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We Got Played #2: Seven Wonders Duel VS. The Lord of the Rings Duel for Middle Earth!
41 Plays4 months ago
Today on We Got Played, we look at the same game... twice! We take a gander at Seven Wonders Duel and its Tolkien counterpart to determine which one is the true game to rule them all.
Transcript
Introduction to 'We Got Played'
00:00:16
Speaker
Hello and welcome to We Got Played. I'm Isaac. I'm Jesse. And let's find out, what did we get played
Exploring 'The Lord of the Rings Duel' and 'Seven Wonders Duel'
00:00:23
Speaker
today today? we got played two games. We got played The Lord of the Rings Duel from Middle-earth and Seven Wonders Duel.
00:00:34
Speaker
The same game, but twice. And designed by two people, so it's twice as nice. Wow. This is an Antoine Bauza and Bruno Cathala, or Bruno Cathala if you're more French than I am, a joint.
00:00:48
Speaker
And it's got a bit of a history, so I'll take us back back into the before times the long, long ago. Please do. ah There was a game called Seven Wonders. Seven Wonders ah came out in, I don't know, let's say 2013. All of these years probably are about the same.
00:01:03
Speaker
actually don't know when it came out, but it was it was in that that range, certainly. and it was a special game because did some very interesting and unique things it took the genre of civ games civilization games and boiled it down to like a 30 45 minute game and it made it for seven players and it used card drafting as its core mechanism So simultaneously seven people could play drafting cards from a hand and passing around and it was a huge hit ah put Antoine Bauza firmly in the upper constellation of board game stars and then as sort of a brand extension brand expansion Seven Wonders Duel followed and Seven Wonders Duel was the two-player version of Seven
Mechanics of 'Seven Wonders Duel'
00:01:54
Speaker
Wonders.
00:01:54
Speaker
Seven Wonders had kind of wonky two-player version in it that I don't know if a lot of people played and He reached out Antoine Bauza to Bruno Cathala and invited him to join in designing Seven Wonders Duel which was its own mega hit and Did a fantastic job of turning a drafting game into a true two-player game with its card layout do you want to describe a little about how the card layout works?
00:02:21
Speaker
Yeah, so the game is separated into three different rounds and each round has its own card layout the first two are a pyramid there's base of of cards that are flipped up, and then below those cards is cards that are facedown, and then it builds up like that, although you place them down backwards in order to get the coverage correctly. And then in the second round, the pyramid is upside down, and then in the third round, there's a weird box sort of created by the flipped down cards.
00:02:54
Speaker
You're sort of in the third age, visually at least, to the extent that we're giving this metaphor any credit. you're You're kind of looking at the pyramid as though were top-down, so you know as though you were suspended above the point of the pyramid looking down on it.
00:03:08
Speaker
Again, that's the the the innovative piece about the layout is, first, that ah there are some cards that are face-up and some cards that are face-down.
00:03:20
Speaker
And second, that when you draft, you can only draft from face-up cards that are not covered by any other card. Right. And as you take those cards, you free up other cards and they flip back up. So it's interesting because you inevitably, when you take cards, um start giving your opponents opportunities to see cards and to take cards that you haven't had a chance to look at as well, which models hand-passed card drafting really well.
00:03:52
Speaker
If I am picking out of the stack of, you know, the first, that first pick, I've got seven cards here. I take one, I pass the other six. My, a player to my left has never seen one that I took.
00:04:04
Speaker
Right. In two players, it, it really helps resolve that problem of after the first two hands, everyone's seen all the cards. Yeah. Right. So it introduces new cards into the system. You could imagine that, uh, maybe in early testing,
00:04:20
Speaker
They might have just added a you know an additional card from a face-down deck to the hand that they were passing back and forth as they were testing and kind of eventually found their way to this. Maybe not. Maybe this was the first iteration, but that's what it's doing. It's introducing new cards into the system that the that one of the players hasn't had a chance to draft.
