The gameplay of The Duel centers on collecting tiles.

Each tile displays either one or two symbols. At least one symbol is a “country symbol”, depicting the tile’s country of origin. A second symbol may either be another country symbol or a “power symbol” that shows the clerical, military, or political might of the region.

The goal of The Duel is to collect more of each symbol than your opponent. Or at least more of enough symbols to win the game. Tap the “Duel” button to see how you’re doing.

You start each turn by taking tiles. They come from a grid that’s created at the start of the game. However, you can only take from the left and right edges, which means that you have a limited set of choices.

Deciding which tiles to take is the heart of The Duel. Taking a set of paired tiles can give you more symbols than your opponent. Taking a disc also gives you a bonus symbol – one that your opponent doesn’t know about. However, sometimes you need to grab specific symbols instead.

Tap to select a tile. You can take either 1 or 2 tiles*. They must come from the same country and must contain no more than 2 country symbols. Then, tap the “Take” button.

* On the first turn, the first player may only take 1 tile, not 2.

Some tiles are covered by discs. These are bonuses that you receive when you collect the associated tile. When you take a disc, you get to see it, but your opponent does not.

The country discs and the power discs each give you a secret bonus of +1 toward collecting that symbol. Since your opponent doesn’t know about it, that bonus can easily turn a loss into a tie or a tie into a win.

The ownership disc, meanwhile, will return an ownership marker that you’ve already spent. It can be saved if you haven’t used any yet. See page 5 for ownership markers.

For those who care about the specifics: 8 discs are selected for each game from a set of 14, which includes 1 of each country disc, 1 of each power disc, and 2 ownership discs.

Your status bar, located to the bottom of the screen, helps you to keep track of how well you’re doing in The Duel.

The basic status bar shows your counts for tiles, discs, and the power symbols. Tap the basic status bar to toggle to a country status bar. The country status bar shows your counts for the country symbols. An Underline notes when you’ve taken a disc for a symbol.

The selected status bar appears when you select tiles. It compares you and your opponent. Tap the pop-up symbol to cycle between selected symbols.

Your opponent gets an abbreviated status bar. Tap opponent’s status bar to expand it.

After the tile selection phase, you’ll play an ownership placement phase. To place an ownership marker, double-tap on a tile. You can only place on tiles that don’t already have ownership markers.

If all of your markers are already on the board, you can instead move one. To move an ownership marker, tap on the marker, then double-tap on a tile. Alternatively, you can skip the ownership phase altogether. To skip ownership entirely, tap the “Done” button.

Once on the board, ownership markers affect the tile selection phase, when you must pay to take tiles owned by your opponent. To pay for a tile owned by your opponent if all your ownership markers are on the board, tap a marker, then tap the “Pay” button.

The game ends and scoring begins after the final tile is taken. You and your opponent will compare how many symbols you collected for each of the 9 countries and 3 powers.

• For each symbol, the player with more of the symbol earns points equal to his count.
• In the case of a tie, neither player earns points.

• The player with fewer of a symbol usually earns nothing.
• If a player collected no tiles with a specific symbol, he instead takes a -5 penalty.
• Having a symbol on a disc is not enough to offset the -5 penalty.

Be sure the visit the Options page after a few games. It allows you to adjust opponent turn speed, opponent difficulty, and several other elements of note.