our review
the 8th wonder of the world
7 WONDERS DUEL
Card drafting for two or three?
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„7 Wonders“ (Antoine Bauza, Repos Production) has, in the years 2010/2011, changed our universe of games in several ways: On the one hand, the – up this point non-existent - award „Kennerspiel des Jahres“ has been created especially for this game (besides many other awards 7 Wonders did also win „Deutscher Spielepreis“ and „Spiele Hit mit Freunden“); and on the other the main mechanism at the basis of this game – the drafting of cards – has been picked up and also widely varied in such a number of other games that it is nearly impossible to keep track of them or keep them all in mind. This inflationary use of the card drafting mechanism has recently prompted the „Review Millionaire“ Udo Bartsch to declare the word „Draft“ to be an acronym for „Da rufen alle Freaks: Toll!“ – unfortunately this cannot be translated verbally, the meaning is „all freaks cry: wonderful!“
For that matter, card drafting – that is, choose one card from a handful of cards and hand on the rest, choose a new one, and so on, until all cards are distributed – was not really new even back in 2010. One of the ancestors of this game mechanism was „Ohne Furcht und Adel“ (Bruno Faidutti, Hans im Glück), which in turn picked up the idea from „Verräter“ (Marcel-André Casasola-Merkle, Adlung-Spiele). Obviously at nearly the same time, in Japan, „Fairy Tale“ (Satoshi Nakamura) was developed. As some current representatives of this genre let me name Sushi Go! (Phil Walker-Harding, Zoch), whose topic fits the mechanism very nicely, by the way, and also „Die Holde Isolde“ (Nicolas Poncin, Schmidt) as well as „SchatzJäger“ (Richard Garfield, Queen Games.
„7 Wonders“, however is and continues to be something special: 1st Wonder: You can play it with up to seven people. 2nd Wonder: A game only takes between 27 and 47 minutes. 3rd Wonder: Playing time is independent of number of players. 4th Wonder: All play simultaneously. 5th Wonder: The distribution of the card deck among players works without hitch in each of the three rounds. 6th Wonder: The seven colors used in the game are easily distinguished visually. 7th Wonder: We are very near to seven expansions (currently „Leaders“, „Cities“, „Wonder Pack“ and „Babel“).
„7 Wonders Duel“, however, is not an expansion, but an independent stand-alone game for (only) two people; the promotional teaser text on the box promotes the fact that the game offers a completely new drafting system for two players. However, already “Ohne Furcht und Adel” could be played by two; in that case – as in a game for three – each player chooses two cards instead of only one and as a result the game is even more alluring than in a bigger group. And, to all intents and purposes, “7 Wonders Duel” has little in common with card drafting anymore, because some o the 12 Wonders of the World cards (a 13th wonder was available last year at SPIEL in Essen) and all 66 Age cards are displayed on the table and players alternate in taking cards. Out of the 12 Wonders of the World featured in the game, only eight cards are distributed in a game, of which only seven wonders can be actually built (activated in play), so that as regards to the arithmetic and also as regards to the story everything correlates again.
The Age cards, on the other hand, are – again divided into three rounds or ages – laid out or fanned out on top of each other in a different pyramid shape for each of the three rounds. The two adversaries alternate to take a card from the display, whereby – due to the different ways of arranging the display – it is always a different number of cards that is available for being taken. Furthermore, about half of the cards in not visible at the start of the game, but are only turned over in the course of a round or age when the cards on top of them have been removed. So both players do not know exactly what is laying in wait for them, albeit with the card situation in each round being known generally or at least being open for calculation using the summary.
Analogous to the „big brother“, the Age cards in 7 Wonders Duel also come in seven colors: Brown, Grey, Yellow, Blue, Red, Green and Purple. The brown cards represent production buildings; to simply take a card or play it is only possible for very few cards in the game; usually you need brick, wood and/or stone, as the cards always represent definite types of buildings. Those three basic resources are produced by brown cards or at least provided by them for the owner of the card. The grey cards work in in a similar way, but the provide glass or papyrus. The cards of yellow color represent trade: When yellow buildings have been constructed, on the one hand they offer their owner an advantage in relation to the topic; on the other hand they offer a new bonus, that was not present in 7 Wonders: An Age card can now not only be taken and built or be used for the activation of a Wonder card, but can now also be discarded. For doing this you get two coins per card (in 7 Wonders you got three per card). But for each yellow card already on display this number of coins is raised by one, so that three yellow cards in your display would give you five coins for each yellow card that you discard. For blue cards or buildings you “only” get victory points at the end, albeit quite a lot of them, and this, after all, is the purpose of the game.
