The game was originally designed with a Roman Empire theme, with the name Tribute.[1] Avalon Hill had acquired the license to produce a Dune game, but when their design proved unusable, the company contacted Eberle, Kittredge and Olotka. Elements suitable for the Dune universe were added to the game, particularly from their earlier game, Cosmic Encounter.[1]
The Spice Harvest[3] expansion changes the initial setup of the standard game by adding a pre-game in which the factions lobby for control of the inter-world Spice market in order to purchase a more advantageous initial position for the start of the main game (control for the planet of Arrakis).
The Duel[4] adds "leader tokens" representing the primary leaders of each faction and a secondary board representing a circular arena for one-on-one combat. Leaders may fight individual combat using a special deck of cards for movement and attacks.
Both supplements included additional Treachery Cards. Both supplements are also incorporated into the French edition[5] published by Jeux Descartes.
In addition, Avalon Hill's strategy magazines, The General and Heroes, published counters and rules for three additional factions: the Bene Tleilax, the Ixians,[6] and the Landsraad,[7] factions and organizations that appeared in Frank Herbert's original novels.
The game received good reviews and due to the popularity of the Dune setting, coupled with the lack of new edition since 1984, became a sought-after item among board game collectors, with prices on secondary market reaching hundreds of dollars.[8] A fan-made print-and-play version was also made available online around 2010.[9]
In the 1990s, Jeux Descartes published a French edition of the game.[10]
The game was reprinted by Fantasy Flight Games in 2012 as Rex: Final Days of an Empire. Fantasy Flight was able to acquire the rights to the system used in Dune (known as the “Simultaneous Dial Based Order System”), but were not able to get the license for the Dune setting. As a result, the game's setting was switched to Fantasy Flight's Twilight Imperium universe.[8][11]
With the demise of Avalon Hill, Dune remained out of print for many years despite being a highly regarded board game. With newfound interest in the Dune series due to the upcoming 2021 Dune film, board game publisher Gale Force 9 reached out to the Herbert estate, which owns the general rights to the game, and received permission to remake it. The art was new for this edition, drawn by Russian illustrator "Ilya77", who was commissioned for the reuse of their art, in addition to the game's original designers, Bill Eberle, Jack Kittredge, and Peter Olotka. Gale Force 9 made very few changes of the game's original rules, tweaking about 3 to 5 percent of the rules.[12] The game was released on October 30, 2019 in advance of the Dune cinematic reboot in late 2021.[13][12] Along with the reprint, Gale Force Nine also released three expansion sets that allows players to control six additional factions, Ixians, the Tleilaxu, CHOAM, House Richese, House Ecaz, and House Moritani, co-designed by Greg Olotka and Jack Reda.[14][15]
Gameplay
Players take on the role of one of the factions in the politics of the planet Arrakis. Victory in the game is achieved by controlling a specified number of strongholds, either alone or in an alliance with other players.
The game board, which is based on the book's original map, represents the planet's northern hemisphere. It is divided into radial sections and territories, some of which overlap multiple radial sections. Five territories contain strongholds.
The radial divisions are used exclusively for storm movement. The planet's permanent coriolis storm moves along the radial sections, destroying any troops in its way. It is possible for a multi-radial territory to be partly in storm and partly clear.
Players move their units from territory to territory. If two or more players enter the same territory, a battle ensues and the contest is resolved using a hidden bidding system based on troop numbers, leaders, and possible treachery cards.
Spice serves as money. Each turn, one territory (determined by a card draw) produces a "spice blow", which places an amount of spice in that territory. This is one of the two ways in which all factions can earn spice for auctions, transportation, revival, and negotiating deals. The other is by winning a battle in which a leader is killed, which earns the faction the leader's value in spice.
An auction is held each turn in which players can purchase "treachery cards". These cards contain a variety of uses such as weapons and defenses, which can be used as advantages in resolving battles.
Each player has five leader tokens of varying strengths. Leaders are used in combat to supplement the strength of their units. However, each player may have one or more traitors among the other players' leaders, so using leaders can be a risk. Leaders can be killed in combat, but players may use spice to buy dead leaders back from the Bene Tleilaxu tanks.
Combat
Battle results when a territory is contested. Combat is resolved using a battle wheel, which consists of three parts: the number of troops, the leader, and any treachery cards which will be used during the battle.
