Last Week's Games: Deal or Duel

This week I played The Witcher 3, Endless Legend and Magic Carpet. One of those is a long-form RPG, one is a long-form 4X strategy game, and the last is an old game, likely very difficult and will take me a long time to play through. I’ll have plenty of time to talk about them in the future. For today, I’m going to talk about a board game that me and Kirsty played: Deal or Duel.

Hamilton: The Board Game?

At any other time of year this would have been funny, but in the Christmas period I imagine this comes up quite a lot: I bought Kirsty some board games from Waterstones, including Labyrinth and Chameleon. She’d played both before enjoyed them, so I thought we could play them together. As it turned out, she’d already bought Chameleon for me, and one of our friends had bought us Labyrinth. So back we went to Waterstones to return the duplicate gifts and pick some new games. We then ran into the problem of me having most of the games that Kirsty would otherwise have been interested in buying, so we were there a while. We eventually decided to buy 221b Baker Street, The Big Movie Quiz and Deal or Duel.

Deal or Duel looks, at first glance, like Monopoly-like game, where the aim is to make as much money as possible. Glance a little harder, and differences start to emerge: You’re dealing with American Independence, the Founding Fathers, and some of the key figures involved with that tumultuous period of American history. And your aims are either to make as much money… or die trying.

Each player picks a colour, or faction, which gives them a set of nine “face” cards depicting historical figures. They have a hand of action cards they can use to make money, or initiate duels with their opponents. You can play general action cards, which usually result in money changing hands, you can sell some of your cards that affect the duels for money, or you can challenge one of your opponents to a duel. At the end of a sequence of turns, Alexander Hamilton – arguably the most influential individual in this period of history – introduces a new policy or tax that affects some, all or none of the players depending on what cards are in their hand. Your goal is either to accumulate $1000, or to be the last player with face cards when all others are either dead or in prison.

Looks like Monopoly, doesn't it...

The duelling is where the game comes alive: If you win the duel, you get the value of the person you defeat in money. You initiate the duel with a duel card, but you can respond with either another duel card, a deal card or a conduct card which changes the stakes. At the end of the second turn after the duel is initiated, the cards you used are flipped and the higher number of clapping hands wins. If a deal card is played, you must pay the value of the card you lost against – but you don’t lose your own card. This was how I eventually lost, however – when Kirsty initiated a high-value duel, all I had to respond with was a Deal card. When the cards were revealed, I didn’t have enough money to buy my way out of the duel – an automatic defeat.

We had a very good time playing the game, although it certainly helped that both Kirsty and I had some investment in the theme through Hamilton, the Broadway musical. I’m learning to sing a couple of songs from it, Kirsty is aware of it through her work in Theatre and will be going to see it in January. We knew who some of the characters were, and some of the historical events in the game. We also had a laugh acting out the duels, being theatrically over-polite in the way 18^th century duelling is very often depicted! It’s not perfect – the small amounts of money changed through the action cards wasn’t making much difference, and while multiple players would increase the strategic element, elimination mechanics are risky in a game of this length. But I’m looking forward to playing it again.