However, a game can come to an end prematurely, as soon as one player meets one of the other two victory conditions: One of them is Military Progress: For each building and also for each Wonder card showing military symbols you move the Conflict pawn on a military track board one step towards your opponent’s part of the track. When the marker reaches certain cases the opponent loses coins and the player with the stronger military receives victory points at the end. Entering the ninth and last case on the opponent’s end causes in instant military defeat of the opponent. This has clearly upgraded the option to use a military strategy for playing, compared to 7 Wonders. Some players are not very happy with this as you are usually forced in the course of the game to set down the one or other military building in order to defend your self, despite wanting play “peacefully. I myself believe that this new element is are very felicitous enrichment of the basic mechanism, especially as the to and fro on the military track and the pressure due to the possibility of an early military defeat can be very challenging and thrilling.
For the green cards, too, there is a clear and considerable change compared to „ Wonders“: In “7 Wonder Duel“ the green cards show one of six different civilization symbols and a success in collecting all six of those symbols is also rewarded by an instant victory in the game. If you receive the second card of a certain symbol you can, on the other hand, chose one out of ten different Progress tokens, each of which provides you with different instant and/or permanent positive effects.
At first glance, it comes across as very powerful to be able to win with only six cards. However, on the one hand you need suitable resources for this strategy, too, and on the other hand, your adversary can of course react repeatedly by using green cards himself or discarding them for money. Furthermore, at the start of each Age three cards are taken out of play without being looked at; should there be one or several of the green cards among them, a Civil victory is rendered very difficult or even impossible without anybody being the wiser about this circumstance before the end of the game. Therefore I would suggest, as an in-house rule, that green cards cannot be removed in this way from the game. Of course, the Military strategy can also be affected by the removal of a total of nine cards in a game, but there would be enough military buildings available all the same for victory using the Military strategy.
In „7 Wonders“ the purple „Guild cards“ provided variable amounts of victory points for various conditions and prerequisites being met in the cards of your left and right neighbor. Here of course there are no neighbors, so that the seven purple cards have been adapted – the owner can now choose if you want to accrue victory points for your own display or city or that of your adversary, and of course you will always choose the more valuable one. However, as a consequence, the Guild cards have become somewhat weaker.
A distinct improvement in “7 Wonders Duel” as compared to “7 Wonders” has been given to the option of buying missing resources: In “7 Wonders” you could mostly get them only from one of your neighbors and had to pay two coins for each resource. But, if the two neighbors did not have the necessary resources, there was nothing that one could do. In „7 Wonders Duel“ you can now acquire all missing resources as virtual resources from the bank and pay a basic price of two coins for each resource. Should your adversary produce the resource, the price rises by one coin for each card – for instance, should I need two wood and my adversary has two wood production symbols in his display, I have to pay four coins for each wood. Thus, even if you are clearly worse off compared to your adversary as regards to construction of resources buildings, you can quite easily acquire missing resources, for which purpose a few yellow cards in your display can turn out to be very, very valuable.
To completely pass on the acquisition of brown and gray resources card and also to pass on yellow cards would therefore not be a very good strategy, which would in any case not be a plausible strategy anyway. Unfortunately, it can happen that – due to an extremely unlucky distribution of cards in the pyramid display one of the two players really has no or nearly no chance to acquire a sufficient amount of production buildings. In that case you should probably terminate a game prematurely, as to continue with such a situation would not be fun for the winning player either. Insofar, the mechanism of alternating in taking cards from a display is not an equivalent fair alternative for drafting cards.
All in all the resulting „feel“ of the game is not simply similar to that of the „big brother“: Keep a card and build it your self, change it into money or rather let the adversary have it? Follow your own goals consequently or better interfere with the adversary’s goals? Especially due to the two possibilities inherent in the game that an instant premature end of the game can happen you should keep an eye constantly on the display of your adversary and its possible developments. At the same time, however, you are driven by the greed and ambition to force your own way to play; in this way, however, a moment of “rien ne va plus” can happen faster than you believe possible – right timing is therefore essential. Also, because of the partially hidden display of cards you should not be too hasty in taking a certain card as you might facilitate access to a card for your adversary that might be exceedingly valuable to him. A tactical “goodie” will usually be to use the one or the other double turn, which is an option provided by some of the Wonders that you constructed or that you can unlock with one of the Progress tokens. All the same, a game plays quickly and varied and is thrilling to the very end and in any case considerable more confrontational than the predecessor. For all this the game was already rewarded – by the users of the websites BoardGameGeek, RPGGeek and VideGameGeek – in the voting on “Board Game of the Year” with third place; in both the categories of “Games for 2 Players” and “Card Games” the game has even won first place. I am sure that additional awards and prizes will follow.
