Scaled down; still awesome ~

Brant Guillory, 2 March 2016

Folks who pay any attention to my gaming discussion know that I’m crazy about 7 Wonders, the city-building card game from Repos Productions.  It’s a game I could play all day, every day and never get sick of playing.  For all it’s grandeur, however, it had a fatal flaw (and no, not the “Leaders” expansion) – the two-player version sucked.  I mean Aquaman-of-the-70s-level sucked.  Microsoft-Clippy-level sucked.  Panthers-in-the-Fog-review-level…  well, you get the idea.

7 Wonders scales incredibly well up to 7 players, but is dependent on at least 3 of them being around to play.  The two-player version forced players to alternate playing as a proxy for a third ‘free city’ that affected both players as though a third were sitting there.  It was clunky, and ultimately made for a very poor game.

Some things are clearly kept in the game: cards are color-coded to the type of building in your city (civic, military, science, etc); ‘building chains’ that grant ‘free’ buildings for having earlier ones built; resources needed for construction; and a game played in 3 ages. But to create a two-player version of 7 Wonders that retained the core tension of each turn – do I play this card or let it go and give my opponent a shot at it? – required a significant change in the mechanics.  You couldn’t just hand cards back and forth, because you know what’s coming, and you know what your opponent is going to do with it.  Additionally, with only two players, you only get two wonders.  A game about building the wonders clearly needs more.

7 Wonders Duel solves both problems, and with an elegance that’s almost annoying in how selfish the designers are in hogging two great ideas for one product line.

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