Aquatica for 2
It’s #firstimpressionsfriday🎲 today, so let’s talk about 🔱 Aquatica Duellum! This is the new duel version of Aquatica. Even though we’ve never played the big brother before, I did hear about its mechanism of tucking in cards into the triple-layered board, and sliding them up as you activate effects on them - this mechanic is also present in Duellum!
Like any good duel game, there are multiple win conditions to fight for:
✔️Complete all 4 game objectives and the game ends - whoever has more points wins
👑Both players have a Crown track - reach the end and you instantly win
🐡Pull the Manta King all the way to your side and you also instantly win
Each turn you play 1 of your 8 action cards to do things. Several cards revolve around buying cards from the display - aka. The Vortex. This is a cool rotating board with different prices listed for each section.
The two players take the roles of asymmetrical factions - the turtles 🐢 and the squids 🦑. Depending on your faction, you pay Trident and Gold resources for cards in different ways: either the value on the Vortex board, or the value on the card. Some abilities let you rotate the board, changing the costs for both you and your opponent. 😉
Location cards are fun: you tuck them into your board, and activate their visible effects one by one by pushing them further in later on. These cards score only if you manage to add them to your scoring pile - but for that they have to be completely pushed up into your board. So you kind of use cards to get more cards. You also have helper animals you can flip for bonuses. It’s a fun & flexible system that is also very tactile. 👍 You can also recruit Mercenary cards, which are simple one-use cards with powerful effects.
Although there are 3 end game conditions, so far we only ever finished with the Manta King tug-of-war area. At first it seems very hard to move this token, but later you can do some bigger surprise combos to gun it for the win.
All in all, this is an excellent duel game with fun replayability and cool graphics! We really enjoyed our plays so far.
