To Duel or not to Duel - Part 2

This is part 2 of an article comparing multiplayer games to their 2-player conversions. For Part 1, see To Duel or not to Duel?.

However, for me, and coming with the disclaimer that I learned this game via Board Game Arena and not face to face, the additional mechanics in this game added a confusion which separated me from my opponent, instead of adding additional interaction to bring me and my opponent closer together.

If this wasn’t called Azul Duel I think this is a perfectly good 2-player game, and freedom from the Azul label might allow someone to take this game in a different direction.  On the other hand, if this wasn’t called Azul Duel I might never have played it, so chalk one up for the marketing team.

Verdict: If you’re attracted to Azul for its simplicity, skip Azul Duel and go deeper into the main franchise with Summer Pavilion or Queen’s Garden instead.  Buy Azul Duel only if you love the mind games of predicting what your opponent will do and you already find Azul far too simple.

The experience is somewhat watered down compared to the original, but I think that’s actually a strength in this context. Gone are the Harvest rounds and wondering how you are going to feed your family, gone is the family development - you have a fixed 3 workers per round. Also gone are the delights of plowing fields to sow grain and vegetables to cook into food, and the improvement and occupation cards, and the expanding action board - all actions are available in every round here.

Centering entirely on the animal breeding and farmhouse building portions of the game, the streamlined game is definitely Agricola in feel, despite actually missing so many of the mechanisms of the original. What’s left is a great 2-player worker placement game full of planning for opportunities, where it is crucial to pay attention to what your opponent needs.

With exactly 8 rounds and 3 workers per player, you will be getting 24 actions each and are trying to maximise your opportunities for obtaining and breeding animals and then expanding your farm to keep up with demand - but the special buildings give you just a little twist to keep the game fresh, like the Storage Building which earns you points for leftover resources or the Open Stables, cheaper to produce for a quicker introduction to the cattle and horse market, but ultimately worth fewer points at the end of the game.

The first edition of All Creatures Big and Small came with only one set of special buildings, making each setup the same. Later expansions brought the special building count up adding some much needed variance to the starting setup, and the ever later Big Box edition packaged the expansions together with the base game for the first time, making the game this was always meant to be.

Curiously, having all of the special buildings available from the start of the game and in public, not hidden in either player’s hand, makes the game feel a tiny bit more like Caverna than Agricola, but at least the setup is randomised.

Verdict: All Creatures Big and Small is a very good version of Agricola for 2-players, giving a more compact experience all around. I can highly recommend owning both this game and the base Agricola game, even if you only play with 2 players, using All Creatures Big and Small when you’re more time-constrained or just fancy something a bit lighter, and using Agricola when you need something meatier to get your teeth into.

Had Caverna Cave vs Cave been released 4 or 5 years later, it would no doubt have been called Caverna Duel, but in 2017… wait… I’m getting deja vu here, and it’s not even true! By the time Cave vs Cave was released, there were many “Duel” titles, so it must have been a conscious decision to buck the naming trend!

Anyway, about the game. This is, undoubtedly, a 2-player version of Caverna. Much like the Agricola counterpart, it’s been watered down with many mechanics removed, but what’s left took the game down a very different design path to Agricola.

Similarly to Agricola, the harvest phase and food requirements are gone, but here food remains as a way to feed your workers to get more work out of them making the investment very worthwhile. Instead of a fixed family size, or a family that you must grow and feed through use of your actions, Cave vs Cave has kept the expanding action board and gives you mandatory family growth to take advantage of it. In this way, the game still contains 8 rounds, but instead of 3 actions in each, you get 3 rounds with 2 workers, 4 rounds with 3 and a final 8th round with 4. Whilst in that first round you will only have 5 options for your actions (4 fixed and one brought in at random) by round 8 the full set of 12 actions come available.

Adventuring is not exactly present as a mechanic here, as there is no ore to craft the weapons to give your dwarves, but instead many spaces on the action board give the opportunity to activate abilities of the chambers you have created for your cave. This mechanically gives something of a similar feel to the blacksmithing of the original, despite being thematically quite different.

With the supply of chambers to craft coming from the spaces that you mine out from your cave, and requiring certain shapes of wall to be built against, the timing of the availability of each kind of room is randomised, which somewhat ironically makes this feel less like Caverna, and more like Agricola with the Minor Improvement cards in play.

