Wednesday 30 August 2017

Review: enDANGERed Orphans of Condyle Cove






















Game Name:enDANGERed Orphans of Condyle CovePublished Year:2016
Game Publisher:Certifiable StudiosPlayer Scale:2 – 4
Game Designer:Jesse LabbeRun Time:5 – 40 mins

Condyle Cove is a dark and dreary place.  Stark and devoid of both colour and life.  It’s even more desperate if you are an orphan.  Alone, tired, dirty and afraid, struggling to survive and the odds of that…well, they weren’t great to begin with and they just keep getting worse.

 

 

In Play 2

In enDANGERed Orphans each player is a nameless orphan struggling to survive, you’ll wonder through Condyle Cove seeking refuge and safety where you can, using up your limited Options to try and stay afloat.  When you’re out of Options, the shadows part and the Bogeyman gets you.  If you find yourself running low on Options and truly desperate, you can always visit the menacingly named Kiddie Corner (or cul-de-sac) at the centre of the map and try an Act of Desperation, to breathe some limited life back into your game, but even that isn’t guaranteed.  As you could always uncover the Bogeyman him/her/itself and be lost to the void forever.  Mwahahahahahaha!

Okay, so this game may sound a little morbid and depressing thematically, and you would be kind of right, but let me put it this way:

Imagine Tim Burton had a nightmare and turned it into a board game with a Peanuts-esque artwork.

Standees

Interested now I bet, and now you’ve got the right feel for this game.

Playing the game

There are three types of cards in the game. Options – cards that you can play to give you bonuses or be detrimental to your opponents, these also form your life-deck.  Cove cards form the map of Condyle Cove, each card has a special ability which will affect any player on the card, and you’ll use these to map out the game area each time you play.  Acts of Desperation – as the name suggests these are last ditch attempt cards to stay in the game, most of these are “good” cards, and at least one of them is the Bogeyman.  Which is bad.  Very bad.

Options Cards

With that all in mind, the rules are very, very simple.  Move (if you want to), up to two spaces.  Play a card (if you want to), and you can play as many as you like in any order.  Draw two cards (either Cove Cards or Option Cards).  If you get to the Draw phase and are unable to draw two cards then it is game over for you and you always, always have to Draw two cards.  This means that after turn one, you will have to play a card.

Kiddie Corner and the Acts of Desperation (AOD) bring an exciting, and terrifying mini-game of chance into endangered Orphans.  You could argue that they are a little swingy, and you’d be right, but a gamble should be swingy.  If a player ever starts their turn at Kiddie Corner, they must pick one of the six Acts of Desperation cards.  Five of these will reinvigorate their Options deck to varying degrees.  One will end their game.  The next player to end up here, well, their odds just got a little steeper.

Acts of desperation

That’s it.  That’s the game.  This is a player exclusion game, with the last Orphan standing (alone, oh so very alone) being the winner.  enDANGERed Orphans is a quick, light game, that is full of player interaction and most importantly; fun.  It is simple, slick and doesn’t get in its own way with too many rules (I’ll discuss the rulebook a little later on) or limitations.  Simply play a card, do what it says.  Make a friend cry perhaps. And move along.

It is all Take-That though, and the game is very competitive, which may not appeal to everyone.  You can very clearly see you opponents Options deck deplete like a cardboard hour glass, and you’ll see them grin from ear to ear when they have that one card they need to ruin you (having a good poker-face will really help you out in this game).  You’ll start each turn with the seemingly innocuous yet difficult decision about moving.  Since many of the Cove cards grants an ability based on where you are, or are not, but you don’t want to stay put for too long.  Sure being in the Creek is handy for a while that is until someone plays Swept Away and makes you discard everything.  And as much as it is a risk, you don’t want to get too far away from Kiddie Corner, just in case…

Player Mat

The start of your first game, you might play nice.  You might start adding to the map instead of immediately causing problems for your fellow orphans.  But that won’t last.  Soon you’ll be causing cards to be discarded, you’ll be stealing and shuffling other pawns around the board with near reckless abandon. When you play your second game you’ll be a top–class, A-Grade d*ck with a capital “D”, straight out of the gate.  What’s more, you’ll have even more fun.

Cove Cards

There may come a point in this game that a loss can fall a little flat, when you’re running low-ish on Options, and then, through a series of unfortunate events (read as ‘Dick moves’) you can find yourself without any viable options, no way to get to Kiddie Corner and nothing left in your Options deck.  This could just be because the people I play against much prefer watching me figuratively bleed-out, rather than just putting me out of my misery, but I do often feel robbed of a Game End when this comes about.