Each player in the contest chooses in secret to sacrifice a number of their troops in that territory. Each unit sacrificed gives them a base score of one. Leader tokens add to the strength of their side, provided it survives the attack by the opposing leader. Attacks and defenses affecting leaders are chosen in secret by the players from their available treachery cards.
Once both players have chosen their strategies, they reveal the number of units, leaders and items used. If the player has chosen their opponent's traitor, they are defeated. Otherwise, if a player has used a weapon against which the other player has not used a defense, their opponent's leader is killed. If a laser is used against a shield, all units and leaders are killed from both sides. Otherwise, the scores are then added together, and the player with the lower score is defeated. The player with the higher score, while victorious, still must lose the number of units they planned in their strategy. In the event of a tie, the attacking player wins the battle.
Factions
Each faction has unique powers which modify the rules. Both the default abilities and the optional "Additional Character Advantages" are included below.
During auctions, the Atreides player may use "prescience" to view the treachery card being bid on, while other players must bid blind. The Atreides player may also use prescience to look at the next spice blow card, and force their opponents to reveal one element of their battle plan. In advanced rules, the Atreides player may bring the Kwizatz Haderach into play, which adds a bonus to the battle wheel.
The Bene Gesserit player may temporarily "coexist" with other players' units without causing a confrontation, which allows transportation of one unit to the polar sink free of charge for every other player's transport. The player may command other players to use or not to use certain cards during combat (representing their use of "the Voice"). At the beginning of the game the Bene Gesserit player secretly records the name of another player and the turn at which they think that other player will win the game. If the Bene Gesserit correctly guesses who will win and when, they win the game instead. In advanced rules, Bene Gesserit units are capable of extended coexistence and arrive in the same territory as the other player's transport.
When the other players buy treachery cards, they pay the Emperor. The player may revive up to three additional units as gholas. In advanced play, the Emperor has five elite units (Sardaukar) that are twice as effective as ordinary units, although they lose this bonus against the Fremen.
The Fremen armies are already on Arrakis, so they need not pay shipping costs to the Guild. They are also able to use "desert power" to move two territories per turn instead of one. Their troops are not killed if a worm appears; instead, they can ride the worm to a location of their choice. If no-one has won after ten turns and certain strongholds are either unoccupied or occupied by the Fremen, they win. In advanced play, they have three elite units (Fedaykin), and only suffer half losses from the storm.
The Guild player receives the payment when other players transport units onto the board, while paying only half for transporting themselves. They can ship units around the planet, or even send them back to their reserves. If no-one has won after ten turns, and the Fremen don't win, the Guild does. In advanced play, they can choose to take their turn at any point during a turn.
When the Harkonnen player buys a treachery card, they receive a second one free, without having to show it to the Atreides player. They can hold twice as many treachery cards as other players, to a maximum of eight. Where the other players must choose one traitor out of four, the Harkonnen player can keep all four. In advanced rules, whenever they win a battle, they may kill or temporarily capture a random leader from the loser.
Each faction also grants some aspect of their powers to their allies.
Winning
A faction wins by controlling three of the five strongholds at the end of a turn. An alliance of factions wins by controlling four of the five strongholds at the end of a turn. In a game with only two factions, the winning faction must control four strongholds.[16]
In a recommended "longer game" variant a faction or alliance of factions must control four strongholds, or all five in a game with only two factions.[citation needed]
Three other winning conditions exist:
The Fremen win at the end of turn 10 (the final round of game play) if no faction has won the game by the normal criteria and the occupancy of certain strongholds meets certain constraints. This win condition represents a situation where the Fremen have prevented interference with their own plans for Dune.
The Guild wins if, at the end of turn 10, no faction has won via the conventional win, and the Fremen win conditions are not met. This win condition represents the situation where the Guild has preserved the status quo on Dune and may continue to provide shipping services.
The Bene Gesserit win if, after a faction or alliance has succeeded in a conventional win, they reveal that they predicted (prior to the game's start) that that faction would win in that turn. The Bene Gesserit need only predict one of the winning players in the event of an alliance win. If the Bene Gesserit cause their own alliance to win in the turn that they predicted one of their allies would win, then the Bene Gesserit alone win. This win condition represents the situation where the Bene Gesserit have manipulated the situation so that their hidden agenda is fulfilled.
