Orion Duel Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Orion Duel, a two player abstract strategy game published by Matagot. Orion Duel is a game of perfect information where you placing tiles to try and meet one of the victory conditions.

For as long as there have been modern abstract board games there have been people arguing about what exactly the definition of abstract is. Can it have a theme? Hidden information? Any amount of randomness? Special powers?

Well Orion Duel is not going to cause any debates: this is about as abstract of a game as there can be. No cards, no dice, no unpredictable outcomes. I guess you could argue that there is a very light coating of “space” theme but only about as much as Chess is about medieval war. So now the only argument left to have is if it deserves a space in your board game collection.

The gameplay in Orion Duel is exceedingly simple. The game starts with a number of galaxy and black hole tokens being added to a hexagonal board. Each player has pieces that will cover 1-3 hexes. All of the three hex pieces include two hexes of your color and one of your opponents, and most of the 2-hex pieces are one of each color. You do have just 2 pieces you can place that only contain your own color, one 1-hex piece and one 2-hex piece.

On your turn, place one of your pieces anywhere on the board so long as it is currently empty. If there is a previously placed piece adjacent to a galaxy or black hole token you can place a new piece under that, so long as the color connects to the previously played color. And you’ll keep taking turns playing pieces to the board until one of three victory conditions are met:

That’s it, as soon as one of those three things happens you win and the game is over.

Orion Duel is firmly in the category of no-luck abstract games. There is no randomness involved and nothing to hide from your opponent. You just have to outplay your opponent (or hope they fall asleep as you start attaching galaxies together).

Generally, I love abstract games for their low