Now, about the components. 

I will start by saying: enDANGERed Orphans has my favourite board game components to date.  Not only is the artwork great in its dreary horridness but the pawns are utterly brilliant – painted or not these look and feel great.  The neoprene play mats: amazing.  The cards themselves are of the highest quality linen finished stock.  The box insert fits everything – including the expansions, with fully sleeved cards – all comfortably, perfectly.  Even the flippin’ box looks great with its spot UV cover art.  I could keep writing words, but you’re better off just looking at this stuff.  Really.

Pawns

Fundamentally, enDANGERed Orphans is a card game.  In a basic two or three player game, you can strip the game down to around sixty cards and the standees – which you’ll be able to fit into a deck box.   I went with a Flip ‘n’ Tray to fit the expansions and pawns in to make easier to transport, which also adds it to my #LunchBreakGames series.

Flip n Tray

Bizarrely, it comes with both standees and pawns.  This is only bizarre because the pawns are so awesome.  I can’t see much use in the standees unless players particularly want to something more specific (since the pawns are both ethnic and gender neutral), like a cat.

Standees with Cat

There are a few expansions also available; Mr Coleman’s Carnival of Captivating Curiosities, Somewhere Down Lexington Drive, these add a new Cul-de-sac artwork card and different and new Acts of Desperation and some additional standees.  Do you need these to expand the game, or get a fuller game experience? No, they just add some more flavour and character.  The one expansion that mixes things up significantly is the Last Winter of Benny Harris which comes with the game which includes a new Cove and ability to draw a different type of card Last Winter, which are bonus actions, some of which are very bad against your opponents, some are very bad for you.  It’s another mini game, big gamble deck which can make the games a bit longer and a little more fun.

Last Winter

…a little later on

One thing about this game that seems to have caused quite a bit of fuss is the rule book.  Is it a very funny, laid-back, jocular and flippant rule book?  Yes, yes it is, there is a very good chance you laugh if not smirk when reading it.  Is it obtuse, vague and occasionally unhelpful, yeah, it kind of is that too.  Yet, as an intelligent, well humoured gamer you’ll get it.  The rules are very, very simple:

Move.

Play.

Draw.

When you’re out of Options you’re out!

Rule Book

Certifiable Studios have gone with the less is more system here and on the whole it works.  If you are a Rule Hound type of gamer…fix yourself a cup of chai tea and find your happy place before opening this rule book.  If you can play a game comfortably by playing logically, sensibly then you’ll be fine.  This lack of clarity extends to some of the cards too, unfortunately with mixed terminology that again, will upset the thoroughbred rule hounds.  Certain Cove card prohibit cards being “Taken” from your hand, but the language on the Options cards uses “Steal” .  Another location stops your pawn being moved – but is that moved as in “Moved one/two/three spaces” like the movement phase, or does it include being taken from one cove location and placed on another.  As a personal bugbear I would have preferred that the term orphan was used in place of ‘anybody’, or ‘pawn’ or ‘player’ to keep the theme and mechanic more interlocked.  A future edition of this game would tighten a lot of these “issues” up quickly and simply, in doing so it making this game more immediately accessible to newer/less experienced or younger gamers.

So…

enDANGERed Orphans is a very completive game, with lots and lots of Take That, which could very easily make you fall out with your friends. It looks utterly amazing, and has set the bar very high for any subsequent games from Certifiable Studios.  Ironically, considering the theme of the game, it oozes love and affection from its creators and they have wanted to deliver the very best, most fun product they could.  I feel they have succeeded in this.  Yes, it is a glorified card game, but, oh.  The glory of it!

BogeyMan

The Good:

Great player interaction

Brilliant components

Amazing artwork

Quick and easy rule set

Exciting elements of luck mixed with light strategy/hand management

Funny rulebook

The Bad:

Full on Take-That game – which some may not like

Player Exclusion –which again, some might not like

The theme may put you off, but stop being a sissy and play it

Obtuse rulebook

Occasionally ambiguous card wording

Semi-pointless standees (they still look ace though)

This game was purchased/ backed on Kickstarter at The "GREEDY BASTARDS" Level

 

Wednesday 23 August 2017

Review: Plague Inc.

