Review of Avalon Hill's Dune Boardgame

General Characterization

First, I would not classify Dune as a "wargame", which to me are usually historically accurate simulations that require considerable amounts of real-life tactical and strategic knowledge and involve the standard chit/hexgrid implementation. I would also not classify Dune as an economic (or "empire builder") game, which usually involve very complex, open-ended simulation environments. Dune is much more abstract and finite than either of these two games.

Dune is sort of difficult to place in a broad category, but I can characterize it as follows:

• Multi-player, which to me means that it involves at least as much inter-player negotiation and interaction as it does simple game strategy.
• Strategic, which to me means that its scale is large and rather abstract.
• Science-fiction (as opposed to historical), based directly on Frank Herbert's novel, Dune (but not any of the sequels).
• Fun, which to me means that the complexity of the rules is not a tremendous burden, but the strategic options are rich and you can play it with friends in a not-too-overly-serious environment.

If you are not a fan of Frank Herbert's novel Dune, then frankly, I rather doubt that you could enjoy the game as much. If you've never read the book, then I would predict that you would find the game to seem like a rather arbitrary collection of unpronouncable terms and strange rules and special cases. If you are a fan of Dune, then like me, I think you should find the game to be an interesting adaptation of the general plot and tone of the book, with some truly unique game mechanics.

General Game Mechanics

Each player controls one of the six major factions from the book -- Atreides, Bene Gesserit, Emperor, Fremen, Guild, and Harkonnen. I have seen several attempts at adding various other factions that became more important in later books, including the Bene Tleilaxu, the Ixians, and even the Landsraad, but in my opinion, none of these have been very successful (and I've given a fair shot at doing these myself). The balance of the game is very well done, and adding new factions just seems to destroy the natural progression of the game.

Perhaps the best way to understand the flavor of the game is to give an overview of the turn sequence:

1. Storm Round: The killer Storm progresses around the board, destroying all spice and troops not protected in a city/sietch or in a non-desert space
2. Spice Round: One (or two in the advanced game) new spice blows are drawn; Shai Hulud (worms) may appear which destroy spice and troops at previous spice blow(s) and signal a Nexus when alliances may be formed or dissolved
3. Treachery Round: Treachery cards (which can grant special abilities or weapons or defenses for use in combat) are auctioned off sight-unseen to high bidder (see description of treachery cards below)
4. Revival, Shipment, and Movement Round: All factions may collect free revival of troops (and possibly dead leaders) from the Tleilaxu tanks and may pay for additional revival; Then, in sequence, each faction may make one shipment of one group of troops down to Arrakis and then may make one movement of one group of troops from one location to another on-planet
5. Combat Round: Each location on-planet containing two or more factions must resolve combat, eliminating all but one faction in that location (see description of combat below)
6. Collection Round: Troops remaining on spice blow location(s) can collect spice. In the advanced game, spice is also collected for possession of some cities/sietches

This sequence is repeated each turn until a winner is determined. The standard victory condition is to control a majority of the five cities/sietches on the board. This can be a shared victory by an alliance of two (or more, depending on house rules) factions. If this can't be accomplished within a time limit, there are default victory conditions for the Fremen and Guild players. The Bene Gesserit may also win by predicting the winner and the turn of victory. If the Bene Gesserit can manipulate the prediction into being true (or just gets lucky), she wins instead.

Treachery Cards

Treachery cards are pretty much the only matter of luck and lack of information in the game. (Although even that can be reduced by clever players.) No one but the Atreides knows who purchases which treachery cards, and even he doesn't know the cards dealt at the start of the game. Treachery cards can be weapons and defenses for use in combat (see combat below), or can be special ability cards, for example:

• Cheap Hero: Can replace a real leader in combat (useful when you know your leader is likely to be killed)
• Truth Trance: Forces an opponent to truthfully answer one yes/no question
• Weather Control: Can affect Storm movement
• Hajr: Allows one free extra on-planet movement
• Tleilaxu Ghola: Allows free revival of 5 troops or one leader
• Family Atomics: Allows destruction of the Shield Wall which exposes Carthag and Arrakeen to the Storm
• Karama: A sort of wild card that offers a rather wide selection of abilities to either enhance a special ability of your own or cancel an opponent's special ability
• Worthless Card: Just as it says, worthless (except to the Bene Gesserit, who can use them as if they were Karamas); the only way to get rid of them is to discard them in battle, which then doesn't allow you to play a weapon or defense card

Knowing when and how to most effectively play your cards and deducing which cards are held by which of your opponents and how to mitigate their effects can often be the key to winning the game.

