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Celestia Duo is a cooperative game made specifically for two players, set in the world of Celestia. You’re both on the same aircraft, chasing pirates who’ve looted the flying cities and are now trying to escape to their lair.
On paper, that sounds like a pretty classic setup. In practice, the game quickly becomes about knowing more than you’re allowed to say, and deciding whether to keep going anyway. You’re sharing resources, sharing cards, and constantly affecting each other’s options, while most of the game is played in silence. Dice decide how bad things look, and your job is to figure out whether you can deal with that… without actually checking.
👥 2 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 30 minutes
📝 Designer: Bruno Cathala
🎨 Artwork: Laura Bevon
🏢 Publisher: BLAM! (Review copy provided by Geronimo Games)
Gameplay overview
At the start of the game, you build a shared aircraft. It comes with a generator that holds a small number of energy tokens, depending on which deck you’re using, and a cargo hold for gold, smoke grenades, and crew. Each player receives a hidden hand of equipment cards. One player is the captain and takes the dice.
The aircraft starts in the starting city, facing a path of face-down ambush cards that leads toward the pirate ship and, eventually, the pirate’s lair. That path does a lot of work. It’s your progress track, your threat level, and your countdown all at once.
Each round begins with a short briefing. This is one of the few moments where you’re allowed to talk normally. You can discuss whether to keep going or stop, but you can’t explain what’s in your hand or hint at how good or bad things are for you. If you don’t agree, the captain decides.
If you continue the chase, the aircraft moves forward based on the symbol on the card you’re currently on. You flip the ambush card at that distance and place the aircraft there. Dice are then rolled or placed based on the symbols shown on the ambush card. Some dice are random, others are fixed. Together they define how hard this encounter is going to be.
Players take turns removing dice by discarding matching equipment cards, wild cards, or pairs of identical equipment. If you can’t remove a die on your turn, you lose an energy token. That’s where things usually start to unravel. Losing energy doesn’t just bring you closer to losing the game, it also forces card sharing and resource loss right away.
Smoke grenades let you reroll some or all dice at specific moments. They help, but they’re limited, and using them always feels like a small gamble rather than a clean solution.
Once an ambush is cleared, you collect rewards. These can be gold, equipment cards, crew, or a bonus communication moment where each player can share one very limited piece of information about their hand. Any equipment gained has to be shared through a structured draft.
Instead of continuing, you can choose to stop over during the briefing. This moves the pirate ship closer to its lair, which is dangerous, but lets you draw and share new cards, spend gold, and sometimes refresh crew abilities. After a stopover, the captain role switches.
In the normal and expert modes, catching the pirate ship doesn’t end the game. It triggers a final battle made up of several assaults, each adding restrictions that limit your usual tools. To win, you need to survive all of them and destroy the pirate ship’s masts before your remaining energy runs out.
Artwork, components, and visual design
Celestia Duo sticks closely to the look of the original Celestia, with colourful skies, floating cities, and friendly-looking flying machines. The overall style is warm and readable, and nothing feels overly dark or aggressive, even when the game is clearly not going your way.
Ambush cards form the main path across the table and show aircraft, airships, and cities from different angles. The icons are clear and placed around the edges, so you can read what matters without covering the art. Even when the path gets long, it stays readable.
Stopover cards focus on larger cities and docking areas, which helps them feel like moments of pause, even if they’re not always a relief mechanically. The pirate’s lair uses darker colours and denser imagery, making it clear that you’re nearing the end.
The ships themselves are easily the most eye-catching components. Both the player aircraft and the pirate ship are built from layered cardboard into proper three-dimensional pieces. They don’t affect gameplay directly, but they do make the table feel more alive and help keep positions clear.
The dice use symbols and match the equipment icons exactly. They’re easy to read and don’t distract from the board. Equipment cards are colour-coded by type, which helps a lot given how often you’re scanning hands without really knowing what’s there. Crew cards do a good job of visually explaining what each crew member is about.
Our experience
Celestia Duo consistently came down to one question: do we push one more ambush, or do we stop now and accept the cost? That decision sat at the centre of almost every round. Once you understand that, the rest of the game falls into place.
To be fair, most ambushes themselves aren’t that complex. You look at the dice, play what you can, and hope your partner can cover what you can’t. The tension doesn’t come from the puzzle alone, but from not knowing how safe you actually are. Even when things look manageable, there’s always the risk that both of you are missing the same icon.
Energy loss was the real turning point in most of our games. Losing energy never felt like a single mistake. It usually came after stretching a bit too far, delaying a stopover, or assuming things would probably work out. Once energy starts dropping, the game becomes noticeably tighter, and stopovers stop feeling optional.
Stopovers themselves felt less like rest turns and more like damage control. Yes, you get cards and resources, but you’re also watching the pirate ship move closer to the end. The final battle, when we reached it, was clearly meant as a climax, but it also exposed earlier decisions very harshly. If we arrived without enough flexibility, the added restrictions made some assaults feel almost decided in advance. It worked thematically, but it didn’t always feel forgiving.
Our thoughts
Celestia Duo stands out because of how heavily it leans on forced sharing and limited communication. Sharing cards isn’t something that happens now and then, it’s constant. Cards move between players through setup, rewards, penalties, and stopovers. The game is always reshaping what both players can do.
The stopover decision is easily the sharpest part of the design. You gain options and stability, but you visibly move closer to losing. There’s no soft reset here. That keeps tension high, but it can also feel punishing if you fall behind early.
The game has a fair amount of variance. Dice drive most encounters, and while smoke grenades and crew abilities help, they’re limited and sometimes unavailable. Honestly, some sessions forced us to accept bad outcomes even when our decisions felt reasonable. Card distribution can also swing. Duplicate equipment cards are powerful, since pairs can act as wilds, but uneven hands can leave certain icons uncovered across the team. When that leads to energy loss, it can feel a bit rough.
What mattered most for us wasn’t clever play during ambushes, but timing. Knowing when to stop while things were still going well mattered far more than trying to recover after something went wrong. Flexibility was the real resource, more than gold or smoke grenades.
Celestia Duo feels tense, restrictive, and sometimes unforgiving. It doesn’t try to smooth out its rough edges, and it won’t suit every pair. But if you’re looking for a two-player cooperative game that builds pressure through uncertainty and shared responsibility, and you’re okay with a bit of silence at the table, it offers something that feels genuinely different.
📝 We received a copy of the game from Geronimo Games.