00:04:39
Speaker
Yeah, and it's smart. It certainly works. There were periods where the tense moment of the turn would be flipping over that card and seeing what that did. Yeah, and I think that fits well with the length of time that the game plays in because these are 30-minute games.
00:04:55
Speaker
And so it's okay if they're a little unfair, right? It's okay if there's a dramatic moment where a card's revealed and it's perfect for one player and you know you kind of have that head-slapping moment. I can't believe that you got this. and But that's okay in this in this style of game.
Winning in 'Seven Wonders Duel'
00:05:11
Speaker
um I think also we're not going to go deep into the rules of how to play either of these games. yeah But just to give you a very, very high level, what's important to note is these are games that have ah two instant win conditions. So you play ostensibly over three ages. yeah But there are two instant win conditions. One is a military instant win condition if you can push the other player in this kind of tug of war.
00:05:34
Speaker
And one is a science condition where you have to collect a full set of symbols that are again featured on the cards. um And then if neither of those two win conditions pans out, then there's a victory point count at the end of the game and the cards that you have contribute to victory points in different ways.
Thematic Elements in 'Lord of the Rings Duel'
00:05:51
Speaker
So that's Seven Wonders Duel. And just this past year, ah as part of leveraging the J.R.R. Tolkien estate and monetizing that IP in every possible fashion, we got Lord of the Rings Duel for Middle-Earth, which is quite a mouthful of a title.
00:06:10
Speaker
Yeah. And it's a reimplementation of the Seven Wonders Duel system featuring the same designers. And... The way that the system is adapted is maybe the first thing I want to talk about. All right.
00:06:24
Speaker
From your perspective, what did you think of how they the Lord of the Rings theme was brought forward in Seven Wonders Duel, Lord of the Rings, Four Middle-Earth, Sauron expansion?
00:06:37
Speaker
So I thought that it felt to me like it was a lot more than just putting the Lord of the Rings art onto the Seven Wonders Duel game. It feels like they really did some work to take the themes and events and story of the Lord of the Rings and put it into that game format, and I thought that was done really nicely.
00:07:02
Speaker
One of the ah things that I thought was just a clever choice in this was the way that they um turned the science symbols into the race symbols. Yeah.
00:07:16
Speaker
So within the fiction of Lord of the Rings, part of the difficulty faced by the free people is mustering all of the different things kingdoms and nations and you know fantasy races together to Awaken to the threat right that is represented by by Sauron Gave actually a lot more weight and texture to that idea because Like in seven wonders duel. It's their symbols. You're collecting sign symbols It's cool if you can like get two symbols of the same then you trigger a power and that's fun
00:07:53
Speaker
But ultimately, you know, moving towards that end wind condition feels a little dry. i think it was better implemented in Lord the Rings Duel where not only do you have the sense of kind of awakening the different peoples, but also it had that trigger power, right? Where if you collected two elves or two dwarves or whatever, you would get um you would also get a power.
00:08:14
Speaker
Mm-hmm. And that, I don't know, for me felt more meaningful. Like, oh, ah you know, the dwarves are coming to the fight rather than i have two quill feather icon texts. I guess we write each other letters and somehow that makes me not pay as much for a future blue card. I don't know. Yeah, definitely. And I think it's a lot more interesting the way they do it in the Lord of the Rings game because in Seven Wonders Duel, the tokens themselves for the sciences are ah the mechanic that they make use of and then the name of the science.
00:08:50
Speaker
in the Lord of the Rings... Say that better, so like, the name of a token is engineering, for example. the name of the token is engineering, but the art on the card is just the mechanic it deals with.
00:09:01
Speaker
So it would be in a depicted version of getting money whenever your opponent uses resources or something. And then in the Lord of the Rings version, there's actual art for each of the races, and that's what you see. And I think you're able to connect with it a little more in terms of building out the story of the game. It's it's thematically better.
00:09:22
Speaker
Yeah, there there are weird thematic disconnects in the sense that in Seven Wonders Duel, you can take any two ah cards that are coded with, say, the wheel or writing, um and they don't bar you or in any way guide you in terms of which technology effect you take.
