Asmodee 7 Wonders Duel Board Game BASE GAME - Intense Two-Player Battles in the Ancient World, Strategy Game for Kids and Adults, Ages 10+, 2 Players, 30 Minute Playtime

If you aren't thrilled with the 2-player version of the original 7 Wonders game, you'll probably find Duel to be a major improvement. Duel pares down some of the complexity of 7 Wonders while at the same time adding intrigue. In each of the three ages, a matrix of cards is formed so that only a few cards are available at one time. Many of the cards are also face-down until activated, which creates quite a bit of tension during the game. There are three paths to victory in Duel: producing buildings and wonders, collecting six science symbols, or reaching the maximum level on the military conquest track. I've played about 10 games to this point, and it's clear that setting up production to earn victory points is the dominant strategy. Focusing solely on the science or conquest path can be rough. Be flexible, though -- your opponent's moves may point out the best path. Some ratings... LEARNING CURVE: Low. Newcomers should grasp the game easily within 15 minutes, even without knowing how to play 7 Wonders. GAME FLOW: Quick. There are few (but many times tough) decisions to make on a turn. Since this is only a 2-player game, you don't have to wait long for your next turn. INTENSITY: Above average. Even though Duel's strategy is rather light, you're often faced with the dilemma of taking a good card while potentially revealing a card that gives your opponent exactly what they need. REPLAYABILITY: Above average. Each game feels different since not all components are in play every time, and the card matrix helps randomize outcomes. THEME: Average. During the game, I'm focused more on what the card gives me rather than the building or wonder itself. The original 7 Wonders does a little better in this area. COMPONENT QUALITY: Average. The building cards are of the smaller Euro-size, but this helps reduce the size of the card matrix. The box insert is designed well to organize game components. The Wonder cards tend to warp over time. Overall, Duel is one of the best 2-player games in my collection, especially if I'm looking for a quick 30-minute game. Strong recommend.

An excellent two player strategy game, feels completely fresh after dozens of matches. You take turns choosing cards to take (or sell) to add buildings to your civilization, each with its own cost, requirements and benefits. You also have access to Wonders, which you choose from a pool of options at the beginning. They require a lot of resources and the sacrifice of a normal card in exchange for powerful effects. Over three rounds, you're aiming for one of three victory conditions, while trying to stop your opponent from doing the same: military conquest, scientific advancement, or simply having the highest score based on a range of factors of the first two weren't achieved. Once you get the flow of the game and are familiar with the card's functions, gameplay is fast and the three rounds pass in no time. The cards are beautifully illustrated and manage to communicate all the information needed in simple symbols, though there are also reference guides in the box if you need clarification. I've never played the original 7 Wonders to compare, but this is a seriously well-designed and elegant strategy game. From the first card draw, you always have to balance what you want with reducing opportunities available to your opponent. There's this constant to-and-fro tension which makes the “Duel” name very apt. No system in the game is complicated, and yet the strategy that emerges from it is: surely the mark of great design.

7 Wonders Duel was a must buy for us. Absolutely love and always enjoy when we had enough people to play the original 7 Wonders game, and as we have yet to try the 2 player variant and Duel is always so highly recommended we wanted the chance to play one of our favorite games as 2p. Simply stated it works very well, Duel is a great game and is highly competitive, and you’ll find familiar iconography and cards/theme from the original game and just need to learn some of the new rules. Duel has many paths to victory and will make each game quite different depending on the shuffle and distribution of the cards and wonders. The new win scenarios with military power or leading with science are interesting and fun to aim for. I personally feel though that once both players understand how both conditions are achieved you can easily upset wins with either of them by just denying those cards to the other player. This will somewhat force you to take cards that you don’t want or need yourself and either take them as money value or use them for wonders. In this way we don’t often see wins based on military or science unless it is a very lucky reveal of the hidden cards in the stack. I’m not really a fan of either of those types of win and we’re almost at the point now that we would prefer always to play to the end and have wins be score based. There is another neat twist with Duel and that is how you set up each age and their cards. You will set up a pyramid or Mahjong type of tile system with altered rows of displayed and hidden cards. The next row of cards won’t be available until the previous row has had any cards on top of hidden cards removed and played, at which time the next row is opened and flipped to display. I really enjoy that part of the game and think it works very well to have some hidden elements at play. I’m not one to count and memorize the cards and be thinking of which ones are hidden in any of the piles so this remains fun for us. What I don’t like though are the tiny cards, shuffling them, and actually arranging that Mahjong style setup for each of the 3 ages, while I still love the mechanic and what it adds to the game the components themselves and the setup detracts a bit and adds time to the game which I don’t care for. Duel is a great pick for 2 player gamers and I don’t imagine we’ll stop playing it or get rid of it anytime soon. It really scratches our itch to play 7 Wonders when it’s just the two of us. There are just a few things that don’t live up to the hype I had expected, although we are still looking forward to adding some of the expansions to our base game and try those out as well. I’m sure we’ll enjoy those as well and we would both still recommend 7 Wonders Duel overall.