If you’re familiar with the mobile game of the same name, this board game variant will need little introduction. For those that haven’t heard of it, in this game you are a pathogen, a germ, a dirty, dirty disease with only one goal; the complete and utter annihilation of human kind.  Thematically, this is opposite to the well known and loved Pandemic series of games, but that is where the similarities end.  Plague Inc., will take you on a very different, very competitive journey in your attempt to wipe man from the face of the planet and be claimed the best (or worst, depends on which way you look at it) disease of all time.

 

[caption width="4032" id="attachment_1965" align="alignnone"]In Play A game in play[/caption]

Now, for some people, the theme may be off-putting, I get that.  I could tell you that this is a good game, which is full of interesting choices, a little bit of luck and some great player interaction.  But, if you really don’t like the idea of playing a game based on a Doomsday Event, you’re going to find a barrier that I can’t really help you get over.
You should try though.



Each player begins with a fairly innocuous pathogen, represented by a player mat with some basic stats, limited abilities and space for new Traits to be evolved and added later.  Playing as either a Bacteria or Virus (the Virus offering a slightly more complex game, but you can play a balanced game with a mix of both on the board) each turn you’ll follow a strict order of play that will enable you to affect more countries, evolve your disease, infect and ultimately kill remove countries from the board.  Game Decks

The complexities, wonders and beauty of the world are reduced to a red-hued world map showing six continents (Antarctica is excluded), each to be made up of Country cards as the game progresses.  These cards display a number of black hexagons which represent the major cities and these are what you will attempt to infect and kill.
In a player’s turn, they will collect DNA points (which act as both victory points and currency) for each County they Control – have equal or majority infection tokens on.  Following this, players will get to choose to add a new, healthy country to the board, or remove a country from the deck in order to [I’m going to call it] mutate and refresh their limited and dwindling hand of Trait cards.  It is at this stage that the interesting choices start to show.

Country Cards

Your disease can’t just pop-up and start infecting willy-nilly.  Far from it, any new Country card added needs to be first connected to a country you currently infect – either on the same continent or via boat or plane.  Next, this new country has to be climate suitable.  Extremely hot and/or cold countries are difficult places for an un-evolved disease to thrive.  You can use these extreme temperature countries to box opponents in or reduce the amount of connectivity they have by discarding country cards that bear the boat or plane icon.  Ensuring that you maintain plenty of climate suitable connectivity.  Of course, your opponents are trying to do the same to you.  However, discarding a country card comes with a ‘cost’, the discarding of your current hand of Trait cards. Trait cards

Trait cards represent the symptoms (by and large) of your disease, each card enabling your disease to do some else, or something extra.  Each delightfully named and thankfully bearing no picture other than an abstracted symbol.  These benefits range from making your disease more infectious, make it tolerant to extreme temperatures, more stable when travelling and, probably most importantly, making it more lethal.  Only one Trait can be evolved –added – to your disease each turn, so the manner in which you evolve your pathogen will impact your game.  The cost of each evolution is naturally sliding, the more it does, and the better it does it the more expensive.  This is where the game gets a little swingy, as the more victory points the Trait costs you, the longer you spend recovering from your purchase.  At the end, you’ll get the points back for all active – topmost – traits, but that only helps in game, and does nothing to help you evolve and upgrade whilst playing.
It is with this mechanic that most new-to-the-game players struggle, as they place additional value to the higher costing, more powerful cards.  Spending 20 DNA points in the first part of the game is eye-watering high, so newer-gamers hold on to these cards, clogging up their hand which slows their progress.



Finally, you’ll be looking to wipe countries out.  Once all the city spots are full, any player who controls that country rolls the Death Die, rolling equal to, or lower than your Lethality score – so if you are prone to roll 1s a lot of the time, you will do very, very well playing Plague Inc..  Remember I promised you player interaction, it is here that it really comes in.  Event cards give you all sorts of abilities, some will let you move your disease around a little more freely as a one shot, others will allow you to make a nuclear strike against that country that is soon to score and you’re not in.  You can quarantine other players, stop them, slow them and generally get on their nerves, all in these great little pockets of playing “the good guys”.