00:09:42
Speaker
So you can take you know the the the pottery and the wheel, and somehow that can give you either mathematics or or engineering or economics, like any of these things. Just, oh, two for any one of the five tokens available. So that's a little bizarre.
00:10:01
Speaker
Absolutely, yeah And we were able to connect the character art on the cards themselves with the tokens we were taking. For example, we had a lengthy conversation about who Boromir was when I took the Boromir card and got a human science for it.
00:10:14
Speaker
Right. And that made sense. It did. ah One other area that I think, well, there there are, I think, two other big... areas to discuss in in comparing these games. One is the way the military is implemented and the other is the the economic system of the game.
00:10:34
Speaker
Which of those do you want to go at first? I want to talk about the military because I have a lot of interesting things to say about the military. Well, you're making promises with that adjective. that is Interesting is doing a lot in this sentence, so let's pay that off.
00:10:46
Speaker
Alright, well, let's see if it tickles more my brain or more yours.
New Mechanics in 'Duel for Middle-earth'
00:10:50
Speaker
um I thought it was interesting that the military mechanic in Seven Wonders Duel was not adapted into the military mechanic of Duel for Middle-earth.
00:11:02
Speaker
Instead, the military mechanic was adapted into the Quest for the Ring mechanic in Duel for Middle-earth. So in Seven Wonders Duel, the military is a tug of war going one way or the other.
00:11:15
Speaker
And if you get all the way to the end, it's an instant win. And depending on where you end, it's a certain amount of victory points. In Duel for Middle-earth, a similar mechanic is present in the quest for the ring part of it, which is there is one slider for the Fellowship and one slider that's embedded inside ah slider for the Fellowship, which is for the Dark Forces.
00:11:38
Speaker
and as one moves forward, the other moves forward inside and one has to get to the end before they catch up. And this really explains why ah podcasts do not necessarily succeed where visual media might.
00:11:56
Speaker
But in essence, ah what happens, if you want to think about it without exactly how they've implemented it, um every time you move the fellowship of space, the Nazgul chasing the Fellowship also move a space. Yes.
00:12:11
Speaker
However, um the ah benefits that are triggered by moving forward only apply to the team moving forward. So if the fellowship players are the ones moving forward, they get benefits. right they They don't accidentally trigger benefits for the Nazgul. And the way that this is done, like the actual physical way that this is done is is very cool because there's track on the bottom and then there's a clear plastic a rail that has ah the fellowship on it and also has printed all of the
00:12:43
Speaker
Nazgul's benefits behind the fellowship. So the fellowship sort of proceeds on whatever. Go on the internet and find out. There's pictures of these sorts of things. We don't need to explain it to you. Right.
00:12:54
Speaker
But the point is that instead of it being a tug of war where I move something three spaces in your direction, you push back and move it three spaces back in my direction, it's actually a race.
00:13:05
Speaker
Right. And one of us is going to win, but the way that it's modeled is – If you win the race, you've dunked the ring. And if I win the race, I've caught you and caught the ring.
00:13:16
Speaker
It's, I think, a really clever piece of product design that translates the exact same game mechanism in a way that makes it filled with foreboding.
00:13:27
Speaker
Right. And just really expresses the theme beautifully. It's a very interesting thing and I say interesting again because I thought it was interesting not because you do well and thesaurus burned down on the um But they adapt the same mechanics from Seven Wonders Duel, it it feels like in different places.
00:13:51
Speaker
So you can play the same game, but in a different way. So instead of the military cards being related to the positional advantages you get, they're different cards that move you along this race track.
00:14:03
Speaker
the war cards are a map that you place troops on and move troops around, and that's a new mechanic that's not in Seven Wonders Duel. And it's in fact a third instant win condition, right? It is. Because in Seven Wonders Duel, you can win by activating all of the the races, whether for good or for evil, or by ah dunking the ring or catching the Fellowship.
00:14:29
Speaker
or by dominating Middle Earth militarily on on an actual map that they put in front of you. And in my opinion, and this is you know coming from someone who really, really loves Middle Earth and the the whole sort of to Tolkien's whole world, you know we have a giant map of Middle Earth over our fireplace in our living room.
