Arcane Duel

Arcane Duel is a 2-player board game released in White Dwarf issue 524. I played it with my partner the day I got my issue, and we both had a lot of fun. I enjoy it so much, in fact, that I've also played it solo several times, using random dice rolls to imitate an opponent. Obviously I'm a fan, but this is my review of why I think this game is certainly worth the price, at the very least, of a magazine.

In Arcane Duel, each player controls a wizard miniature and uses cards and dice to cast spells to attack the other player's wizard. Spells usually either force your opponent's wizard to move to a different zone on the board, or else to sacrifice Power Dice. Board zones have varying effects, some beneficial and some detrimental. Power Dice are what you use to cast spells, and you lose the game if either player's turn ends and you have no Power Dice.

As with many one-on-one games about a duel, there's a serious danger that game play falls into a repetitious cycle. In this game, the danger seems greater than usual. There's no terrain to hide behind, each player only ever has 3 spells to choose from, and some of your most powerful in-game tools depend on the luck of the dice. The designers of Arcane Duel turn all of those "problems" into strategies, and have created a fun and dynamic game that only requires an A4 board game, 2 miniatures, 7 double-sided cards, and 32 six-sided dice. This is a real gem of a game.

Strategy

Games are choices, and Arcane Duel provides a clever number of ever-changing options. The most constant is resource management. You have 16 Power Dice, and to cast a spell you must choose how many Power Dice you want to use in your attempt to equal or exceed the spell's casting requirement. You can't use all 16, because you can only ever use up to half of your current Power Dice pool. And once you roll dice to cast, you must discard the dice you've just rolled. Your Power Dice pool is diminishing as you cast, and worse yet your opponent is casting spells at you that force you to discard Power Dice. You can mitigate this attrition by moving into a zone on the board that grants extra Power Dice, or by casting "healing" spells that restore Power Dice to your pool. However, you only get a single action with each turn, so you move or to heal at the cost of attacking.

Your available spells are defined by cards. There are 7 double-sided cards included in the magazine for a total of 14 possible spells. You only use 6 cards in each game, so the available spells in any game is most likely different to what you had in a previous game. Each spell has a success threshold, so you're constantly weighing the probability of rolling high on as few dice as possible. Once you cast a spell, that spell card goes to your opponent, so your available spells are constantly rotating as the game progresses.

You can also attempt to unbind a spell that your enemy has just cast. To do that, you must "lock" a spell from your hand, which makes it unavailable during your next turn, and then you roll 2d6 in hopes of exceeding your opponent's casting roll. If you succeed, the spell fails.

When you roll double 1s, your casting fails and you lose a Power Dice.

When you roll double 6s, your casting cannot be countered with unbind, and your opponent loses a Power Dice.

The game moves quickly, even with the mechanics allowing for restoring Power Dice. It's a simple game to learn and to play, and the push-your-luck resource management aspect of it is extremely satisfying.

Wordsmithing problems

As fun and as simple as the game is, I have to admit that I'm only assuming I'm playing it as intended. The rules writing is confusing and over-complex. I can only assume that White Dwarf games are developed and published along with the rest of the issue, because every one that I've played feature rules that at times are indecipherable. I've emailed them for clarification on some, and have yet to receive a response, so I think the games are meant to be relatively ephemeral. They think up a fun way to spend an afternoon with your miniatures and some dice, they try it out once or twice, they quickly write down what they did, they publish it, and never think about it ever again. Because the writing style of White Dwarf follows the same editorial voice of Games Workshop itself, so the meaning of some rules get lost in their own verbosity.

Take the rule for casting a spell, for example:

remove an amount of dice from your Power Dice pool equal to the number of casting dice you want to roll. Removed dice are placed to the side. Roll the casting dice and add up the result.

According to this rule, no dice are ever restored to your Power Dice pool. Were that true, you'd run out of Power Dice after turn 2 or 3, because there are definitely fewer opportunities to gain Power Dice than there are to spend Power Dice. The way my partner and I eventually interpreted it was as I've described in this review: You can spend up to half your current Power Dice pool, and you remove the dice you roll from your Power Dice pool permanently. In other words, the phrase "placed to the side" means you set dice from your pool aside to prove that you have an equal number of unspent dice to the amount of dice you are spending. However, it could actually mean that you're removing an equal number of dice as the number of dice you are rolling, effectively causing every spell to cost twice the number of "casting dice" you roll. I don't know.

I would love for Games Workshop to learn about the active voice, and to eliminate the future tense from their rules writing.

Spell slinging

There are lots of games out there about spell slinging. I think lots of gamers think it should be fun to rapid-fire spells at one another, blasting arcane energy at one another like the witches in Willow or like Gandalf and Saruman in Lord of the Rings. But in practise, I can't think of many games solely about casting spells that I've actually enjoyed. Arcane Duel is a notable exception. It's a fast and fun game with high stakes and really small yet important strategies. If you see a copy of White Dwarf issue #524, it's definitely worth a purchase just for your own copy of Arcane Duel.