Event Cards

These event cards are a welcome and occasionally brutal surprise when playing a game, and any player that occupies a county when it is killed gets one, so even just dipping your toe in and spreading your little, non-lethal disease around will net you a good bunch of these cards.  The Event cards also inject a little more colour into the game, with more illustrative card art, however, these cards don’t fit perfectly from a thematic stand point, where you will be wiping out parts of North America out one minute, and then setting up a travel ban for all of Asia the next.  This flip-flopping between humankind and disease does snatch some of the immersion away – of which, as an abstract game there isn’t an abundance.
Plague Inc. is an example of a game that tells a story, even though it is probably one you don’t want to hear.  There is a healthy dose of replayability as some countries are removed each game, and with two different styles of play and a large Trait deck, you are unlikely to see much repetition.  You’ll play you second different to your first, and different again in your third and so on, learning and improving your understanding of the game each time.  It may be a little morbid, and monochromatic on the table, but the player interaction and competition will keep Plague Inc. as a welcome game on my table or shelf.

Solo Mode:
Plague Inc. also boasts a solo player mode, where you’ll play against the Plague Bot.  This presents an interesting challenge, and a fun little puzzle but it can, if you’re unlucky either kick your ass or just end up limited to the African continent making people sneeze and very little else.

This is a middle weight, competitive area control, hand management game, which is easy to pick up but offers plenty of choices and changes between games.  You’ll have great satisfaction dropping CDC quarantine down on your opponents, and the rare occasion where rolling a 1 is always a good thing.  In this game, you don’t want to succeed too much, as you can risk taking yourself out of the game, so striking that perfect balance where you are slightly ahead but never in risk is an interesting challenge.  As a fan of the mobile game, I’m really excited to see where the board game goes and how it develops with expansions, not that they are needed but they are ripe for design.  As much as this game is a little morbid, it is sometimes a lot of fun being the “bad guy”

Box

The Good:

Turns a very familiar theme on its head

A really good, simple area control game

Great player interaction

Plenty of scope for expansions
The Bad:

Player interaction is very Take-That heavy, which some may not like

The theme could be quite off-putting/upsetting

It looks a little bland in red hues and stark simplicity

Wednesday 9 August 2017

Review: Temp Worker Assassins






















Game Name:Temp Worker AssassinsPublished Year:2016
Game Publisher:Self PublishedPlayer Scale:2 – 4
Game Designer:David NewtonRun Time:45 – 60 mins

In Play

If you’ve ever wanted to kill your boss, imagine how much more you’d want to kill them if you worked at Bureaucrat Castle, where your boss could be a Payroll Pirate, a Public Relations Troll or even the Acquisitions & Mergers Viking.  Well now you can! (you can’t go and kill your boss, this isn’t an endorsement, it’s a board game review).  As a top-class assassin you’ll infiltrate the castle-come-office, you’ll stalk your victim, you’ll plan and when the timing is just right, CHLUNK, you’ll hit them with…a stapler.

Temp Worker Assassins is a deck building, worker placement game that takes place over 5 turns framed as days of the week, using your Assassin meeples you’ll scurry off to certain departments, which will invariably enable you to become a more proficient killer by either imbuing you with particular skills, equipment or allowing you to access different Targets.  Alternatively, an assassin can make an attempt on a Target, where the player will begin playing and chaining cards from his/her hand to deal out more or equal damage than the Hit Points of the Target.  On a successful attempt the Target card is awarded to that player for Victory Points, and kill or not, that assassin meeples is set to the dungeon to think about what they’ve done.

Departments

 

Once all Assassins are placed, the day ends and they all leave for the night to work and kill again the following day.  After five rounds of this, the game ends and victory points are totted up and a winner is declared.

The core mechanics of this game are very simple, and the streamlined interlinking of Deck Building and Worker Placement make this a very easy game to pick up and play for veterans, and also for newer gamers.  The game pace is such that players will very quickly establish their strategies, patterns and counter patterns, so as each new day begins, there is a flurry of movement as workers are placed, and only as the day wears on, do your options become limited and more thought required – which personally I think makes for a clever and interesting thematic mechanic, as I do far less work in the afternoon too. I’m also more likely to want to kill my boss by the end of the day (again, don’t actually kill your boss).

Player Hand

Like many worker placement games, strategies need to be adaptive, as “Blocking” forms the core player interaction – although there are a few cards that specifically hinder opponents, and in later rounds Targets fall quite rapidly, so if you’re planning on an attempt you have to be fast acting to get the one you really want.  The same is true of plundering the supply line of stationary when you need that last pencil to improve the score of your stapler.  With ten Departments, many with multiple action slots to be filled there is always some choice, more choice than one normally expects to see in such a game.  On occasion this can lead to a little Analysis Paralysis, and every so often a Department falls a little flat in comparison to another.