Quick take: The original 7 Wonders is well known for being a great 3-7 player game, though it struggles with a tedious variant for 2 players. 7 Wonders: Duel takes this 2 player criticism head on with brand new game mechanics, but keeps the spirit of the original game intact. Positives The 7 Wonders universe has always had great artwork and gameplay, and Duel meets all that. However, Duel takes a significantly different approach to how cards are built throughout the game. The main 7 Wonders game and all its expansions were based on a hand of cards passing around the circle, and then card-drafting your civilization from that. Duel takes a different approach of laying the cards out in different combinations of face up and face down pyramid shapes, with cards overlaid on top of others. This ensures that both players can see some of the cards that will be available in future turns, though not the face down ones. On your turn, you might hesitate to build a Stone Quarry (even though you really need stone!) because doing so would open up a key card or cards for your opponent. These back-and-forth risk/reward decisions that players will make would be interesting enough on their own, but Duel also adds a twist to three more mechanics: military victory, science victory, and Wonders. Military Victory. In Duel, at the start of a game players will start with a neutral position on a two-way "tug of war" style military chart. As military strength is built up, the military token will swing back and forth between the two players. If one player is not careful to keep the other's military in check, they can easily be overrun and lose immediately when their opponent's army reaches their capitol city. In the original 7 Wonders, one could often ignore military power entirely and still win. In Duel, if your opponent decides to go for a military win and you ignore it, you will most likely lose. This adds a much appreciated tension to the game and makes the "Duel" moniker very applicable. Science Victory. Another way for an immediate victory in Duel is to build six unique Science symbols. This is harder than it sounds, since your opponent will be doing everything he can to ensure that you don't. However, since being "too" defensive is equally as poor of a strategy, they'll have to allow you to get close, but not too close. With equally skilled players, these Science and Military victories won't happen as often as the typical "Most Victory points" win, but they are immediate and satisfying when they do. Wonders. Each player will start with 4 Wonders available to build, and only 7 can be built during the game. The Wonders in Duel are satisfyingly expensive, and several of them have a "take an extra turn" mechanic that can be used strategically to bury a card that your opponent especially wants, and then snatch the next card underneath it before your opponent has a chance to take their turn. This enhances the tension of the back-and-forth card taking because you're never sure when your opponent is going to use it to take two turns at once. Negatives In the ten games that we've played, everything seems near-perfectly balanced. Everything, that is, except one specific Progress token which led to a runaway victory when paired with a specific Guild card. In fairness, we were both new to the game at the time, so I didn't have a game plan to combat it. It may have just been a random "perfect storm". Since then, we've been able to mitigate that from happening. Other than that minor quibble, I don't really have anything else negative to say. Final Thoughts Duel benefits greatly from the two-player only design. It plays relatively quickly (35 min) but packs a lot of interesting decisions without being too brain-burning (i.e. Five Tribes). After ten plays, you start to appreciate even more the tightness of design. The interplay between the Military/Science/Victory Point strategies keeps you on your toes and ensures that you can't just fall into the same game plan every time. We're huge 7 Wonders fans in our group, and happy to say that this game would stand up even without the 7 Wonders name. It's easily our favorite "two player only" game that we own. I wouldn't be surprised to see this game get a flood of expansions as well; it's that good. Quick note on the components: the cards are reduced in size quite a bit from the original game, mostly because of necessity, but that makes it also easy to transport. Note: full review of this game, including gameplay descriptions, more bad puns, and a lot more pictures available at playbegins.com

Absolutely adore this game! My husband and I love the full 7 Wonders Game but couldn’t play it just me and him and this game is perfection! THEE BEST TWO PLAYER GAME IVE SEEN YET! It’s different every time you play, strategy, luck, reliably fun, and a lot of the time you don’t know the winner until you add up the points! Definitely a more complicated game to learn but once you do, easily one of my top games! 100000% worth the money!

