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Some games click straight away. You open the box, play once, and you know exactly what they’re doing. Duel for Cardia wasn’t quite like that for us. It took a few plays, a bit of confusion, and a couple of “wait… did that just happen?” moments before it settled.
At first glance, it’s a small two-player card game set in a fantasy city shaped by magic and politics. According to the story, a young adventurer once freed a powerful djinn trapped in a swamp. Together they founded the city of Cardia. Over time, the city grew, factions formed, and power became something to fight over. That part feels familiar enough.
Four factions are now competing for control: the rebellion from the swamp, the scholars of the academy, the engineers of the guild, and the dynasty descended from the city’s founder. Their struggle revolves around signet rings, symbols of political power. Collect enough signets and you become the next ruler of Cardia.
All very classic fantasy stuff. What isn’t so classic is how the game actually plays once you get your hands on it.
👥 2 players, ages 9+
⌛ Playing time: 15 minutes
📝 Designers: Faouzi Boughida & Mathieu Rivero
🎨 Artwork: Florian Herold, Qistina Khalidah, Dominik Mayer, Ingram Schell & Jonas Schmutzler
🏢 Publisher: 999 Games (Dutch version, review copy provided)
Gameplay overview
Duel for Cardia is a strictly two-player game, and it leans into that hard. Both players use identical decks of sixteen character cards, numbered 1 to 16. That number is the card’s influence. Each card also belongs to one of the four factions and has a unique ability.
The game is played over a series of encounters. Each round, both players secretly choose one card from their hand and place it face down opposite each other. Then both cards are revealed and their influence values are compared. The higher number wins the encounter and gets a signet. If the values are the same, it’s a tie and nothing happens.
Here’s where things get interesting: only the card that loses the encounter activates its ability.
At first, that feels counterintuitive. Losing sounds bad. But honestly, losing is often exactly what you want. Abilities can affect the current encounter, earlier encounters, or even ones that haven’t happened yet. Some resolve immediately, others stay active until something removes them. One important rule that keeps things from spiralling completely: only the card that loses the current encounter activates its ability, even if abilities later flip older encounters and change who’s winning there.
Encounters are laid out in a line, following a fixed direction of play. Cards never leave the table unless an ability removes them, so the table slowly fills up. Some abilities care about where a card sits in that line, which makes positioning matter more than you’d expect from such a small game.
Influence can also change after the fact using modifier tokens. When that happens, earlier encounters can suddenly change outcome, and signets might move or return to the supply. It’s not rare for a card played several rounds ago to suddenly become relevant again.
At the end of each round, both players draw one card if possible. Decks are never reshuffled. Running out of cards doesn’t automatically mean you lose, unless you’re required to play a card and can’t.
The game ends if a player has five or more signets at the end of a round, if an ability directly says someone wins, or if an opponent can’t play a card. There’s also a rare edge case where both players can’t play a card; then the player with more signets wins, and if that’s tied, the game just ends in a draw. It doesn’t come up often, but it’s there.
Artwork, components, and visual design
This is a small box with mostly cards inside. And that’s fine. The character cards do most of the visual work. Each card has a full-colour illustration, usually showing a character mid-action. The style is bold and high-contrast, leaning more modern than classic fantasy.
The card layout is clear and functional. Influence values are easy to spot, faction icons make sense, and ability text is readable without being tiny. There are quite a few different abilities to absorb at first, which takes a game or two to get used to, but it does speed things up once you’re familiar with it.
Besides the cards, you get signet tokens shaped like rings, modifier tokens with clear numbers, and ongoing-effect markers. Nothing fancy, nothing distracting. Location cards show environments instead of characters, while summary cards are purely practical.
Our experience
Duel for Cardia sets up fast and plays fast. Teaching the basic rules takes a few minutes, and the core loop is easy to explain. Pick a card, reveal, compare, trigger an ability. Done.
In our first couple of games, though, it felt a bit messy. The structure seemed almost too simple, and it wasn’t clear why certain choices mattered. With hidden cards and abilities constantly firing, the game felt more chaotic than clever at first.
That changed after a few plays.
Once we stopped treating losing as a failure and started treating it as a tool, the game opened up. The tension between grabbing signets now and setting up better positions later became much clearer. Suddenly, losing an encounter on purpose felt smart rather than frustrating.
One thing we really noticed is that nothing ever feels fully decided. Cards stay in play, influence values shift, and outcomes can change long after an encounter was resolved. It gives the game a slightly uneasy feel, where you’re always waiting for something to happen. You’re never completely safe.
Because decks never reshuffle, paying attention really matters. You can see what’s been played or discarded, but remembering what’s no longer in the deck becomes important, especially later in the game. It’s not heavy rules-wise, but it does ask for focus, and that’s not something everyone will enjoy.
As piles shrink, the game becomes more about reading your opponent. Are they trying to win here, or are they setting something up? You’re guessing, but not blindly. That tension became one of our favourite parts.
Our thoughts
At its heart, Duel for Cardia is about tempo. Signets are points, but they don’t stay fixed, and that changes how you play around them. The real skill is learning how to lose without losing control. If that sounds vague, it probably will until you’ve played a few times.
Because only losing cards activate abilities, you can often plan very specific, controlled losses. The risk is always that something flips in a way you didn’t expect, and suddenly the game looks very different. That tension never fully goes away.
Ongoing abilities are especially impactful. Once they’re active, they shape large parts of the board, and removing them can cause immediate changes. They’re simple effects, but they carry a lot of weight.
The extra content, like location cards or the second deck, adds more to track rather than just making the game harder. For us, that was interesting, but it does push the game further away from something casual. If you don’t enjoy keeping a lot of small interactions in your head, this might be where the game starts to feel a bit much.
Timing is everything. Many abilities are only strong in the right moment, and a well-timed loss can be more powerful than a clean win. Some interactions only fully resolve several rounds later, which rewards players who think ahead rather than react.
At the same time, nothing is guaranteed. Cards are played face down, and even good plans can fail if your opponent reads you correctly. The game asks you to adapt constantly instead of sticking to a fixed strategy.
In the end, Duel for Cardia is easy to learn and much harder to really understand. It’s quick to set up, plays fast, and fits in a very small box, but it rewards repeated play more than first impressions. If you enjoy tight two-player games where reading your opponent matters and where losing isn’t always a bad thing, there’s a lot here to explore. And if you’re curious, it’s also available on Board Game Arena, which makes it easy to try a few games and see how it feels for yourself.
📝 We received a copy of Duel for Cardia from 999 Games.