Combat

Combat is the most unique mechanic offered by Dune. When in combat, each faction prepares a secret battle plan which consists of:

• Troops to commit: The number of troops present at the battle which will be committed. Committed troops die regardless of victory or loss; However, all troops of the losing faction die. In the advanced game, spice must be spent for troops to fight at full strength.
• Leader: The leader (or Cheap Hero) to play. Each leader provides a strength number which will be added to the number of committed troops, if the leader is not killed.
• Weapon: Either a projectile or poison weapon, which represents the method by which the opponent's leader is going to be attempted to be killed; there is also a Lasgun weapon which is risky to use but against which there is no defense. A Worthless Card may be substituted for a weapon in order to discard it.
• Defense: Either a projectile or poison defense, which represents the method by which your leader is going to be protected; a Worthless Card may be substituted for a defense in order to discard it.

Then, if the Bene Gesserit are involved in the battle, she may force her opponent to play (or to not play) any named weapon, defense, or Worthless Card. If the Atreides are involved in the battle, he may ask to see one element (committed troops, leader, weapon, or defense) of his opponent's plan before committing his own plan.

Both battle plans are then revealed simultaneously. Each leader is then checked for death. (For example, if I play a poison weapon and you do not play a poison defense, your leader is dead.) (Another fun fact: If both the Lasgun and a Projectile Defense (Shield) are played in the same battle, a nuclear explosion occurs, destroying everything in the location.) Both leaders can be killed since resolution is simultaneous. The total battle values (committed troops + surviving leader value) are compared, and the higher total wins (tie goes to the aggressor). The loser is eliminated from the location and must discard all treachery cards used in the battle. The victor loses only the troops committed to battle, may keep his treachery cards if desired, and also gains spice equal to the value of all leaders killed in the battle.

Thus you see that combat is very simple and involves no (or at least very little) randomness, but it presents many tactical choices: A battle is frequently won or lost by a leadership advantage, which usually means that you need knowledge or clever deductions of the treachery card holdings of your opponent. (You can see that the Atreides Prescience and the Bene Gesserit Voice are very powerful abilities. Not to mention the Harkonnen ability to hold double the normal number of treachery cards, half of which are unseen by the Atreides.) You can sometimes put yourself in a position to win a crucial battle by overwhelming troop numbers alone, but that requires a significant expenditure of troops which usually takes quite a while to replace and can quickly cripple you. You can also bluff quite easily if you don't have much to lose -- if I attack your stronghold with only one troop token, do I have an "ace in the hole?" Am I just trying to whittle you down by forcing you to commit enough troops to beat me if you can't kill my leader, am I planning on playing the dreaded Cheap Hero/Lasgun/Shield combination, or am I just on a mission to discard Worthless Cards to open up my hand?

Player Factions

As I've implied several times above, each faction is characterized by certain special abilities that override the basic rules of the game, which adds flavor and extra strategy to the game:

• Atreides:
  • Can look ahead to see where the next spice blow will occur
  • Can see treachery cards up for bid
  • Can see one element of opponent's secret battle plan in combat
  • Can use Kwisatz Haderach to enhance leaders in combat and prevent them from turning traitor
• Bene Gesserit:
  • Can use Voice to force one element of opponent's secret battle plan in combat
  • Can coexist with other factions, denying combat until they have stealthily built up an effective force on Arrakis
• Emperor:
  • Gains great wealth through collecting spice spent on treachery cards
  • Has special elite Sardaukar troops
• Fremen:
  • May ride Worms instead of being eaten by them and has control over appearance of Worms after the first in a turn
  • Takes only half losses from Storm
  • Ships troops free
  • Has special elite Fedaykin troops
  • Knows how far the Storm will move
• Guild:
  • Gains great wealth through collecting spice spent on shipment
  • Ships troops at half-rate
  • Has additional shipment options
  • Can take shipment and move out of sequence
• Harkonnen:
  • Can hold double the number of treachery cards
  • Can have more than one traitor in his pay
  • Can capture opponent's leaders when victorious in combat

There are other differences between the factions, including special Karama abilities, quality of leadership, starting position on the board, revival rate, and starting spice, but you get the idea.

Flaws

Dune is one of my top 5 games of all time for enjoyment in play, but there are flaws with the game as printed:

The rules are not totally complete nor well-organized. There are quite a few loopholes in the rules that require some house rules or adjudication to fix. There are also lots of rules that require some clarification -- you can pretty much infer what makes sense, especially if you're familiar with the tone of the novel, but I've found that each separate group of players has usually made at least 3 or 4 different clarifications on key issues. (I have personally accumulated a list of about 60 rules questions that I intend to send to Avalon Hill in search of answers soon.)