I rarely write reviews, but this board game really deserves it. If you are looking for a medium weight 2-player game, do not hesitate to buy it. The game is well-designed and offers multiple ways to win (science, military, points), making it very replayable. And there are two extensions (as of 2025) that you can buy to enrich the base game. The game is fast to set up, although for a medium-weight game it does have a bit of a learning curve. My husband, being a gamer, got all of the rules right away, but for me it took a game or two to understand all the complexities. There are just a lot of different types of cards and special tokens that take a while to learn, but then in my eyes this makes the game more replayable. The game is called “7 wonders” but building the wonders gives you only some of the points. You also get points for various cards and tokens, and if you win via military or scientific victory, points do not count at all. I personally like the fact that there are options to try to win without accumulating and counting points. My husband, on the other hand, is used to complex games where you count points at the end. So this game offers something for us both. What I also like is that there is a good deal of interaction between players (stealing cards and coins, balancing a military score). Next to Splendor Duel, 7 Wonders Duel is our favorite to play when we have an hour or so in the evening. The two games are actually fairly different, but if you like one of them you may like the other!

I got this game months ago and have played it twice in that time. The first time we tried to play we got as far as setting up the pyramid of cards, and then couldn't figure out what to do and gave up. Last night we gave this game another go, and played it completely wrong. Third time's the charm right? First of all, I love board games and own a ton (I got four new ones in the last couple of weeks and have two more on the way). I play with my wife. I play with friends when I can convince them to play with me. And just help me find new games and work through ones sitting on my shelf, I play at work after the day's labor is done when I can make it to game night. So I'm no beginning when it comes to board games by any means. That said... Looking at the rule book it doesn't seem that bad. The basic gameplay is pretty simple (though figuring out which cards you can actually pick up in that pyramid required my wife explaining to me what the rules could not). You pick up the card and play it, or cash it in, or build wonders. The head-scratching comes in because there SO MANY exceptions to the rules. You use the top-of-card value like money for a particular resource, unless it's a yellow card in which it either gives you money to spend every turn (think coins in the game Dominion), OR if it has the resource symbol it SET THE PRICE of that resource. My wife kept trying to use yellow cards like wood/stone/clay symbols. Then there's the wonders. I couldn't figure out how they worked till I read PAST the end-of-game scoring part of the rules and found that the arrows meant take a second turn and some wonders gave you cash once immediately and others gave you resources every turn (confused yet?). Actually playing the game was somewhat fun, but LOADED with math. You constantly don't have enough resources to build what you need, so every five seconds you are asking the other player "How much wood do you have?", "And how much stone?", "Wait, how much wood was that?". You have to know because that sets the price of the resource with the bank. But then "Oh wait, I have four not two!", "Oh wait, I have the yellow card for that it's actually one, let me take my money back!" Yes, the monetary system in this game is really complicated, and very confusing if you don't have a mind for math and a good short-term memory. I'm pretty good with math but it's still headache. By the time we got to the end of game scoring my wife was saying "forget it, you win!" because she didn't want to do any more math! When I actually did a little calculating on my side, I discovered that despite my huge military and giant fortune, my wife slaughtered me at this game, because all that really mattered in the end was Victory Points! Yes, the game is VERY confusing to learn. The rules are badly written (not as in translated from Chinese to Swedish to English, more like written by someone who knew how to play the game FOR someone who knew how to play the game). If you try to learn this game without someone who already knows how showing you, the rules will be more confusing than anything else unless you have both played the game wrong, AND read the rules COMPLETELY through. There is just too much to the main game, and too many exceptions to the primary rules. Fun Factor I'm not exactly sure why 7 Wonders gets such rave reviews. I've played this game twice, and while it's a decent game at under an hour for two people who enjoy a good old-fashioned Victory Points battle, I have no burning desire to immediately play it again. I do appreciate the uniqueness of basically being able to play Sid Meiers' Civilization in less than an hour, but even I don't know anyone who would want to go through that level of complexity in under an hour regularly. For my money, I think if you want to go the complex route you are better off getting something like Netrunner, where there is a high degree of customization, room for lots of strategy, basic rules that are more solid, and endless room for adding modifiers to keep things fresh. If, on the other hand, you only have two players and have never played Civilization (the computer game) give this a shot. Just have someone demo it for you or play with you prior to purchase or you're in for a headache.

Love the game! Easy to learn, plays within about 30 mins, easy to set up/clean up. Really enjoying it