Target Row

There are five standard Departments in each game (six in a four-player game), means the large deck of cards provides a wide range of variation and game-on-game variations.  There is even a “Hard Mode” when you’re ready for more of a challenge.  Equally there is a decent array of Target cards that you can’t always bank on that potentially very valuable General Service Golem making an appearance (this Target awards 3 victory point for each Typing Pool Zombie you have killed, where these Zombies are very, very easy to kill, but in themselves worth very little).  Finally, there is a very large deck of Stationary cards, and as these are what you’ll be building your deck with there are plenty of them – here I would lean towards there being too wide a range – especially in a two player game, where circling through them is much slower.  Having a set of cards that were removed in a two-player game would make the deck far slicker.

Stationary Cards

I’m a fan of deck builders, and this game does a very good job with this mechanic, there is a great deal of satisfaction when chaining card after card into a grotesque stationary-horror tableau of fantastical death.  Unlike some deck builders, where a small, concise deck is preferred, Temp Worker Assassin excels with a larger deck where much of the fun is drawing cards.  The gamble and risk of pulling the card you need is what makes this game for me, and sets it aside from others such as Star Realms or Dominion- where you are limited to the cards you have in your hand.  Instead, Temp Worker Assassin has more of a Texas Hold’em Poker feel, gambling on the next card out the deck being the one you need to make the kill.  No, you don’t need to risk this, and you can build your hand more conventionally – which is how I started playing – but as soon as one player starts taking those risks and hitting bigger rewards the game changes pace completely.

Depending on the spread of Departments, Stationary, and Targets occasionally it can be difficult to play catch up when a player is able to take the lead.  The Bulletin cards – awarded each day for the player who makes the first kill are pretty powerful cards and are certainly worth fighting to gain a couple of.  The easiest way to do this is the Typing Pool Zombies, which aren’t worth a great deal individually, but stacked up, especially with the Golem can be a highly lucrative tactic.

Adam Bolton has done a jaw-droppingly brilliant job with the art work in this game.  As a lifelong comic book fan, the comic book slant on the fantasy artwork can’t be ignored or highlighted enough, and it does something different with an otherwise very tired genre – I’m looking at you Magic the Gathering.

Targets

Temp Worker Assassin blends two very simple mechanics and does so simply and seamlessly, and yet feels and plays differently.  The theme is fun and charming accentuated by the brilliant artwork allowing this game stand out from a genre crowded area of tabletop gaming.

 

The Good:

Easy to learn and play

Great variability

Plenty of choice in each round

Amazing artwork

Different and funny slant on fantasy genre

The Bad:

Little player vs. player interaction

Few catch up mechanisms

Gameplay can be a little longer than game weight expectations

I want oversized cards to see the artwork better

I also want custom Assassin meeples – but then I’m just greedy

Box

Thursday 3 August 2017

7 Wonders Duel






















Game Name:7 Wonders DuelPublished Year:2015
Game Publisher:Repos ProductionsPlayer Scale:2
Game Designers:Antoine Bauza & Bruno CathalaRun Time:30 – 60 mins

7 Wonders Duel takes you back three–thousand odd years or so, to once again rule over an empire in this tricky, thought provoking, and ultimately brilliant riff on its big brother; 7 Wonders. If you have never played 7 Wonders don’t panic, as these games are very different, yet are clearly related.  If you’ve played 7 Wonders, and, love it or hate it, this game is worth investigating.  A relatively small footprint, and gameplay under an hour it is great for couples, lunch breaks or just as a cracking head-to-head game that wraps up in under an hour.

7 Wonders Duel

After each selecting four of the available wonders each – yes that does mean there will be eight of them in total, but only seven can be built – and your starting coins, in turn, you will select one the available cards from the pyramid style display and add it to you civilisation, paying any costs associated and thus gain its benefits/resource.

There are three ages to the game, where each subsequent Age the range of resources changes and evolves, advancing your civilisation forward.  The game will come to a natural close at the end of the Third Age, where all points are calculated and a winner is declared.  Alternatively, victory can be achieved through a ‘Scientific’ channel – collecting six of the seven possible scientific icons, or via the ‘Military’ route, whereby you crush your opponent beneath sandal shod foot.  These latter two are much harder to achieve – but believe me, it feels really, really good when you do.