00:14:54
Speaker
So to me... can't bring Middle Earth forward without maps. It's just part of It's actually the one thing that i didn't I felt was missing in the War of the Rings card game that is otherwise quite good. i think a Scott Brody...
00:15:13
Speaker
did that um anyway so yes so the map and moving around on the map and putting troops on the map and building fortifications on the map all this has no real analog in seven wonders duel that's true um what did you think of it i know that was by the way i i won our game of duel for middle earth and lost both of our games of seven wonders duel uh so obviously i liked one of them a lot more than the others but um but it was in fact um Yeah.
00:15:42
Speaker
and guess
00:15:45
Speaker
when we say that it's new and it's different from sevenw wonders duel it's actually really ah reimplementation of the victory point system yeah That's what it really is doing. So instead of cards that earn you a flat number of victory points and at the end of the game you see who has the most victory points if nobody got one of the instant win conditions, here it's instead of victory points you get military points that either allow you to put troops onto the map in different places or move troops that are already on the map so that they fight each other and eliminate one another.
00:16:21
Speaker
And ultimately, if nobody wins through any other way, whoever has the most control um the map is going to win. and um But you can instant win if you wipe somebody else off the map entirely and have presence in all of the map.
00:16:41
Speaker
That's, you know, to my mind, ah ah really nice iteration on victory points. I'm going disagree with you here. I don't think it works both ways. Because there's lot of other systems happening, it feels like at a certain point, if you're not ahead in any specific thing, if you're not ahead in sciences, if you're not ahead in the quest for the for the ring, that part of the game starts to become way overvalued.
00:17:08
Speaker
um and it starts to just become essentially an arms race, and I find that part of the game is the least fun, and it's a little unfortunate that that's the analog that they came up with that acts as both instant win and also ah the tiebreaker. I thought it would have been much better as one of the other.
00:17:26
Speaker
It's interesting to me because i think that... ah just as the map is an important part of ah Lord the Rings, so are battles and fortresses and sieges.
00:17:42
Speaker
And, you know, it's a 30-minute game. You're not going to get really elaborated system. But that map system is relatively clever, right? I think there's six regions, I remember correctly.
00:17:55
Speaker
um And,
Map Mechanics and Military Strategy
00:17:57
Speaker
yeah probably an odd number so that there be ties. yeah um So seven regions... And The military cards ah allow you to um sometimes ah move troops, sometimes add troops. And then there's this whole other piece, which is how the wonders are represented. Remember, because in Seven Wonders Duel, you have these wonder cards that are expensive to build and provide rather powerful immediate effects and often victory point bonuses at the end as well.
00:18:25
Speaker
um And there's a whole set-up draft that you do with them. There are 12, you set out 8, you put 4 down. like There's a whole... complex setup for it. In Middle-earth, it's much more straightforward. You just shuffle them up and then deal, I think it's four or three. Three. Three, and that's the three you're playing with today.
00:18:45
Speaker
And each one is tied to a specific region. So there are seven of them, and each one's tied to a region. and if you acquire the card which is basically a race as to who's going to get the um symbols that they need the resources that they need in order to acquire it but when you acquire that card you get to put a fortress down and that fortress kind of a permanent um and and its presence it automatically gives you presence in that space and I think they did a really nice job of sort of saying, well, in this version of the story, these are the three battles that are going to be, you know, the right the battle of Helm's Deep and the battle of Minas Tirith and the battle of Pelennor Field. And like, that's what they're going to be in this version, you know, and right maybe, maybe for some reason it's happening in Enidwafe. can't tell you why.
00:19:34
Speaker
But that's how this story has played out. So I hear your your objection, but I found it to be a relatively interesting and immersive part of engaging in the world of Middle-earth.
00:19:48
Speaker
I didn't think it was as engaging until that third round. To me, it felt like I was more drawn to the other parts of the game, the building up resources and ah building or making those landmarks and moving along the track than I was the expanding through Middle-earth.
