Hey, welcome back! Good to see you, come on in!
We've saved a seat for you! This is Boards and Cords, and I'm Jonathan, and today
we're going to talk about the Duel of Ages II board game. Now Duel of Ages II,
if you like miniature war games, but maybe you don't
like so much the cost and painting of the miniatures themselves, Duel of Ages II
might be the game for you. The premise of this game is this: in the
distant future the World Spanner Corporation entertains the masses with
arena sports, yet they're not like those of today. Competitors assume the personas
of archetypal heroes, anti-heroes and others, taking on their combat and
adventuring strengths and weaknesses and banding together into two teams. These
two teams are made up of real and fictional characters from ancient,
colonial, modern, and future eras, and they strive with each other for achievements,
favor, and final victory in the arena. The players in Duel of Ages II begin by
forming themselves into two teams, a white team and a black team, and then
they select from among 192 different characters such as
Jade the Unicorn, or Annie Oakley, or Spartacus, or a host of others. Some of
these characters feature skills that favor adventuring, such as breaking into
bases or solving era based challenges, and others excel at combat. Your job as a
player is to deploy your crew effectively to take advantage of their
strengths, scoring enough victory points to ultimately defeat the other team.
The action in Duel of Ages 2 takes place mainly
a number of chosen platters which determine the terrain features, such as
high ground, or tunnels, houses, and choke points. Adjacent and connecting these
terrain platters, adventure zones, spawning zones, and team bases fill out the rest
of the playing area. Played over a certain number of rounds, usually ten to twenty,
the teams must in this limited time accomplish their strategy to gain the
most points by the end. No one strategy is more universally superior than
another, but it'll depend on the makeup of your team. Learning the significance
of the skill values on your character cards will be crucial in successfully
deploying your troops and resources for victory. Now there's a lot more to the
rules than what I've just gone over. That was really a high-level overview, and
you'll need to take some time in the rulebook to really understand how to
play this game. But let's move on and talk about the components. As you can see
here this game is massive - massive - in all its expanded glory. We bought this
game, the basic set and its expansion the master set, at the same time, and so this
review really considers both to be the same game. The expansion set doesn't
change or add any rules. It just expands it and adds more of everything: more
characters, more treasure cards, more platters, and just ... more! With the basic
and master set, then, Duel of Ages 2 claims the prize as the game on our
shelf with the most components. There's several decks of
standard-sized playing cards - these decks are large just in and of themselves -
there's these large character cards, there are cardboard tokens for
characters, for henchmen, and other items. There's these platters, and there's
adventure zones, there's other assorted tokens as well. Containing so much
material, this is unsurprisingly and appropriatly the most expensive game on
our shelf at this time. The components themselves display beautiful artwork! The
platters on the back side contain character artwork that inspire the
imagination and convey the spirit of the persona offered to the player of the
characters. In addition to the lovely character art, the front of the character
cards will have a myriad of stats and icons conveying the strengths and
weaknesses of the individuals on the card. On the reverse side is a brief
story snippet capturing in a snapshot the essence of the character in their
place in the history and fiction of the World Spanner world. Reading through all
of the backstories on the cards is entertaining in itself, and together with
all the other cards, as they interweave with each other, they tell stories that
bring some of the unknown characters to life in the imagination and make them
that much more fun to play in the game. I really have no particular real complaint
about the components, except for that that I have made in other games with
lots of pieces, and that is storage. It's not easy to store a game of
this size without being fairly creative. If a storage solution makes it easy to
set up and pack up the game, it's even better because it makes it that much
more likely to get onto our game table. The best storage solution that we've
come by that doesn't involve cutting and making custom boxes for the game
involves mainly the use of coin collector pages, stored in a three-ring
binder. In these pages, we've sorted the characters, and the henchmen, sentinel
tokens in order by type and the number printed on the respective cards. You can
see we've got them slotted into the coin holders with a page behind them, and
their number and their label makes it easier to figure out where they go and
what they are. It makes it for far easier method of finding the map markers needed
for each of these during the game without having to sort through a bunch
of plastic baggies. So this was a huge help for us whenever we
discovered this! I found this solution on BoardGameGeek, and I'll link in the
description of the show notes where we found this, so maybe you can
replicate this if you wish to do so. In addition to this, we've also printed out
on cardstock tuck boxes for all these many card decks that we have, and this is
a huge help in setting up, sorting, storing these cards for the game. I've
got them printed out in black and white, but I'll also link to a section on
BoardGameGeek that has the files that you can download in PDF for the color
versions of these if you want to print them out in color, and you can cut
those out and assemble them for your card decks.
