Players: 2
Playing Time: 45 minutes

The Components

Builders Duel is a card game that also comes with cardboard markers of various sorts.

The Cards: 60 cards make up the Builders Duel deck.

Six of them--three for each player--lay out the buildings that the builders are trying to create. They're color-coded by player and clearly show what's required for the building and what reward you can get for building it.

The other 54 cards are "advantage cards", which are essentially action cards used throughout the game. They're broken into two decks, "A" and "B". The majority of the cards have simple iconography that shows what they do, though many instead have text paragraphs.

The cards themselves are printed on untextured medium-weight cards. They all feature artwork by Michael Menzel which is very attractive. There is also some good attention to utility in a few specific elements, such as color-coded attribute cards (which can only be used by one player) and cards that are clearly marked "1x" to show that they can be used later (one time).

Cardboard Bits: Gold coins, seals, character markers, resources, and a start marker are all printed on linen-textured cardboard. Like the cards, these pieces are quite attractive. Again, there's some good attention to utility, such as differing colors on the two sides of the resource tiles (one of which shows raw materials and the other finished products).

Overall, Builders Duel is very attractive, has good-quality components, and has good attention paid to usability. I often find it harder for card games to really wow me, as opposed to board games, but given all those good qualities, I've let these one eke in a "5" out of "5" for Style. There's little I'd do to improve it (except maybe some linen texturing on the cards).

The Gameplay

The object of Builders Duel is to complete your building before your opponent finishes his, by taking the best advantages over several "duels".

Setup: Each player choose a color and takes the building cards, character markers, and personal seals for that color. He additionally takes three raw materials (wood, stone, and sand) and three neutral seals.

Play starts with the red player.

The Seals. These are used for the main "duels" of the game. Each one is two-sided with the opposite sides of the seal adding up to 5. Thus the 3 possible seals are 0/5, 1/4, and 2/3. The neutral seals come in all three flavors, while the personal seals are always 2/3.

The Building Cards. Both players have identical building goals. They must construct three segments of a building, each of which requires three finished goods: mortar, cut wood, and cut stone; mortar, cloth, and cut stone; and cut wood, cloth, and a finished ore product (either a bell or a gate, depending on the player).

Order of Play: The game is played over up to 4 rounds of 3 turns each. A turn includes the following phases:

• Lay Out Advantage Cards.
• Claim Advantage Cards.
• Duel!
• Use Cards & Build

Lay Out Advantage Cards: Nine random advantage cards are laid out. During the first and third rounds, these cards come from the "A" deck, and during the second and fourth, they come from the "B" deck. Since there are three turns in each round, that means all 27 cards in each deck will appear over the course of a round.

The Advantage Cards. The advantage cards are basically action cards. They let you do various things over the course of the game. These include: taking raw materials; turning raw materials into finished resources; taking money; taking over control of the start-player marker; buying neutral seals; and buying and selling raw materials.

There are also a number of "text cards", which do less common things. Some are marked for use only by one player or the other; the "wrong" player can claim these cards, but can't use them. Others are marked with a "1x", which means they can be saved and used later.

Claim Advantage Cards: The start player claims a row, column, or diagonal of three cards using his character markers. Then the other player similarly claims a row, column, or diagonal that must overlap with the start player's selection in exactly one place.

Duel!: Now players go back and forth playing seals until one of them wins the duel for that one contested card. This is done rather uniquely by flipping the seals. The start player begins, then the other player can flip one or more seals until he's winning, which pushes the onus of flipping seals back to the first player. This continues until both players either pass or use their personal seal--which is always the last seal they can flip in a duel.

The start player wins if he has the same value of seals as the second player or more, else the second player wins. The winner turns in all of the neutral seals he flipped, while all the rest of the seals go back to their owners.

Use Cards & Build: Now the start player, then the second player, gets to use the 2-3 cards that he won. This'll (hopefully) let him get raw materials, turn them into finished resources, and generate money.

The ultimate goal is to put those resources into a building. On one turn you can only put resources into one section of your building. Beyond this limit, things are pretty open: you can build your sections in any order, and you don't have to work on the same sections from turn to turn. You can add one, two, or three resources for a cost of 2, 6, or 12 gold.

Finishing a Building Section. Whoever finishes each of their three sections first earns a reward: two neutral tokens, 10 gold, or two raw materials turned into resources, depending on the section being finished.

Ending the Game: If someone finishes their building, they win the game immediately. Else, the winner is the player who built more of their building by the end of the four rounds.

Relationships to Other Games

Builders Duel is part of a loose series of games that includes Pillars of the Earth and World Without End. They're all based on books by Ken Follett and they're all games that focus on resource management and building in various ways, but beyond that each is its own game with its own mechanics. This one is even by a different designer than the others--Stefan Feld rather than Michael Rieneck and Stefan Sadler.

The Game Design

The most clever mechanism in Builders Duel is surely the means by which you claim cards, where the two players each claim three cards with one overlapping.

It's a very nice, constrained mechanism which sometimes forces hard choices, as you decide whether you want certain advantage cards enough that you're willing to take other cards that are less useful. The start player also has some interesting tactical possibilities, as he can block his opponent from taking a specific line of cards by choosing it himself.

I'm less fond of the "duel" mechanism, but that's mainly because flipping markers feels a bit silly to me. Strictly from a mechanical point of view, I think it's another solid system. You have real risk-reward, as you choose whether to flip more variable seals (0/5) or more reliable ones (2/3). There's also a bit of press-your-luck, as you might try and force your opponent to use seals to win a duel that you don't actually care about.

The rest of the mechanics are more mundane, but work well. The constraints involved in winning and converting raw materials are all interesting, while the limitations on how and when you can build require even more strategic planning.

Overall, though the game is simple, it's not simplistic. You have a lot of balls that you have to keep in the air, and if you get behind on any of them (money, seals, finished resources), you can be in trouble!

Beyond that, I also think the game does a very good job of enforcing not just interaction, but competition in a two-player game. The requirements for selecting cards pretty much require it, while the first-place awards for finishing up the various building sections are another good incentive to keep an eye on what your opponents are doing.

I think Builders Duel is a very good game, and definitely one of the stronger offers in the this series of 2-player games, originally created by Kosmos. I've given it a high "4" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

The Pillars of the Earth: Builders Duel is a well-designed and thoughtful resource-management game. Not only does it have unique and nicely tactical mechanisms, but it also really encourages head-to-head play, just as you want a two-player game to do.