When I was a kid, our version of a “fight with playing cards” (to borrow the tagline from Postmark Games) was War. For those of you who never had the pleasure (and I use the word loosely), both players simultaneously flip over the top card of their deck and the high card takes the lower card. Repeat ad nauseum.

52 Duels is decidedly not like that.

Instead, the good folks at Postmark Games (Matthew Dunstan and Rory Muldoon) have taken the basic idea from their successful playing card-driven solo dungeon crawler (52 Realms: Adventures) and crafted a head-to-head dueling game with real decisions and clever mechanics.

And they fit it all in a couple of pages of rules and a few print’n’play character sheets.

For those of you who are new to Postmark Games, all of their designs are print’n’play. In other words, you’re buying the right to print copies of the various game elements for you and your other players. The physical elements you have to provide are simple – in the case of 52 Duels, you need two decks of regular playing cards. (Other games require d6s and a pencil/pen, while 52 Realms: Adventures needs a deck of playing cards plus a couple of small cubes.) There’s no cutting out cards or constructing a board – each game element is a single sheet of paper.

Additionally, each Postmark game has had additional content released for it over time – new maps for Voyages, Aquamarine, and Waypoints; new dungeons and characters for 52 Realms: Adventures. As a backer of all of their projects, I can attest to the quality of the later content.

OK, enough about Postmark’s business model and high quality – let’s talk about 52 Duels.

52 Duels: A Primer

52 Duels can be played head-to-head against a live human opponent or against a very solid AI opponent/nemesis. (Each player mat is double-sided.) I’ve tried both modes and each work quite well.

Each player has two discard piles – one that is actually the discard pile (and is shuffled when you run out of cards in your draw deck) and one that is your Wound pile where damaged cards go and are unlikely to return to your deck.

On your turn, you take your five card hand and use your two actions assign the cards to variety of positions on your player mat.

• You can “level up” your fighter to gain a passive buff for the rest of the game. (The cost? Those cards never come back to your deck.)
• You can play cards on your four attacks which are poker hand-ish in nature: same suit, same rank, run, full house. When you play a card (or cards) to an attack, you can trigger the attack if you have enough cards there. Some attacks can trigger at multiple levels; others require a set number. (Attack cards are discarded to your discard pile.)
• You can play cards as items, based on the suit. They can allow you to heal, to create wild cards for your attacks, or even force your opponent to discard a card from their player mat. (Items are also discarded to the discard pile.)

After you finish your two actions, you refill your hand to five cards and await your opponents next sortie.

All of the characters have some sort of defensive ability that allows them to discard or reveal cards from their hand to mitigate damage. If your opponent is able to create more damage than you can block, you suffer that damage by discarding cards from the top of your draw deck into the Wound pile.

As you can probably guess, you lose if you cannot refill your hand to five cards at the end of your turn or you need to suffer wounds and you run out of cards in your draw deck. Winning is having that happen to your opponent before it happens to you!

Unfortunately, my only head-to-head game (so far!) resulted in my ignominious defeat at the hands of my younger son. Sigh. (A rematch is coming.)

52 Realms Solo

I’ve written a lot about solo play here on the OG site… and I’ve been pleased that each of the Postmark Games work well as solo experiences. That’s true of 52 Duels as well.

The flip side of each character is a Nemesis version of that character with specific instructions on how to play the hand of your adversary: face cards are used for leveling up while other cards are sorted by suit on the various attacks. Those attacks trigger after all the cards are played if the appropriate number of cards are present.

The Nemesis can also defend themselves. When you attack, you pick up their five card hand and use any cards that apply to reduce their damage. This peek at their hand also gives you information about how they will be attacking you on their turn – and that’s intel you can use to your advantage!

I’m 1-1 against the AI so far which means I’m not ready to ramp up the difficulty… but Matthew and Rory already have suggestions in the rules for doing just that.

Final Thoughts

52 Duels is on Kickstarter right now… and the $6-7 US feels like a steal. I mean, the Postmark team will have four characters in the initial release, with six more characters releasing over the next year or so.

Like all of the Postmark Games, this is an excellent travel game – especially for those of us who end up in hotels for work. It’s easy to pop some sheets in a folder and stick it in your laptop bag (along with the necessary card decks and dice).

Finally, it’s a game where paying attention to your cards matters. Have you seen certain suits or ranks end up in your wound pile? Did you put a bunch of face cards into leveling up? How is that going to affect your ability to play certain attacks?

In other words, it’s a real game with real decisions. Well done, Postmark Games.

I received a preview copy of the game with just two characters in order to write this article… and I promptly backed 52 Duels on Kickstarter when it went live yesterday with my own money.

Note: if you want to dive down a rabbit hole, there are actually multiple variant versions of War. I’d rather play 52 Duels, thank you.