewarding the various strategies you can go down. You also have the same options with each card you draft - build it, use it to build a Wonder, or discard it for money.

With multiple routes to victory in Duel, either through establishing military dominance or scientific breakthroughs at any point in the game, or by winning on cultural points when all the cards have been drafted, you have to be on the ball throughout. Clever design makes it such that even if you don’t achieve a military or scientific victory outright, getting close can force your opponent into suboptimal card picks to prevent you, and benefits earned along the way can give you the cultural victory anyway.

Verdict: You need both of these games. 7 Wonders is a great card drafting civilisation building game that can add many players without substantially increasing the game length. It just can’t work with 2-players out of the box, so the conversion to 7 Wonders Duel makes a tepid 2-player experience into an amazing one.

Take the Crane for example.  In both games, the Crane is a Construction card that you can build that can later be built over to make a new building, with a discount from the cost.  However, in each game the implications of that are very very different.

Let’s say I already have the Courthouse in play and a pebble in my supply.  In Everdell, I could use that Stone to play the Crane, earning me a building resource (which could even be the Stone I just spent).  I could use a door to bring the Architect into play for free.  Then I could build over the crane with another building, triggering the Courthouse again for another resource, and use a door to bring another critter into play.  I would have needed some luck for the 2 critters to be available at just the right time, but I could have set this up ahead of time with some card draw perhaps.  The net result - for 1 pebble I have fuelled actions that have put 3 new cards into my city, and either gained resources along the way or put something expensive into play.  This resource economy is rewarded, meaning I’m free to place workers to gather even more resources and eventually get even more cards into play.

However, in Duo, every action taken advances a marker towards the end of the season.  The sun moves for worker placements, the moon moves for card play, and the season ends when both markers reach the end of the path.  This same sequence of moves in Duo would firstly be impossible because doors are a limited resource so I would have to spend workers to obtain doors to make this play, but wouldn’t be as economical because despite using a small number of resources, I’ve still used 4 actions to get only 3 cards into play, making that all I could do this season.  Suddenly I’ve gone from being rewarded for being very economical with resources, to essentially being punished for using a card play action on a temporary card.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for valuations of cards changing in different circumstances.  I just can’t square up the feeling that Everdell and Everdell Duo are using the same name, look to be from the same universe, and have such opposing views on resource economy versus action economy.

Everdell Duo does have one unique thing going for it - there is a co-op campaign. However, it’s hard. Really hard. I have a friend who is something of a board game masochist.  He loves nothing more than an incredibly hard co-op game that hates you and makes you want to suffer.  I think he’d like Everdell Duo’s co-op campaign. Don’t be afraid to house rule some of the scenarios to reduce their difficulty, like maybe keep the seasonal goals but don’t worry if your end score falls short.

Verdict: If you have played one of these and like it, I would wager that you won’t like the other version quite as much.  If you have Everdell and crave more, head toward the standalone Everdell Farshore.  If you want Everdell in a smaller, faster, simpler package, My Lil’ Everdell has got you covered.  And if you really crave a 2-player campaign to play though, the fan made Heroes Saga is a great shout, though that is a competitive campaign, not co-op.

And if you do play the co-op campaign and find it easier than I’ve made it out to be, drop me a line at [email protected] to tell me what I’m doing wrong!

Being a Kickstarter addict my copy of Duals came with extra cards to back port into Flamecraft, now sold separately.

Flamecraft Duals is undeniably in the same universe as Flamecraft, with Sandara Tang’s gorgeous art to boot.  And, in a sense, it is still a game about organising artisanal dragons to assist shops.  However, this game is far more abstract, playing with tokens drawn from a bag and trying to arrange them in shapes that match the shop cards you hold.  What Duals does very well is allow you room to be clever on your turn - it’s a fantastic feeling when you first cash in 2 shops on the same turn (or even 3 if playing with the fancy dragon Trinity!) whilst at the same time this isn’t your classic abstract game with umpteen levels of lookahead because of that random bag draw.

Verdict: You need both of these games - they are totally different and complement each other beautifully.  I have met people who don’t like Flamecraft and they are wrong.

Familiar features of Kingdomino are here, with both games using the same scoring mechanism.  Briefly, each connected area scores based on the size of the area multiplied by the number of scoring features in that area (i.e. Crowns in Kingdomino, Crosses in Duel, becaue they’re easier to draw I guess?), and there are both common areas types with rare scoring features, and rare area types commonly accompanied by scoring features.

Duel adds a new concept - a spellbook that you progress on by drafting dice that don’t score, creating a race to access powerful spells that can modify your turn or score extra points.  However, it just doesn’t replace the feel you get from drafting domino tiles and the original game had an excellent 2-player format already.

Verdict: Unless you really love roll-and-write games, skip Kingdomino Duel and just play the original, even if you’ll only ever play it with 2 players.  The original game is far superior, and at 2-players you even get to extend the game to a whopping 7×7 Kingdom.

As for Coconuts Duo, it’s the same game as Coconuts, just with fewer pieces (2 monkeys and 9 cups) to support only 2-player play.  I think you’re better off getting the 4-player version even if you think you’ll only ever play 2-player, as it’s so easy to take interested spectators and add them to the game that you may as well.

Verdict: Buy both Coconuts and Coconuts Duo together and play this with 6-players!

This is key to the abstract game experience, and why I firmly believe that abstract games are simply better played at 2-players.  For Ingenious, the 2-player rules on the regular board are identical to the 2-player only board in the travel edition, so it doesn’t matter which edition you are playing (the larger edition expands the board for 3-4 player play).  However, the smaller form factor of the travel edition makes it more likely to see play as it’s easier to just jam in your bag, get out on a train, etc.

For Blokus however the smaller board and central starting positions actually make Blokus Duo a distinctly better game for 2 players.

Verdict: Get Blokus Duo and Ingenious Travel edition, and play other games when you have more than 2 players.

Have I missed your favourite 2-player conversion of a game? What do you like to Duel over? It might be covered in part 2, but let me know at [email protected] and I’ll make sure of it!

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