Additionally, Cave vs Cave, Era II exists as an expansion to this game - however it sits on my shelf of shame unplayed. Cave vs Cave just happens to be the perfect length for a vehicle ferry crossing (or a lunchtime!) from the Isle of Wight to the mainland, fits onto a ferry table with my patented* diagonalised setup, and as such, my wife and I have simply not ever gotten around to trying out the expansion. It’s on the list!
*not actually patented

Verdict: It’s very tempting to copy and paste the Agricola verdict and swap the words Agricola and Caverna, as indeed I think you can absolutely justify owning both games, the 2-player version is more compact and does play quicker. However, in this case, I think the games are further apart. 2-player Caverna feels like a 2-player version of what Caverna might have been, if it had been developed in a different direction. Regardless, it is a quality game in a smaller box with a shorter play time, and I am quite happy owning all 4 of these games.

Codenames is a curious game to have made a 2-player variant of, as it’s first and foremost a party game.  This game shines at 6 or 8 players, because once you’ve split the players into 2 teams, then taken 1 player per team off to be the spymaster, it’s important there are at least 2 people left on the guessing side of the team to give them a reason to talk out loud about what they are thinking.  That’s where the humour is in this game, at any lower player count the came can almost be played in silence, and no-one wants that!

Duet, by being co-operative and having each player see a different but related board, puts both of you in to the spymaster role simultaneously.  This is great in terms of player engagement, you’re really actively playing the game the whole time.  Unfortunately I know people who find the idea of playing as the spymaster in Codenames quite stressful, so these are people I really don’t see myself ever being able to Duet with.

It’s also a little irritating that the game seems designed to have the two players sit opposite each other, and the cards are readable from either end, but one way around is definitely easier than the other. Perhaps you could sit side-by-side and put the key grid between you, but that just doesn’t feel comfortable to me.

However, if you do have the perfect play partner to duet with, the inclusion of a campaign map where you can tinker with the difficulty of missions is very welcome. In the basic game you get 9 turns to find the 15 spies, and every turn could end in an incorrect guess (finding an innocent bystander that is. Finding an assassin ends the game in failure immediately, just like the original). In the campaign you might get a different amount of turns to play and a different number of allowable mistakes, with the hardest missions either being extremely turn limited, requiring loose plays and real shots in the dark, or requiring absolute precision and conservative play with zero bystanders touched.

You can play Codenames Duet with more than 2-people, at which point it becomes much like regular Codenames, it’s just that the game is co-operative instead of competitive. Whilst I can acknowledge that some people are so competition-averse that this could be an attractive option for them, for me the competitive original version is just that much funnier to play and I would always choose to play competitively if given the choice.

Getting the game out to takes pictures of for this article I got a cheeky quick game in with my teenage son. We took all 9 turns and the bonus sudden death turn to get the victory (a final turn in which no clues are given, just guesses that use up any leftover data you have from previous turns), but we just about squeaked it. It was satisfying, but we were both of the same opinion - spymastering is hard!

Verdict: If you and your 2-player partner both love the spymaster role and want to deepen your personal connection, or if you are scared of the spymaster role and want a safe space to practice in, Codenames Duet is a great buy. It’s much better than the official 2-player variant of the base game and has a campaign mode to encourage repeated play.

It won’t be quite like the party game, but it will exercise those word-association muscles and give you and your partner lots to discuss in the debrief.  And, if you love Codenames and play it a lot, even if Duet does miss the mark for you it can act as an extra word bank expansion as the word banks do not overlap (At least, I know this is true for the first edition, the second edition with the revamped cover art may have changed the word banks)

Actually, that doesn’t quite do it justice. Wingspan Asia is:

That little box is pulling a lot of weight!

Some spaces on the Duel board provide additional immediate bonuses which provides a touch of extra interactivity to the timing of when and where to play birds. At the end of the game, as your largest group of tokens on the Duel board also contributes to your final score, you have a kind of area control subgame added to your engine building main game.

As a fully standalone game, Wingspan Asia comes with a solo automa mode and a quickstart tutorial Swift Start mode that sets your opening hand and guides you through the first 4 turns.

Verdict: There’s little reason not to get Wingspan Asia - if you already play Wingspan, and ever play at two players, I’m sure you’ll enjoy the Duet mode’s additional board and cards. Even if the Duet mode is a miss for you, the extra cards will spice up your game, and the two-sided player boards are a fantastic space-saver. On the other hand, if you’ve never played Wingspan and are wondering what all the fuss is about, Wingspan Asia is a superb entry point for you to play the game solo or with a partner before deciding on taking the plunge and buying the full base game and every expansion.

Have I missed your favourite 2-player conversion of a game? What do you like to Duel over? It might have already been covered in part 1, but if not do let me know at [email protected] and if there are enough I may even make a part 3!

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