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

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.

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!

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

We love this two player game! The variety in strategy keeps the game fresh each time and makes it more fun. I personally enjoy games that keep me mentally engaged, and this game delivers there. It’s easy to learn, but takes a few rounds to fully remember all the rules.

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.

For the past several years, my primary gaming partner has been my wife. As you can imagine then, 2-player style games come out quite often at our house. This is the best 2-player game I have ever played, bar none. To start, know that I have never played 7 Wonders (the original game), so I can't compare it to that. We also are extremely late in picking this up due to owning Splendor, Among the Stars, and Roll for the Galaxy (as well as many others), each of which has 2-player engine building style gameplay, similar to 7 Wonders Duel [7WD]. Despite that basic similarity, however, 7WD has several features that simply places it on the top, where it will stay for quite some time. - It has multiple unique win conditions. This is so important in a 2-player game, I almost refuse to play any 2-player game where this is not a feature; at least give us multiple paths to the same victory condition! Knowing you will lose starting on turn three is no fun whatsoever. In 7WD, you can win by points, by conquering your opponent, or by gaining enough variety in the sciences. The latter two still count as a victory even if you have zero points. So it is entirely possible to be winning the whole game, then have your spouse swoop in for a victory on the last phase! This makes every game tense and enjoyable for both parties; you are never out of the fight... - It is an engine building game at heart. Engine building games are great for 2-spouse games because it allows you to win without stomping the other one into the ground. Humans are competitive; we tend to stay mad at the opponent for a while after a loss! So, having an engine building game where it is more "your city versus theirs" is nice. For whatever reason, psychologically the loser feels less angst towards the winner about the loss, probably because the loser knows the losing city wasn't built properly! - It is inherently random. Each game is set up in a Tri-Peaks style pyramid, meaning each game is unique. On top of that, you only see the faces and abilities of about 50% of the cards; the rest are face down. This provides a substantial amount of replay value between games, as within each phase of each game you are constantly having to rethink which victory you are pursing and how. The facedown cards do not always fall in line with your first thought! - It is thematic. Building an ancient Greek city is such a cool idea. - It is fast. We are parents. As much as we love sitting around playing five hour adventure romps on cold nights, a 30 minute game is much more reasonable. Plus, 2-player games are just better when they are shorter: finish it up, move on to the next round, give the loser a chance for redemption - or time to grab a beer... - The titular Wonders are very well done, in both their art and their mechanics. They provide a race mechanic (8 are dealt, but there can only be 7 on the board!) and are incredibly helpful with their game-altering mechanics, but they are not inherently overpowering. I have still won games where my wife dropped all four of hers on the board in one fell swoop. Again, that's rare, but it's yet another example of how you aren't out of the fight until its over! 7WD has set the bar for 2-player game enjoyment. It isn't the most complex, it isn't the prettiest (but its close!), and it is certainly only one genre: engine building. But it understands what a 2-player game needs and delivers on all fronts. Hopefully, other genre's of 2-player games will learn from 7WD's success.