Wouter & Ymke 
The sun rises over a valley filled with tulip fields, windmills and ships waiting to carry bulbs overseas. It all looks rather peaceful. Unfortunately, there’s another horticulturist in the valley with exactly the same plans as you. In Windmill Valley: Duel, two players compete to grow their businesses by planting tulips, building windmills, trading abroad and making use of whatever opportunities appear along the way.
Designed by Dani Garcia, Windmill Valley: Duel is a standalone two-player reworking of 2024’s Windmill Valley. It keeps some familiar ideas from that game, most notably the action wheels, but changes how they work by putting both players onto the same board. Your wheels are connected, the tulip fields are shared and several other parts of the game belong to both players as well. You’re building something of your own, but there’s no ignoring what’s happening on the other side of the table.
👥 2 players, ages 14+
⌛ Playing time: 45 minutes
📝 Designer: Dani Garcia
🎨 Artwork: Pedro Codeço, Zbigniew Umgelter & Katarzyna Witos
🏢 Publisher: Board&Dice (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Three interlocking action wheels sit in the middle of the board. Each player controls one smaller personal wheel, with both connected to a larger central wheel. On your turn, you rotate your wheel one or two spaces clockwise, or spend a tool to rotate it three. You then choose one of the two actions where your wheel meets the central wheel. If you spend two tools, you can perform the second action as well. After your turn, your opponent gets a follow-up action from the part of the central wheel connected to their own wheel.
The actions let you collect guilders, tools and tulip bulbs, plant tulips, build windmills, visit the market, trade overseas or take farm enhancements. If a central wheel action isn’t useful, you can skip it and take guilders instead, with the amount determined by the calendar. Follow-up actions work in much the same way, except that they can’t activate helpers.
You can also change the wheels themselves. Enhancement tiles cover existing action spaces and replace them with new ones. Adding one to your personal wheel costs guilders, with silver enhancements costing more than wooden ones. An enhancement placed on the central wheel works differently: you immediately perform the action you’ve just covered.
Tulips are planted into patches on the shared board. You place a bulb from your storage onto the first empty space from either end of a patch. The first tulip at an end can be any colour, but after that it has to match the tulip beside it. Covering spaces can give immediate rewards. Windmills are built beside these patches by spending guilders and can give you an action from one of the neighbouring patches when placed. Their positions also determine which tulips you’ll be able to score at the end. The market gives you another way to buy the bulbs you need.
Foreign trade lets you send bulbs to different ports. You spend one of the requested colours, score the indicated points and perform the action on the corresponding export tile. The delivered bulb stays in your foreign trade area and may also count towards contracts. Before trading, tools can be spent to move the ship between accessible ports.
Farm enhancement cards are shared between both players in a slightly unusual way. A card facing you as a helper is simultaneously a contract for your opponent, and vice versa. Helpers provide abilities during your turns, while contracts give additional scoring opportunities. Adding a new card pushes the existing cards along the row. If a contract is pushed out, its owner can pay one guilder to score it immediately. Otherwise, it’s discarded.
The calendar controls when the game ends. It advances when certain supplies run out and when players reach milestones such as building a fifth windmill, completing a sixth foreign trade or reaching 40 points. Once it reaches the final space, the current round is completed and both players then get one final turn. Contracts are scored, followed by the tulips. Your windmill area determines whether each tulip colour is worth one, two or three points, and the windmills you’ve built beside the patches determine which tulips you score. Two windmills beside the same patch let you score its qualifying tulips twice.
Artwork & Components
If you’ve played Windmill Valley, this will immediately look familiar. There’s plenty of green, blue water, brightly coloured flowers and, naturally, windmills. The board is quite busy once everything is set up, with symbols in almost every direction. We needed some time during our first game to find things without scanning half the board. Once we knew the iconography that became easier, but it remains a fairly crowded board.
The three action wheels grab most of the attention. They’re made from thick cardboard, connected with plastic pins and sit directly in the middle of the board. Enhancement wedges slot onto them during the game, so they gradually fill up and change. I like having the main mechanism represented so physically. Turning your wheel and seeing another wheel attached to it makes the connection between the two players rather obvious.
The tulips are thick cardboard tokens in five colours, while the windmills are wooden and come in red and yellow with white printed details. The tulips aren’t particularly fancy, but once they start filling the fields they add a lot of colour to the board. We liked the windmills more. They’re simple pieces, but seeing them spread around the tulip fields is one of the nicer parts of the finished board. There’s also a wooden ship, cardboard guilders and tool tokens.