It makes a huge help for sorting, believe me! There's also a resource site for Duel
of Ages on the producers website, and they have some instructions on how
you can build some card storage trays, but with the tuck boxes and the
notebook solution that we have, I'm able to get all of the game
components into the two boxes of the basic and master set that they came in,
so that's good. I like that a lot. But also on the rules set, on the resource
pages rather, of the Duel of Ages II website, you can download the
basic and master rule sets, as well as some rules clarifications and video
tutorials, and I think you'll want to go through those as you're learning this
game. So of course I'll link to those in the description as well. So what's
it been like as we play? A few years back we decided that we wanted to
invest in board gaming as a major family activity and hobby, so we purchased Duel
of Ages II as one of our first after watching some video tutorials and
reading the rulebook from their website. Since then we've played it several times.
and it remains among of the ones that has generated some of our best gaming
memories. One thing I love, how replayable this game is! We play it with a random
draw of characters, where I use a random number generator on my phone to select
12 characters per team, and then the members of the teams can decide eight of
those to play with. Usually we play with three platters like we have here, so each
team will select one, and then we pick a
third one to go in at random. Finally we take turns placing the platters and
connecting the bases with the keys and the adventure zones until the map is
constructed. And so this makes for a unique playing field each time we play. I
also love how this game builds a story each time within its strong theme. What
group of character avatars will we get this time? What will the
terrain and the map look like as we assemble it together, and how will they
be laid out? What will the cards that we draw, how that affect where we place our
characters on the map and move them through? What exciting moments of tension
and adventure will emerge, and what unlikely hero will make that perfect
shot that turns the game around? These are the moments that build a story that
we'll be talking about over the years as we remember these game sessions. This
game also has a great tactical and strategic value.
While the versatility required by the players in the random draw character
selection we use forces quick thinking and strategizing, it may also be that
some of the other character drafting methods could be used, such as a
round-robin player's choice, or alternating team picking allowing for
players to learn and develop strategies and synergies for particular groups of
characters in a team. Whatever the method, once the characters begin deploying on
the field, the team that ultimately wins in most cases will be the one that forms
a good strategy for their team, and then tactically and effectively maneuver
turn-by-turn to score points. There are, however, some features of this game that
some will view as negatives, and that indeed keep this from being a
frequent selection from our game table. The main ones to my mind are the
complexity of the rules and the length of the game. These factors prove rather
daunting when we're deciding what game to play, and we often end up choosing
something else to play instead. First, the rules are really complicated, so much
so that the rulebook suggests six specific and successive starting
missions to play in order to learn the game mechanic. Six. That's six trial games.
So you read through the 24 page rulebook and then possibly
another 30 page one from online, if you get the Masters compendium, followed by
six learning games. This makes for quite a learning curve to get into the real
games. If you aren't playing regularly, expect to need some remedial training
in the rules when you do play. Also Duel of Ages 2 is a really long game! If you
have a group that is very familiar with the rules and have elected to play a
short variant, you may be able to finish the game in the one and a half hours
that the the rules predict, but for our family even the shorter games tend to
last many times longer than that, easily sitting out on our table for six or
eight hours of playtime over a week or more. And this again is one of the
shorter versions of a game. The longer variants with larger maps
will likely take much longer than this, and we haven't even dared the longer
games yet. Lastly, although it may not be such an issue for us as it might be for
some because of our storage solutions that we've come up with and found, setup
and cleanup are always a factor in these long games with lots of components.
Happily we have these coin pages and tuck boxes, and that helps greatly reduce the
extra time investment of setup and cleanup, but
for those who don't have an organizer of some sort, setup and cleanup will take a
significant and additional time. Even if you do have a good organization like we
do, expect 30 minutes of setup time as teams are chosen, and the playing area
are built, and card decks are shuffled and arranged, even before you get into
the game proper. Finally we do need a large playing area. I've got this
set up here on our 5 foot by 3 foot table, but it's really not nearly enough
room for people to play on comfortably. We'll need to put together two tables, or
play on our large dining room table to be able to play this game
comfortably. Alright so for family friendliness, honestly this Dual of Ages
game is no Candyland. Of course this is one of the appealing aspects in my mind,
but the complexity and depth that draws me as an adult causes me also to
hesitate for a hearty endorsement for it as a family game. As I mentioned before,
the complex rules and length of the game mean that many children will have
difficulty understanding the nuances of the rules and the strategy needed,
especially if they're playing against competitive older siblings or parents.