But there is something maybe ven better! A user on BoardGameGeek has come up with a Three-Player-Variant for the game components in “7 Wonders Duel” - „7 Wonders Truel. A variant for 3 players“, as of 15.02.2016, to be found at http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/1526497/7-wonders-truel-variant-3-players, which I like very much. So, to conclude my review, I give you my version of this idea, which gives back the “real” drafting mechanism to “7 Wonders Duel” – the rules of the game remain the same, unless this variant demands something different:
Preparations for the game: The two Progress tokens „Economy“ and „Theology“ are not necessary and are returned to box.
Each player is given four Wonders of the World cards, chooses one and puts it down; the other three are handed on in clockwise direction, all choose another card to put down open-faced, and so on, until each player has four cards laid out.
Three colored marker pieces of any kind, one per player, are placed in the center of the Military track. On this track there is now a common top and a common final case for all players. The four Military tokens are all placed in the bottom half on their usual spaces.
At the start of each Age: (in each round): Two of the Age cards are put face-down in the middle. The remaining 21 are dealt randomly to each player; each player chooses one card of those seven, puts it down face-down and hands on six cards. Then all players choose a card from those 6 cards, put it down and hand the remaining cards on, until all players have seven cards laid out and take them up in hand – this is the usual drafting from “7 Wonders”, with the difference that the cards are not played instantly, but are collected first, analogous to “Medieval Academy” and “Schatzjäger”.
The game: All three players choose a card from their hand, play it simultaneously and also use them simultaneously – for a building, for a Wonder of the World or for acquiring money. Effects triggered by using the card become effective afterwards – for instance, a wood production building built by an opponent does not make my simultaneous wood purchase more expensive.
Purchasing resources: The respective price is determined by the player holding most of the necessary resources and not by summing the respective resources of both adversaries.
Example: Player A needs 1 stone and 1 glass. Player B produces 2 stone, Player C 1 stone and 1 glass. Player A thus pays 2+2 for stone and 2+1 for glass.
Guild cards: The respective effects (money or victory points) are now valid for the sum of your own display and that of one neighboring display.
Wonders of the World Cards: Basically, you can now construct nine instead of seven Wonders of the World.
(Negative) effects of Wonders of the World cards are applied to both adversaries. All effects are resolved simultaneously, after all players have played and used their Age cards, for building or for acquiring money. Positive and negative Military symbols, also from Military buildings, would thus cancel each other out for each of the adversaries on which they would be applied.
For a double turn you receive the two face-down Age cards from the middle, use one of them and put the other back. For the second double turn in an Age you receive the second, remaining face-down age card. Thus, only two double turns are possible in one Age. Should it be possible for more than one player to do a double turn, the one with the worse military status goes first, in case of a tie on the Military track the decision is taken randomly.
When seven or eight Wonders of the World have been constructed already and several players could and want to construct additional Wonders simultaneously, it is possible in this case to construct a maximum of eleven Wonders instead of nine.
Civil victory: You need only five instead of six different symbols for an instant victory.
Military: For Military symbols on Worlds of Wonder cards the marker of the constructor moves up the track accordingly, the markers of both adversary go downwards accordingly. Military symbols on Age cards the marker of the constructor also moves upwards on the track accordingly, for both adversaries the number of symbols is divided among them evenly and alternatingly. An uneven number moves the marker of the player whose marker is currently further up. In case of a tie in the marker position the constructor of the building decides.
The loss of two or five coins can only hit each player only once; as a reminder you receive the corresponding Military token. When both Military tokens for one of the sums are already given out, the third player does not have to pay if his marker should enter the respective area on the Military track.
When no Military Victory is achieved you score 2, 5 and 10 victory points for markers in the top half and 2, 5 or 10 penalty points for markers in the bottom half.
Harald Schatzl
Players: 2
Age: 10+
Time: 30+
Designer: Antoine Bauza, Bruno Cathala
Artist: Miguel Coimbra
Price: ca. 25 Euro
Publisher: Repos / Asmodee 2015
Web: www.asmodee.de
Genre: Card collecting
Users: With friends
Special: 2 players
Version: de
Rules: de en fr it jp pl
In-game text: no
Comments:
Tactical and swift game for two players
In a version also playable for three players
Beautiful and harmonious graphics
Good quality components
Takes little room to play
Compares to:
7 Wonders
Other editions:
Repos editions in English, French and Japanese; Asterion for Italian
My rating: 6
Harald Schatzl:
„7 Wonders Duel“ is not only a version of the well-known and multiple award-winning predecessor and not only a simple downgraded adaptation for two players, but is a well-made and real enrichment for our games tables and –inherently due to his crisp and short playing time – all but a must for a collection of two-player games.
Chance (pink): 1
Tactic (turquoise): 3
Strategy (blue): 1
Creativity (dark blue): 0
Knowledge (yellow): 0
Memory (orange): 1
Communication (red): 0
Interaction (brown): 2
Dexterity (green): 0
Action (dark green): 0