Our Experience
Since we’d already played the original Windmill Valley, our first game of Duel started quite smoothly. We recognised most of the iconography and knew roughly what the different areas were trying to do. For the first few turns, we mostly rotated our wheels towards whichever action we wanted and treated the other player’s follow-up as a bonus they happened to receive. That didn’t last very long. Two rotations could be equally useful to us and leave completely different options on the other side.
We weren’t constantly choosing worse actions just to block each other. Most of the time, doing something useful ourselves remained more important. But if two options were close, what we left behind often decided it. There were several occasions where someone had already put a hand on the wheel, looked at the other side of the board and changed their mind. Upgrading our personal wheels also helped because important actions could become available in more places. We could interfere with each other, but we could also prepare for it.
Tools spent quite a while sitting in that category of resources we knew were useful without being particularly excited about collecting them. Then the action we needed was one space beyond our normal rotation. Keeping a few tools available became much more common after that. The helper and contract cards caused more immediate problems. A helper could be exactly what we wanted, only for the contract facing the other player to fit their position rather too well. We sometimes took those cards anyway and hoped the other half wouldn’t come back to haunt us. It occasionally did.
The tulip fields took longer for us to judge. Early planting was often about taking a useful reward or putting down whatever colour was convenient. Once the board filled up, the colours around each player’s windmills mattered much more. In later games we were looking at those positions earlier, particularly when deciding which bulbs were actually worth collecting. A tulip that seemed useful now could become rather less exciting when we realised we had no good way of scoring that patch.
We’ve deliberately tried different approaches across our games and haven’t settled into doing the same thing each time. Helpers, contracts, ports and wheel enhancements have pulled us in different directions, and our scores have generally remained close even when our boards looked quite different. We also usually went beyond the listed 45 minutes. Once we started checking both sides of a wheel before turning it, some decisions simply took longer. We were rarely waiting for the other person to finish, though. More often we were watching them ruin whatever we had planned thirty seconds earlier.
Our Thoughts
The main reason we prefer Duel with two players is that so many decisions involve the person sitting opposite us. You can’t tear down their windmills or wipe out several turns of work, but you can make the thing they want harder to reach, take a card before they do or occupy a useful part of the shared board. Doing that at the expense of your own turn usually isn’t worthwhile. The best opportunities tend to be the ones where something helps you and happens to be inconvenient for them as well.
That kind of interference won’t suit every pair. Plans can be disrupted and something you were preparing for may disappear before your next turn. Two players who mainly want to concentrate on their own engines will probably find parts of Duel annoying. We like having to keep an eye on each other, especially because most of the interference comes from normal actions rather than separate attack mechanisms.
Having played both versions, we’d choose Duel over the original Windmill Valley whenever there are only two of us. The original works with two, but here the presence of exactly one opponent is built into the board. The shared areas, linked wheels and two-sided cards give us more reason to follow the whole table. With three or four players, obviously, that comparison disappears. With two, I don’t see us reaching for the original very often.
There is a downside to having so many things connected. A wheel rotation itself takes seconds, but deciding where to rotate can take considerably longer. Players who want to calculate every possible consequence could slow the game down quite a bit. Combined with the amount of information on the board, this can make Duel feel heavier in play than the individual rules suggest. The visual clutter is most noticeable in the first game, but the possibility of overthinking a turn doesn’t really disappear once you know what everything does.
I’m less certain about how familiar the game might become after many more plays. There isn’t an enormous stack of different content changing from game to game. So far, most of the variation has come from familiar things being useful in different circumstances. A helper we wanted last time may do very little for us now. A contract can suddenly become attractive because of how the tulips have been planted, and an enhancement can solve a problem created by the current wheel positions. The other player has a large influence on all of that, which has kept our games from following the same route so far.
After several plays, Duel is the version of Windmill Valley we want when it’s just the two of us. We still get the resource collecting, conversions and planning we liked in the original, except now we spend far more time looking across the table. It makes most sense for two people who play together regularly and don’t mind having their plans disturbed now and then. We’re still trying different approaches, and we’re still finding reasons to blame each other when the tulips don’t quite work out as planned. That seems appropriate for a duel.
📝 We received a copy of Windmill Valley: Duel from Board&Dice.