00:20:06
Speaker
I didn't feel a whole lot of connection to that, and it felt like a game state that was just kind of changing everything. here and there for the first two rounds, and then it only becomes fun in the third round.
00:20:19
Speaker
Yeah, tempo-wise, it's interesting because it definitely builds to a crescendo. There are more of those military cards in the third
Economic Improvements in 'Duel for Middle-earth'
00:20:27
Speaker
round. And I think, again, that's helping to model the story. To me, it's great because it shows you the hand of the designer.
00:20:34
Speaker
There aren't an equal number of card types in each thing. And and Seven Wonders always had that. Resources are in age one and two, and there are no resources in age three, but there are victory point cards in age three. So it's...
00:20:46
Speaker
following along, but you definitely get that drama of those big combats or of those kind of swinging moments. um So I e actually rather liked it, though i recognize that, you know, tastes will differ on this.
00:21:04
Speaker
um we We should touch on the economic system because yeah we've, I think, covered this one pretty well. ah To my mind, the economic system from a game design perspective is uh the most successful uh step forward the most successful sort of iterative design so in in seven wonders duel you get seven coins some cards cost a coin or two or three to purchase straight out um but most most cards don't they cost resources and if you don't have enough of a resource you have to sort of
00:21:39
Speaker
in a very abstract way, purchase it from a market. And there's a whole pricing scheme, like things cost two coins plus one for every symbol that your opponent has of the kind of resource you want to buy. So if I want to buy a ah clay and my opponent has three clays, I got to pay two plus three is five for each clay times the two I need is 10 clay.
00:21:59
Speaker
Right. It's like a little convoluted. And the way that you get money is you choose a card and you discard it. So instead of taking a card into your system to build it, you discard it from from the game, or exactly from the game, but into a discard pile, and you gain who coins plus one for every yellow card you've previously built into your system.
00:22:22
Speaker
So there's stuff to remember. It's not intuitive. it's There's a lot of peering over and calculating and so on. and All of that is dispensed with in Duel for Middle-Earth. You want to talk about how it works in Duel for Middle-Earth?
00:22:38
Speaker
yeah You can take this one.
00:22:42
Speaker
So um in Duel for Middle-Earth, you don't have any of the um the price differentials or whatever. If you discard a card, you get...
00:22:53
Speaker
Gold equal to the age that you're in. In age one, you get one. right age two, you get two. age three, you get three. And that's it. Right. Super straightforward, super simple.
00:23:07
Speaker
No need for a player aid, no need for any memory elements. It's right there for you. um And, um you know, replacing resources just costs one.
00:23:18
Speaker
Right. What the game does is it scales up costs so that that all works. Yeah. Yeah. To the point that i evidently didn't even notice it, that it was like a thing and it worked very seamlessly.
00:23:32
Speaker
Yeah, I think, again, you know, a lot of my... a lot of my thesis about game design is that we have learned an awful lot in the last 20, 30 years of modern board games. And sometimes I find myself struggling to explain exactly how, because there are old games that are great.
00:23:54
Speaker
Like there are a lot of old games that are fantastic. And so people are like, well, you see, we didn't, we haven't gone anywhere. The old games are great. And the new games, they have more Chrome. They're a little bit, you know, they got blingy bits and fine and, you know, and they've gotten a lot more complicated and they,
00:24:09
Speaker
Mechanism on top of mechanism and it's not necessarily better and it's all a matter of taste and so on and you know I don't want to get too philosophical about how to measure the good and aesthetic theories and all the rest of that but You know, when you see an elaboration of a previous design, it's so much easier to point and say, see, that's better.
00:24:31
Speaker
That's cleaner. It's more intuitive. It's more instinctive. It's less fiddly. It works. And nothing stopped someone from dreaming of it in 2013.
00:24:44
Speaker
But they didn't. We had a greater tolerance for some of this crud, not because, you know, we've
Evolution of Game Design
00:24:52
Speaker
developed better taste over time. It's because the state of the art advances. And you look at, you know, 720p television today, and you're like, I can barely make this out through my cataract.
