7 Wonders Duel (Base Game)

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!

Our family (ages 8-12 and adults) loves the variety of strategies to win the game and the fact that it is a pretty quick strategic game is nice. My wife and I like the fact it is a 2 player, so we don’t always need a big group. It’s well thought out, easy to learn, and different each time. It’s a fun game to add into the rotation or have as a date night game.

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!

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.