Game Design Perspective: 7 Wonders Duel

This is part of my Game Design Perspectives, which examines what game mechanics work (or don't) and why. Today, I'm looking at 7 Wonders Duel, a board game released in 2015. 7 Wonders Duel is highly rated, ranking 16th place on boardgamegeek's top games list at the time of writing. It's a fun game for two, and (bonus!) it only takes twenty or thirty minutes per playthrough.

Go from the Stone Age to the Iron Age in the time it takes to cook a pizza.

This game shares many similarities with its predecessor, 7 Wonders (2010), though mechanically it plays quite differently. The original 7 Wonders involves two to seven players in a collective card draft. In each of three Ages, a player is dealt seven cards, chooses to build one of them, then passes the six remaining cards to the next player. You then take six cards passed along from the previous player, pick one and pass on the next five. This process repeats until the "pass" hand has one card left, which gets discarded. A card can be a resource card (e.g. wood or stone) that allows you to build more complex projects, a civic project that scores victory points, a market card that improves trading rates, a science card (more VPs, essentially), or a military card to increase the strength of your army. Besides building a card, you can also sell it for money or use it to build up your Wonder. (Each player receives one Wonder card at the beginning, and each Wonder has two or three stages to build, each granting benefits to the player.)

7 Wonders Duel shares most of these rules, but it’s the differences that make it a better game. I’m going to explore how the designers made a more focused experience. First, as the name suggests, Duel is played between just two players. Each player has four Wonders they can build (out of a total of twelve different Wonder cards), and each Wonder only has one stage. Like the original, each Age has a deck, and cards get more powerful and expensive as the Ages progress. Unlike the original, the deck is dealt into overlapping rows, alternating face-up and face-down. Players then take turns choosing from any uncovered cards. If a player removes a card that was covering another card, the now-uncovered card is flipped (if it was face-down) and the other player can choose that card. Like the original, each card can be built, sold for money, or used to construct a Wonder.

The deck is dealt for the First Age.

Both players take a card, and then a new card is revealed and can be chosen.

Science cards are revamped in this edition. In the original version, Science cards had three types and you scored points for each full set and exponentially within each type. For instance, if you had a gear type, a compass type, and three tablet types, you would get seven points for the set, one each for the gear and the compass, and nine points for the three tablets. If you were able to gather four tablet cards, you would get sixteen points. It's a strategy that can net you big points, which naturally incentivizes other players to deny you those science cards. It leads to some interesting situations - if Player A is hoarding up science cards, Player B might spend a turn burning a science card to prevent A from getting a big payout. Or, if Player C is in between the two, B might hope that C wastes that turn instead.

While that works for the original, it wouldn't work as well for a two-person version. If one player started collecting Science cards, the other player would be forced to respond by collecting them as well. It would reduce the strategic space and be unbalanced as a mechanic. Instead, Science cards are important for two reasons. Science cards now have seven types, and getting two cards with the same type gets you a Progress token. Progress tokens have powerful abilities, from cheaper Wonder construction to more powerful military actions. Secondly, if you collect Science cards with six of the seven types, you automatically win the game - you Science your opponent to death. If you see your opponent getting many different Science types, you have to try to deny them a Science victory. Even with that in mind, you don't have to devote as many actions to that denial as you would with the original game's Science system.

Pictured: Sciencing to death.

Military cards are similarly altered. You still gain VPs by building a strong army, but now if you have a strong enough army you win instantly. If your opponent is building up military might, you have to start building your own military projects (or selling those project cards to deny them to your opponent). Military cards get more powerful when you are in Age III (more bang for your buck), but a player who takes three or four military cards early on in the game will get a good distance towards the goal line. Playing for a Science win is similar - small steps taken early on will have an outsize impact in late-game play. If your opponent is close to a Military or Science victory, you have to play much more defensively. You have to pass up high-scoring cards to prevent the insta-win. There's legitimate tension each time you uncover an face-down card, since it might be the one your opponent needs to win.

The nature of the card setup and card choosing might make the game seem a wee bit deterministic, but the designers included two mechanics that add a little more strategy to the who-picks-up-what-card order. First, several of the Wonders have a 'take another turn' power. Normally, if you really want a covered card, you have to hope that your opponent takes the last covering card. Otherwise, if you took the covering card yourself, you allow time for your opponent to steal the card you want so much. However, if you have an appropriate Wonder, you can use the covering card to build the Wonder and use the extra turn to grab that tasty card for yourself. This adds a more uncertainty to the card-choosing order and more strategy to your card choices. It’s a clever idea, and it’s my favorite design choice by the game designers.

The second mechanism happens before each Age is dealt. Before the deal, three random and unknown cards are removed from each Age. This prevents players from deducing that, say, the last face-down card must be X because X hasn't been seen yet. It also means that certain strategies (like Science or Military victory) might be impossible from the get-go, making those strategies higher risk.

The player on the left is very close a Science victory - the player on the right must prevent that at all costs.

There aren't too many missteps in the game design. Military doesn't feel as powerful as perhaps it should. You do get some VPs if your military is dominant over the other player, but the ratio of cards drawn to VPs gained is too low to be worthwhile unless you're gunning for a Military victory. The three Ages have different configurations of cards, but having additional configuration options beyond the three would be interesting for more varied play. Finally, some strategies that seem like they should work - denying your opponent access to wood, for instance - end up being easily negated. Each resource production card you play gives you access to that resource while also increasing your opponent's cost to buy that resource from the market. However, if you take all the wood production cards, your opponent can easily take a slew of market cards that either give money directly or raise the amount of money gained for selling a card. The "increased cost to buy" rule ends up being less important than it appears.

Thematically, the game is even weaker than the original. In the original, you have a single Wonder to build and you feel like you’re playing as a single civilization. In Duel, you assemble a motley crew of four different Wonders. It feels less like you’re playing as, say, Egypt, and more like you’re playing as Rome, Egypt, Greece, and Babylon simultaneously. The original game never focused too much on the thematic aspect, so I don’t feel like Duel suffered too much for a weak theme. It’s enough to tie the game mechanics together and no more.

Overall, the game is extremely well done. It offers an interesting strategic range of options in a compact package, and the quick playing time makes this game easy to fit in when you don't have a couple hours to devote to a board game. It distills the mechanics of the original 7 Wonders game down to a tight and focused two-player duel. Name checks out. Both Juliana and I give this game a hearty thumbs up.