00:25:05
Speaker
You know, and a 4K TV just looks spectacular. It's So I think we're seeing similar things. We're seeing more elegant sense for how to do some of these mechanisms, for how to make some of these economic systems work, for refining all this.
00:25:25
Speaker
And this is just a really clean example of what I mean when I say games have gotten better. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and i I agree with that. i definitely think that there's some sort of ah rose-tinted filter that old media in general goes through that...
00:25:43
Speaker
Suggest that we have short memories not everything that comes out is going to be remembered and twenty thirty years from now there's going to be ah select few games that are remembered for either their quality or their significance and a lot of those games are the games that we compare to when talking about newer games and how they compare to older games and i feel like That's not entirely accurate, you know?
00:26:11
Speaker
That's not a total representation of what that era was. And so I think it's easier to say that older games were better when you have such a limited view on those games.
00:26:25
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with that. Well, I think we both agree that these were good games. We also played the Seven Wonders Duel Pantheon expansion.
00:26:36
Speaker
I don't want to spend any time on it. I thought it was terrible. I thought it was overly complex. I thought it didn't add almost anything. yeah I think, Jesse, you had the you you made the point that when a game makes the rulebook a component, it's probably not great. A part of the game is figuring out what the rulebook means.
00:26:58
Speaker
Yeah, and by the way, you know even the original Seven Wonders Duel ah had some... really difficult ah elements to it. The rules, you know, they're originally written in French and they're translated and it's not always great, but I mean, in particular, and apologize I apologize, I'm going some box noise.
00:27:17
Speaker
don't know we're going be able edit all this out, want to just read this to folks because some some things deserve to be called out. Always got to make the noise suppression difficult.
00:27:30
Speaker
This is... i really should have prepped this before, but bear with me. I'm just going make a lot of noise. Once you're making noise, it's more fun to make all the noise. Okay, so this is this is from the helpfully labeled Help Sheet. It's spelled one word, Help Sheet. That's how they do it in France. Subtitled Description of the Symbols.
00:27:50
Speaker
It's like the Gathering of the Vibes. The Fellowship of the Ring. so So, yeah, no, this is this is from the original Seven Wonders Duel. I don't want to confuse you. and I'm already confused. There's a set of icons that are common that it's trying to describe what they are, which already, if your icons are not, I mean, the iconography in Seven Wonders Duel in general was always a little tricky, but um here's I guess it's a sentence?
00:28:16
Speaker
I don't know, you tell me. Let's hear it. At the moment when it is billed, The card grants you one coin, two for each of the element represented constructed the city, which has the most of that element.
00:28:36
Speaker
and Now, in case you thought, oh, well, Isaac, you're being unfair. You're picking on them. That was clearly a typo. That sentence probably would have made more sense with a missing, you know, just strike out one word in there. Let me read the next sentence.
00:28:49
Speaker
At the end of the game, this card is worth one victory point for each of the elements represented constructed in the city, which has the greatest amount.
00:29:00
Speaker
None of that adds up. And they knew that none of that adds up because the very next word is Clarification, colon. Oh, good. and yet another attempt to describe what the heck they meant. it's It's like that video of the bear, like the bear mascot on the hockey rink, and no matter what, he just can't stop slipping.
00:29:28
Speaker
Right. Well, listen, and and, you know, the next column over has a header that says, organization organization of the cardboard depending on the age. Like, this is just a really bad translation job. Yeah. and this is from Seven Wonders Duel.
00:29:45
Speaker
The um expansion features similarly challenging text, a really poorly laid out rulebook. lots of new icons, and ultimately, like, did you care about anything that was happening in that expansion? it didn't it didn't feel like it added a lot thematically or mechanically.
00:30:08
Speaker
It didn't do i did some things that were unique to that expansion that felt like they were just unique for in order to be unique, and thematically, it doesn't fit with the idea of building up a civilization.
00:30:20
Speaker
No, mechanically it was like, hey here's some new card effects that you pay varying amounts of money to trigger instead of taking a regular turn. Which, you know, I don't know. You could probably boil down any mechanism into yeah dry language like that and everyone shrugs and goes, yeah, let's let's go play pickleball.