 

[caption id="attachment_1873" align="alignnone" width="4032"]Age One Pyramid of the 1st Age[/caption]

 

A central feature of the game, and one that makes the game look very different from many, is the table layout of the cards for each of the Ages.  Not only does it look cool, and it is also pretty thematic but it provides a great assimilation of the drafting mechanic used in 7 Wonders, but for two players.  Which is far, far better than the two player mode that exists in that game.  From this very simple set-up, each player is beset by an array of choices and consequences, in a greater fashion that you would normally experience in a draft.  With about 50% open information – since roughly half of the cards are placed face down – the questions of what to take, what to leave behind, what to open, or leave for your opponent to open form your basic, yet difficult choices that must be made each turn.

[gallery ids="1875,1874" type="rectangular"]

When playing this game, there is a definite sense of flow, with the game’s pace charging ahead as the Ages fall, as your civilisation becomes more coherent and more structured, choices become more clear, but never simpler.  Ways and means of blocking your opponent become more recognisable, but ultimately more costly if they don’t also benefit you.  If you fall into the category of a “Classic Gamer”, one who likes strategically planning ahead, second guessing your opponent and basically planning your victory from four or five moves away, 7 Wonders Duel will be right up your street, with a nice flourish – in that every now and then, a revealed card scuppers even your best laid plan.  On the flip side of this though, if you are prone to Analysis Paralysis this game can, for those same reasons feel a little daunting at times.

 

[caption id="attachment_1880" align="alignnone" width="4032"]Wonders 8 of the 7 Wonders...erm...yeah, 8[/caption]

 

Players already familiar with 7 Wonders will feel right at home playing this game, coming armed to the table with an understanding of how the tableau and resource building works.  There is a significant change in the way Commerce, Science, and Military are handled, but not so much so to create a barrier.  New players to this cannon will quickly be able to make sense of the rule book, which provides plenty of examples plays for the more ‘complex’ rules.  The rulebook, isn’t the most concise, and looking for rule clarity and reminders isn’t always as straightforward as one would like – I always forget how many coins you start with during set up, and I also forget I have to go to page six to find out.  Of particular note is the iconography, particularly on some of the Science tokens, Guides and Wonders – once you know what they mean the symbols do “make sense” but that meaning doesn’t spring forth, so early games can become slowed while you look them up.

Science Tokens

With an almost perfect and useful box insert, quality components including the nifty military tracker, Repos Productions have done exactly what you would expect of a major game distributor.  Unfortunately, they have even managed to make the card sizes irritating again – in 7 Wonders they are unnecessarily big, in Duel, too small – yes it helps keeps the footprint down, but if a standard poker card size had been used very little would have been lost.

There are no ‘Take That’ actions you can make in this game, no way you can directly stop or hamper your opponent, other than removing or limiting their options (a couple of the Wonders do allow you to destroy one of your opponents resources).  Military actions do provide a little back and forth, but never enough that you ever feel like you are focussing solely on that aspect of the game, and certainly not enough to spoil anyone's enjoyment.  All the player interaction happens above the table; one player out-smarting, out-manoeuvring and out-playing the other. The tit-for-tat of selecting the card you know you opponent needs soon becomes too costly, and so as the game progresses so too must a player’s ability to plan and strategize.

War Trcker

After a game of 7 Wonders Duel, I feel compelled to play it again, and again.  Throughout each game there is a palpable competition and conflict, and far more so than one would expect from such a small, compact box.  Some iconography feels obtuse, and the cards are a little too small for me to be able to comfortably shuffle, but really, these are the only bad points about the game...in fact, I wish I could play a multiplayer version of Duel, that wasn’t 7 Wonders.

It plays in under an hour, is a great two-player game with enough depth, strategy and variation to ensure each game will feel and play differently.  It also looks both interesting and beautiful on the table. 7 Wonders Duel, really does feel like it pits you head-to-head, in an all-out rivalry against your opponent in a way that many larger games just don’t seem to capture.  I strongly believe everybody needs a solid two-player game in their collection, and you can’t go far wrong with this game at all.

 

The Good:

Compelling game play

Great pacing

Strong competition

Thought provoking

Multiple paths to victory

 

The Bad:

Cards are too small for “man hands”

Icons can be very confusing

Rulebook is a little on the naff side

Can only be played two-player!

Don't just take my word for it though, check out what Meeple Like Us or Creaking Shelves have to say about this game.