The flow of the game doesn't quite seem to work out as the designers seemed to intend. I usually see the following: everyone jockeys for position, trying to set themselves up as a dominant faction (or at least an appealing ally) in terms of money or position until the first Worm is drawn. At that point, the two (or more?) strongest factions tend to ally and go for the win immediately with the other alliance(s) trying to stop them. However, the dominant alliance almost always seems to get the win that turn or perhaps the next. The game is usually easily over in half of the allotted time (total 15 turns), or usually by the 4th turn when using the advanced rules where Worms tend to come up in half the time. (I suspect that in groups where it's not culturally desirable to accept shared victories this probably wouldn't be a problem. But in my group and most others I've heard of, sharing a victory is fine, and so there is no tension over making and breaking alliances and plotting over a length of time.)

Based on the designer's notes and a detailed article on strategy published in The General, it appears that the designers intended the Atreides and the Fremen to be the powerhouses that must be stopped by a combination of the other players. However, it seems clear in the play I've seen that the Harkonnen tends to be in the stongest position at game start, usually running out of steam if the game plays long. The Emperor and the Guild usually seem to gain their greatest relative strength in the mid-game (although the Guild really needs to bide their time to make that happen), and the Fremen are strongest relative to the others only in the extreme end game, unless played extremely aggressively and given some room to collect spice by the others. The Bene Gesserit and Atreides definitely seem to be the underdogs, and don't seem capable of winning a game alone, but they do make extremely powerful allies -- one or the other is very frequently a member of a winning two-faction alliance.

The standard Dune rules state that an alliance can consist of any number of factions. This is not terribly realistic (who would be satisfied with a 5-player alliance win?), and I don't know anyone who plays that way. But even limiting alliances to two factions (which we do), it's too easy for an alliance to win, and too difficult for a single faction to win before alliances are formed. There have been several fixes proposed from a variety of sources, but the first option listed below is clearly the favorite:

1. Require 2-faction alliance to occupy 4 of 5 cities/sietches to win, while a single unallied faction still needs only 3 of 5. This tends to make alliances slightly less attractive and increases the challenge for an alliance win, but it really does nothing to make a single faction win more likely, except when the game runs very long.
2. Forbid alliances from forming in the first 'N' turns (we've played N=3 or N=4), regardless of Worm appearance.
3. Require all alliances to be broken at each Worm appearance. The same alliance cannot be reformed until the next Nexus, but different ones can be. (This never really had much of an effect on preventing a strong alliance from winning in the turn it forms, but it did seem to make allies remain a little more distant from each other, making cooperation more challenging.)
4. Introduce some sort of new alliance-restricting special abilities to certain factions (e.g. Emperor may play Karama to prevent an alliance from forming).

Expansions

One more footnote: there were two expansion games added in the American market when David Lynch's film adaptation appeared.

The Duel introduced the concept of Kanly, whereby factions can challenge each other to duels to the death. Other factions can wager on the outcome, and so on. The problem was that players with very strong leaders quickly started declaring Kanly in such a way that forced multiple duels per game turn (e.g. "Kanly if you take any action this turn"). This just distracted from the game and wasted a lot of time. This expansion also introduced 10 point leaders for each faction representing the leader of that faction (e.g. Paul Atreides himself). You could use these leaders just as any other, but the trick is that if that leader dies, your faction is out of the game. This was not satisfactory because the removal of a faction entirely would often really destroy the balance of the game for the remaining players.

Spice Harvest introduced the concept of managing the spice harvests for a series of years prior to beginning the battle for Arrakis. This really resulted in an entirely separate game of its own being played prior to the Dune game itself. The results of this game would determine the starting positions and spice treasuries of the factions in Dune game to follow. This expansion made for an interesting game unto itself, but the near-randomization of the starting positions tended to totally destroy the balance of the Dune game to the point that it was literally possible for a faction to win on its own in the first turn. In my opinion, the carefully balanced starting positions should not be changed.

Both expansions also added new treachery cards, but these were poorly designed. Most of them effectively became worthless cards due to their relative weakness (i.e. Thumper, Harvester). One (Cone of Silence) had no basis in the original novel, and was usually capable of being used to quite literally select who would win the game. One (Residual Poison) was just an administrative nightmare, and didn't really add anything meaningful to the game.

In my opinion, both expansions had their interesting points, but hurt the game rather than helped it. I don't play with either expansion if I have a choice.

This review is copyright © 1995 by Brad Johnson (johnson@cig.mot.com)