The length of time may cause your youngsters also to lose interest during
the course of the game. As this game with the Master expansion easily cost more
than the next three most expensive games combined, please do carefully
consider your play group before you buy this. Now Duel of Ages has elements of
both team play as well as competitive conflict, so opportunities exist for
refinement in your kids of the positive aspects of collaboration and good
sportsmanship that we want to encourage in them with
board-gaming anyway. However, since it is a war game of sorts, parents need to be
aware that there will almost always be violent action going on in this game,
with the intention of elimination or incapacitation of the opponent players'
characters. This is a board game, so the violent action is not graphically
depicted, but it is implied by the game mechanics, and so it's it's really mild
in its depiction, but it is still there. The artwork in the game of the
characters, they feature realistic but tasteful art of characters without the
hunky-sexy illustrations frequently found in archetypical hero art, fantasy,
and that sort of thing. Nor does it appear to have any profanity or
substance abuse. And the only other caution that I would give about the
character artwork would be some of the more monstrous avatars that might be
disturbing to younger kids, but these do constitute a minority of the characters
in the game, so I'll just leave you
with that and then show you some examples in the video, and you can make
some determinations on your own of that.
All right so let's talk about strategy then. Today's strategy tips come from
user SpitfireIXA from BoardGameGeek, and i will link in the
description to that for you to get the more expanded version of it. But with a
beginner's tip, the beginners start in the game by picking your teams, so
let's talk about team building. The most important beginners tip that I can think
of for this would be to say pick your team wisely, and this will help you to
succeed more often in the game. So you'll want to, as much as you can, make sure you
have the bases covered in your teams and that will be looking at the numbers on
the right, left... that would be right hand side of the card, and try to have
the team that you pick complement each other in terms of the skills that you're
high in. So you will hopefully not have all of the same characters being high
and all the same things. Especially, you'll want to look for Strength,
Intellect, Honor, Respect, and Wits: those are the main ones that you want to have
covered in these characters, in terms of having high scores in those areas. These
will be the most help in your succeeding in the team-based challenges
and the labyrinth guardians. After that, try to have the main fighting skills
covered by your characters, and that would include Melee, Aim, Point, Throw, React, and
Stealth. You'll find a good reference card
included in the game for these, as you'll be able to tell what they are by looking
at that during the course of the game if you need a
refresher. So the pro tip then would be as you're thinking again about what
characters to choose, another choice that you can make in there that would be
helpful, is to try to get the most turns in the course of the game. Well, if you
get more turns than your opponent's team, then that means you'll
have more opportunities to accomplish your objectives so the way the game
works here is the higher Respect characters deploy on the map first
early in the game. So what you'll want to do then is if you can pick characters
that have high Respect as the majority of your characters, you'll place them out
there on the board first, and thus they will have more turns than the other
players lower Respect characters, because they'll be out there taking turns as
they're still deploying characters, so you'll have more overall turns with
those characters than the opponents will. And that will help you get a head
start on your opponents with the lower average Respect that gives you an
advantage you can use to take the lead and keep it.
Staying on the offensive can help keep the other team reacting to your moves to
try to stop your advance and scramble to catch up. So those are the two strategy
tips I would have for you. So my final thoughts on this game: let me just tell
you about what I love about it. This game is a great strategy game. So coming up
with the strengths of the weakness of the characters that you have and
deciding how you want to win the game can be really fun. And the theme of this
game, as I've said earlier, makes for some great stories as you're moving your
characters around the board.
I can just remember a time where I was using Annie Oakley to run across a map,
and she had, as you might expect, a rifle which she was very good at shooting, so
she would stop into buildings and take pot shots at the chasing enemies, and it
was a great game of cat and mouse. She would run and snipe and hide and it
just made for some great memories. And as you know with with these kinds of games
I love story and I love theme and if I can walk away from a game feeling like
we've told a great story and had a great adventure in the game itself, then I'm
just as happy as I can be. So if you are the same and you love story and theme,
this game is hugely rich with both, and I think you'll like it as well. So with
that, that will bring us to the end of our episode, and I hope that you have
enjoyed it. If you do, please subscribe, please comment and like the video or the
podcast, and visit me on our other social media outlets and on the website for
more gamer information and reviews. Until next time, this is Jonathan saying
goodbye. Thanks for joining us on Boards and Cords. Connect with us on Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube, or at our website at BoardsAndCords.com. We'll see you at
the table!
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