Base price: $17.
2 players.
Play time: ~15 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 8 

Full disclosure: A review copy of Duel for Cardia was provided by Asmodee USA.

This hasn’t been a great week for working on reviews, and I mostly blame the impending Hades II launch. It’s going to be like this for a while. Well, that, and my day job. It’s mostly been the day job, actually. We’ve been undergoing a lot of Various Events at the office, and that’s kind of bled over into the time that I would normally Write and Rest. We’re working on it. Things are just hectic right now, but I’m told that they won’t be Hectic Forever. That’s probably a lie, but that’s the business, sometimes. Before I dwell on that too much, let’s drop into Duel for Cardia!

In Duel for Cardia, players are vying for the approval of various factions for control of the legendary city of Cardia. It was made by a djinn. So that’s cool. I have a lot of infrastructure questions and like, Public Sanitation / Parks Department questions, but they’re probably out of scope here. Do you think she appointed the initial folks and said something like “with the power of my magic I’ve made this city’s constitution follow a Weak Mayor system; a strong city council is key to the prosperity of this town”? Am I getting too into the weeds on this? Why not find out?

Contents

• Setup
• Gameplay
• Player Count Differences
• Strategy
• Pros, Mehs, Cons
• Overall

Setup

None, really. Each player gets a copy of the same deck. You can play with Deck 1:

Or you can play with Deck 2:

Once you pick one, shuffle the cards and draw five. You can set the tokens aside:

And you can use a Location if you’d like:

Regardless, you’re ready to start!

Gameplay

This one’s surprisingly straightforward, which is always nice. To start a round, each player shuffles their deck and draws five cards. Both players choose a card to play simultaneously face-down. Reveal both; the higher card wins and earns a sigil. The lower card activates its ability. If the cards are tied, no player gets a sigil or activates an ability (unless otherwise stated).

Various cards have various effects, and some can cause other cards’ values to retroactively increase or decrease. If that happens, a card that was previously tied or losing may now be winning. Award that card a sigil. Do not activate the other card’s ability, though; that ship has sailed.

Once a player has five sigils, the player who earned five sigils first of the two wins the round! Take the cards, reshuffle each deck, and start over. The first player to win two rounds wins the game!

Player Count Differences

None! This is a two-player game.

Strategy

• Sometimes the long game is the best game. It’s not always about winning five bouts straight out the gate. You might be able to play the Djinn, which lets you win, early on for a quick win, and then lower the value of a different card so that you can re-activate the Djinn’s effect. There are a lot of combos that emerge!
• Generally, the higher the card value, the better the card’s effect. It’s not guaranteed, and the effects are pretty situational, but if you know what to look for and what you’re trying to do, you can get some pretty good things done.
• Forcing your opponent to discard cards and limit their options is always good. The fewer cards they have to choose from, the more you can predict what moves they’re going to take. If you know what they’re playing, you can counter it.
• There are certain critical cards whose effects are worth almost always going for. I think one is that you retroactively and moving forward win all ties, which can suddenly vault you over the five rings you need to win a bout. It happens sometimes.
• Try to get your opponent to second-guess what card you’re going to play. Don’t be predictable! If they can predict you, you’ll be the one getting countered. Sometimes if you think they’re going to play a high card play a low card or one that will neutralize their plan.
• Even if you lose the signet, you get to use your effect. That’s sometimes better than winning in a particular round.
• Don’t get so wrapped up in using card effects that you forget to win bouts! You still need to win five bouts to win the round! If you’re too busy using effects and goofing off, you might end up like I did. Activated a ton of cool cards, still not a great outcome because my friend just played five high cards and won.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• The art and colors are super fun! I like how deep and saturated everything looks; it makes it look somewhere between magical and Capital Lux.
• I appreciate that the two sets of decks have different backs to keep things easy to organize. Most games wouldn’t even consider making the deck backs separate. Again, it’s a new piece of art potentially and there’s legal signoffs and things like that. I imagine. I’m still not a manufacturer.
• Modularity is cool! I think it’s really neat that you can swap, say, the yellow set from Deck 2 with the yellow set from Deck 1! I need to play a bit more so I can try that out. Board Game Arena doesn’t support custom decks yet.
• I like the Location Cards and their effects. They’re a nice way to inject some variety between games.
• The nice thing about a short strategy game like this is that it tends to grow with players: if you keep playing the same person over and over again, your strategy is going to grow and change along with you. Players start to learn how another players play, and if you play this enough with a strategic player they’re likely going to start learning your opening gamits and what cards you tend to favor. If that happens, try something new! There’s a lot to do for only 16 cards.
• Very portable. It’s a tiny deckbox and it easily fits 64 cards (plus some extras).

Mehs

• Watch out for the physical length of this game, just because a bunch of side-to-side cards can take up a lot of space. The game tends to run physically long! Sometimes a foot or two? Not sure; I forgot to measure it last so we’re going with “about a foot or two”. It’s creative. I’m sure one of y’all is skilled enough that you can figure it out from the photos.
• Definitely a game where it’s worth looking at the cards before your first play. All of the cards have unique effects and the synergies are non-obvious. Going through them really fast will lead to a smoother outcome for everyone playing, and will hopefully make the game more fun and competitive!

Cons

• I do wish the theme came through in the cards a bit more. Even the cards’ effects themselves aren’t always necessarily super thematic. Some do, some don’t. I understand there’s only so much you can do with two 16-card decks, but, nonetheless, sometimes the theme feels a little abstract for my preferences.

Overall: 8 / 10

Overall, I like Duel for Cardia! It reminds me somewhat of Love Letter / Lost Legacy, particularly the latter since so much of that was just “play a card and see what happens”. This carries on some of that but with a more organized and streamlined two-player experience. There’s a fairly good amount of strategic play built into which cards you choose to play when, but the effects aren’t so complicated that you can’t pick them up in a couple minutes and play. Ergo, a near-perfect game for date night or a little bit of a wait or an airplane, similar to Wizards Cup. I am sympathetic to the need for publishers to release smaller-box games at lower manufacturing price points to deal with the general Tariff Unpleasantness, but it does help that a lot of the games they’re releasing are pretty fun. I’ll always have a soft spot for a small-box game. What I particularly like here is that there’s configurability; you can swap all cards of a color between decks to configure the different gameplay to your personal preference (notably, both decks must be the same, though). You can also add a Location which can change things up. Things are more interesting when you’re drawing more or fewer cards or cycling one card to the bottom of your deck each turn, and things are certainly more dire when in addition to winning five matchups, winning three in a row wins you the round. Location effects are a cheap way to add some variety, but hey, there are a ton of games that it works for (and this is certainly one of them). If you’re a fan of quick card games that present well, you want to go head-to-head with a buddy or rival, or you just like vaguely djinn-themed properties, you can’t go wrong with Duel for Cardia! I’ve enjoyed it.

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