To start with, Repos Production plans to release 7 Wonders: Duel in French, English and German at Spiel 2015 in October, and I imagine that other publishing partners will release the game in languages of their own, too. To continue, those who don't enjoy videos can partake of this written description:
What's different about 7 Wonders: Duel is that, as the title suggests, the game is solely for two players, with the players not drafting card simultaneously from hands of cards, but from a display of face-down and face-up cards arranged at the start of a round. A player can take a card only if it's not covered by any others, so timing comes into play as well as bonus moves that allow you to take a second card immediately. As in the original game, each card that you acquire can be built, discarded for three coins, or used to construct a wonder.
Each player starts with four wonder cards, and the construction of a wonder provides its owner with a special ability. Only seven wonders can be built, though, so one player will end up short.
Players can purchase resources at any time from the bank, or they can gain cards during the game that provide them with resources for future building; as you acquire resources, the cost for those particular resources increases for your opponent, representing your dominance in this area.
A player can win 7 Wonders: Duel in one of three ways. Each time that you acquire a military card, you advance the military marker toward your opponent's capital, giving you a bonus at certain positions. If you reach the opponent's capital, you win the game immediately. Similarly, if you acquire all six different scientific symbols, you achieve scientific dominance and win immediately. If neither of these situations occurs, then the player with the most points at the end of the game wins.
• In case you weren't already aware that 7 Wonders is popular — what with the spinoff game covered above and the three expansions and the multiple mini-expansions — this next item will give you another clue of that popularity: the 7 Wonders: Playmat from Repos Production, which will be released at some point in 2015. Yes, we recorded a video of a playmat.
• For all its popularity, though, 7 Wonders is still unknown by some folks who play games. Okay, most folks. Repos would like to change that, so in 2015 it plans to introduce an organized play pack to help brick-and-mortar retailers organize tournaments for the game in order to introduce it to others. Part of that organized play pack will be the playmat mentioned above, and another item is the 7 Wonders: Art Pack, which will be distributed among tournament participants and given wholly to the winner. In more detail:
• What, still more videos of 7 Wonders? Yes, this time with a full playthrough of the 7 Wonders app that Repos Production has developed internally for use on the iPad, whether you want to play against friends or AI bots. As for when this app will be available, the only honest answer is probably "Not tomorrow, but sometime in the near future relative to the heat death of the universe". Inspiring!
• To step away from 7 Wonders for a moment, let's look at another forthcoming title from Repos. I first posted about Roberto Fraga's Doctor Panic in March 2014, when it then bore the provisional title Panicobloc, and while the current Doctor Panic title is still provisional, the game design itself is pretty much finished, with Repos expecting to debut this design at Gen Con 2015 in August. The short version: You and your medical team have twelve minutes to save an emergency care patient. To do this, you'll need to don your silly scrubs and get to work...
• Guillaume Blossier's arena combat game Ultimate Warriorz first appeared in 2011 in a small edition from French publisher Pulsar Games. For 2015, Matagot has added the game to its catalog, revamped some of the character powers, and planned for a release that includes rules in multiple languages, including English, German, Chinese, Dutch, Polish and of course French. Here's a rundown of the gameplay: