How to Play 7 Wonders Duel: Pantheon expansion

Hi! It’s Ryan from Nights Around a Table, and this is 7 Wonders Duel: Pantheon, an expansion for the 2-player game 7 Wonders Duel, which is, itself, a spin-off of the set collecting, card drafting game 7 Wonders… and 7 Wonders, of course, is a spin-off of the pyramids. If you’d like to know how to play the 7 Wonders Duel base game, check out my earlier video for it – one of the first videos i ever produced! No proper sound, no lights… i didn’t know what i was doing. Who am i kidding? I STILL don’t know what i’m doing! Anyway, this game. Let me show you how to play!

7 Wonders Duel: Pantheon adds this new adjunct board that fits onto the main game board like a glove. Mwah! Love it. There’s a new deck of special cards filled with famous gods from different cultural pantheons: Mesopotamian, Phoneician, Greek, Egyptian, and Roman. In the first age, the card tableau is sprinkled with these Mythology tokens; whenever a player uncovers one… he or she chooses a god from a certain mythology deck and adds it to the Pantheon board. In age II, the gods get flipped over, and players have a new action available to them: they can pay to activate one of these gods, which will give them a special power. What’s more, unlike every other action you can take in the game, this action doesn’t burn a card in the tableau, which adds a new dimension of strategy to the game. 7 Wonders Duel: Pantheon also includes new wonders, new progress tokens, some divinity discount tokens, a token that lets you steal a science symbol, a special token that affects military strategies, and an updated scorepad. These new Grand Temple cards replace the Age III Guild cards from the base game.

INTEGRATING PANTHEON

Shuffle the two new wonders… and three new Progress tokens in with your originals. Fill the Progress area with random tokens, as usual, and take turns choosing your wonders as you do in the base game.

The Mysticism Progress token nets you 2 victory points for each of the Mythology and Offering tokens you manage to collect at the end of the game, provided the game doesn’t end by military or science victories.

The Poliorcetics token makes your opponent lose a coin for every space forward you move the Conflict token along the track.

And the Engineering token lets you pay 1 coin to construct any card that has a white chaining symbol on it, even if you don’t have a card with the matching chaining symbol in your city.

The two new wonders are closely connected with the new god cards. We’ll look at them shortly.

Each Mythology deck contains three god cards. You shuffle them up and stack them in their individual piles. This new setup card tells you where you should randomly place these new Mythology tokens, face down. The unused tokens go back in the box.

When a player takes a card from the tableau that causes him or her to flip over a card with a Mythology token on it that player looks at the token’s symbol, and takes the top two god cards from the matching mythology deck, leaving the third card face down on the table. That player has to choose one of these two god cards to place into one of the available slots on the Pantheon board. This choice matters, because in Age II onward, you’ll get the chance to pay coins to activate these gods, and they have two prices beneath them. You have to pay the price closest to your side of the table. So the closer slots are cheaper for you and more expensive for your opponent, and the farther slots are more expensive for you and cheaper for your opponent. Therefore, depending on what the god does, you could either stock the near side of the board with gods that are helpful to your strategy, or put useless gods farther away from you, OR put gods that may benefit your opponent closer to you, to make them harder for your opponent to obtain.

By the end of Age I, all but one of the Pantheon slots will be filled with the gods you and/or your opponent selected. Before you set up the tableau for Age II, you flip over all the god cards, and fill the gap with this card, which says “Door” on it, even though the rulebook calls it the “Gate” card. I think “Gate” sounds cooler, so i’ll call it that.

From Age II onward, you have a new action available: you can construct a card from the tableau, juice a card for coins, slide a card under a wonder to activate it, or, you can pay money to activate a god card from the Pantheon. As discussed, you pay the price below the card that’s on your side of the table. So this card costs you 4 coins, but it would cost your opponent 7 coins. These cards are one-shot: once you buy and activate a god card, it can’t be re-purchased or re-activated by you or your opponent. Again, it’s worth noting that activating a god is the one action you can take that doesn’t expend a card in the tableau.

Age II also gets these Offering tokens dealt face-down and randomly. You claim them just like the Mythology tokens, and they give you discounts when you activate the gods. They don’t let you make change if you overpay, though, and you discard them once you’ve used them.

So what’s so great about gods, anyway? I think it’s worth the time to go through all of the different god cards to see what they do!

THE GODS
The Roman mythological gods are all about war. Mars gets you two shields to move the Conflict token. Neptune lets you mess with the Military tokens: choose one and discard it, without doing the thing, and then choose another and discard it, and DO the thing. So if all 4 tokens were on the board, your best move might be to discard one of the ones that make you lose coins (making you lose nothing), and then discard the one that dings your opponent for five coins (which actually happens).

Minerva lets you place this new pawn anywhere along the military track. It essentially “eats” a move by the Military pawn. So if you placed the Minerva pawn right next to the Military pawn, and your opponent constructed a building with two shields, the Military pawn would bump against the Minerva pawn for that first move. The Minerva pawn would get discarded, and the military pawn would take its second move forward.

The green Mesopotamian gods are geared towards a science victory. Ishtar gets you a law science symbol, which can contribute to a six-symbol science victory. It can also match with this Law Progress token from the base game to earn you another progress token of your choice.

Nisaba gets you this Snake token that you can place on an opponent’s green science card to steal that symbol. So again, if you steal an opponent’s symbol.. and you have the match, …you can claim a Progress token, …and/or steal a symbol you don’t have towards a 6-symbol science victory.

If one of the gods you flip over in the Pantheon at the beginning of Age II is Enki, you draw 2 of the unused Progress tokens that weren’t dealt out to the board and put them on the card. The player who activates Enki gets to claim one of these tokens and discard the other into the box.

The Greek gods are a bit of a grab-bag. Aphrodite gets you 9 points. You’ll love ‘em. Hades lets you take all of the discarded cards that you and your opponent have been scrapping for coins, choose one, and construct it for free.

And Zeus lets you take any card from the tableau, face up or face down, and discard it, including any token it may have on it.

The Phoneician gods are all about the Benjamins. Or the… who the Hell is this guy? Ptolemy? The Phoenician gods are all about the Ptolemies. Tanit gets you 12 coins. Astarte lets you place 7 coins from the supply onto her card that can’t be touched by your opponent in any coin-destroying gambits. You can spend these coins if you want to, but at the end of a non-military, non-science winning game, each remaining Astarte coin is worth a point.

And Baal lets you steal a brown or grey building from your opponent and construct it in your own city.

Finally, the Egyptians affect wonders. Anubis lets you discard a card underpinning one of the constructed wonders – yours or your opponent’s – cancelling that wonder’s ongoing benefits. The owner of the gutted wonder can rebuild it later, re-earning its instant effects, which is maybe why you’d want to use Anubis to kill off your own wonder instead of your opponent’s.

Isis lets you construct one of your wonders for free using a card from the discard pile.

And Ra lets you steal one of your opponent’s unconstructed wonders to become one of your unconstructed wonders.

If you buy the gate/door card, you have to pay double the price listed beneath it on your side of the table. It lets you flip over the top card in each Mythology deck, choose one of the gods, activate it, and flip the rest back over.

THE NEW WONDERS

7 Wonders Duel: Pantheon includes two new wonders that interact with the god cards. When you build the Sanctuary, you get a 2 coin discount on any god you activate. And the Divine Theatre lets you pick a Mythology deck, choose and activate a god from it, and reorder the remaining cards in that deck however you like. That means that you could bury a particularly powerful god so that your opponent can’t access it via the Gate, or leave one exposed so that you can use the Gate to get it later.

THE GRAND TEMPLES

The last change to the game comes in the form of these Grand Temple cards, three of which you shuffle randomly into the Age III deck, after getting rid of three regular Age III cards. You don’t use the base game’s Guild cards any more.

The cost to construct the Grand Temples is steep, but if you have a matching Mythology token from Age II, you can construct them for free. You get to hang on to the token, so that you can still score points from it with the Mysticism Progress token. The Grand Temples are worth 5, 12, or 21 victory points in a non-military, non-science ending game, if you’ve constructed 1, 2, or 3 of them.

And now, you’re ready to play 7 Wonders Duel: Pantheon!

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[Music – Board Game Boogie by Ryan Henson Creighton]