00:30:39
Speaker
Nobody says that. So anyway, we've now spent three minutes explaining how we're not talking about the expansion. Well, that's terrible. That's all i need to know. Yeah, that's probably a good summary. um ah So, phooey to the expansion. But I think that we would all agree that we did not get played, right? No, I don't think got played.
00:31:00
Speaker
are The base games at least, yeah. Yeah, both of these games, forget we're going pretend the expansion never happened to us. Yeah. but the But both of these base games are are really good, really enjoyable. They hit their 30-minute mark.
00:31:13
Speaker
They give you that sense of wanting to play more. they play out a little different each time. um It's kind of fun to push each other around. It is. Do you want to rate it out of how many wonders there are?
00:31:24
Speaker
Yeah. Well, that is one of the puzzling bits about the game It claims that there are seven wonders, but there are 12 in the box and two in the expansion. Yeah. So, yes. But but um before we even get to to rating it, before um I want to ask the more important question, I think. Because I think we're going to agree that this is well this is a good game. i would rate it maybe eight wonders out of seven. Okay, that's too many. Okay.
00:31:49
Speaker
But I mean, I feel like there's really 12. So maybe no, this is I think I have so a both of these games rated as 10s on my BGG. Like these are excellent games. Exactly how many wonders you want to rate it out. I don't know.
00:32:02
Speaker
But like they're real good. Yeah. um Is there a reason to own both games? Is there a reason to play both games? Would you ever want to play one and not the other vice versa? What are we thinking?
00:32:15
Speaker
I almost feel like Seven Wonders Duel is a tad bit more complex, ah just because mechanics are different in such a way that they're they're rougher, you know?
00:32:31
Speaker
ah The Lord of the Rings version really smooths a lot of that over. And I think it's better for it, and I think it plays better. ah But I can totally understand if you would rather play this game in that more complex format.
00:32:47
Speaker
Aside from that use case, I don't think there's a reason that I would want to play Seven Wonders Duel over lord of the Rings version. Yeah, I mean, for me personally, after the first play Lord of the Rings Duel, I went over the bookshelf, pulled out Seven Wonders Duel, and just put it right on the sale pile.
00:33:03
Speaker
Yeah. And, you know, and the only thing that saved it from the sale pile was that I hadn't yet played the expansion. i thought, well, I should probably play the expansion before... And that was a net negative move, actually. I wish I had that time Yeah, and we also broke the component that was made of terrible, bubbly cardboard. Yeah, we don't need to get into that. Why do you have to bring up me breaking the game and making it... I said we!
00:33:28
Speaker
You're right, you're right. Well, I'll tell you what, since since it now has even less sale value, maybe we'll have to do a contest at some point and yeah um send the game to ah to one of our faithful listeners. Yeah.
00:33:40
Speaker
you know and and if if you wish we can destroy the expansion on your behalf before sending it out to you ah but that said I totally agree I think Seven Wonders Duel is great but Seven Wonders Duel for Middle Earth Lord of the Rings Sauron Saruman versus Gandalf Aragorn and Boromir Aragorn and Boromir both of them I think it's the best version I definitely think it certainly has the best name no names up yeah no Smeagols were hurt in the making of this podcast Gollum though ooh he really took it um
00:34:12
Speaker
so So, yeah. And I think, by the way, that it doesn't matter if you care about Lord of the Rings, if you watch Lord of the Rings. like the The game system holds up. It tells its story. And you know i'm you know i was I was born in the Third Age. This is the thing. But you know Jesse, you're not a huge Middle Earth Lord of the Rings fan. And I didn't feel like it hurt your experience of the game at all.
00:34:34
Speaker
No, definitely not. I don't even know who Boromir is, but I still thought it was pretty fun. Right on. Well, I think that might do it for us. So thank you for joining us, and we'll be back next time, and you can find out if we got played.
00:34:49
Speaker
Yeah, see you then. Thanks for listening.