The Bene Gesserit cannot predict the Fremen or Guild turn 10 default wins. However they may predict that the Fremen or the Guild will win in turn 10 by the normal majority stronghold occupancy criteria.
Reception
In the January–February 1980 edition of The Space Gamer (Issue No. 26), Tony Watson commented that "Not only is Dune a good game, it does an amazingly accurate job of conveying the feel and air of Dune the novel."[17]
In the inaugural edition of Ares Magazine (March 1980), Eric Goldberg gave it a below average rating of 6 out of 9, saying, "Battles are won and lost dependent on the number of spice tokens present in an area. Treachery, storms and the fearsome shai-hulud (gigantic sandworms) enliven affairs. Dune is a nice little game, but nothing special."[18]
In Issue 77 of the UK magazine Games & Puzzles, Nick Palmer was impressed, writing, "The ability of the game to bring out the delicate power balance in the planetary power struggle depicted by the book is nothing short of extraordinary — and yet the rules occupy a mere three pages!" However, Palmer had issues with the alliance rule, which states that players in an alliance can jointly win the game. But Palmer pointed out "A strong alliance can generally win at once, and if one wants to avoid an abrupt ending it seems best to limit wins to single players. One can then employ Diplomacy-like cunning in lining up some unsuspecting allies before making a dash for victory, since allies cannot interfere with each other's plans until alliances are reviewed when the next sandworm appears." Nonetheless, Palmer game the game an Excitement rating of 5 out of 5, saying, "Dune is in my view the best game that appeared in 1979, simple, fast-moving, yet packed with strategic and tactical ingenuity."[19]
In the December 1993 edition of Dragon (Issue 200), Allen Varney considered Dune a classic, saying "Unique flavor comes with the movement rules, combat strategies, and chances that your leaders will turn traitor." However, Varney advised "Don’t bother with the unbalanced advanced rules that Avalon Hill foisted on the clean basic design."[20]
In a retrospective review in There Will Be Games, Jonathan Volk gave high praise to the game's unusual, asymmetrical design. In Dune, he noted, there is no artificial balance, no "Arthurian circularity" to the game table: the various player positions have wildly differing strengths and weaknesses, and the unfairness of the world setup makes "a seductive point of entry". More importantly, that unfairness presses players into complex social relations and moral quandaries rarely found in games. It's "impossibly good, better than any board game I’ve played, and I’ve played a lot of them," wrote Volk, summing up: "No game lingers with me more than Dune.[21]
Tom Mendelsohn, in a retrospective review from Ars Technica, stated that the game was "moderately popular" during its release, but commented that the 1984 re-release was commercially unsuccessful.[22] Mendelsohn, however, stated that the game was "ahead of its time", shown by the variable number of rounds each game. The reviewer additionally complimented the tenseness, the combat as a "state-of-the-art" mechanic that is a "battle of wits and bluffing", and praised the hidden information and "bursts of chaos". Nevertheless, the asymmetry was criticised as unappealing to some players, Mehdelsohn also stated that the rules are "full of holes and ambiguities" and that the expansions are dubiously necessary. The review also described that Rex: Final Days of an Empire was received less favourably.[22] Similar to Mendelsohn, who commented that Dune "features more than a few rough edges courtesy of how ahead of its time it was", Luke Plunkett from Kotaku observed that the game had "rough edges", criticising that "If a major publisher was pitched Dune in 2020 they’d likely tear it to pieces, aghast at how so many of this game’s features are seemingly worthless, overpowered or both at the same time." Nonetheless, he praised that the "elastic nature" of victory conditions and "treachery lurking", and complimented the engagement in consequence of "unpredictability and unfairness".[23]
The Duel is a 1984 expansion for Dune published by The Avalon Hill Game Company. It provides optional rules for duels between character groups.[26]
Steve Crow reviewed The Duel in The Space Gamer No. 76.[26] Crow commented that "In all, The Duel makes an interesting supplement to the original Dune rules, but overuse of the challenge rules just bogs down the game."[26]
The 2019 Gale Force Nine edition has released three expansions to date: Ixians & Tleilaxu, which adds those two factions, Tech Tokens and additional cards; CHOAM & Richese, which adds two more factions, Leader Skill Cards, and Advanced Stronghold Cards; and Ecaz & Moritani, which adds another two factions, homeworld tokens, and new cards.
All three expansions were designed by Eberle, Kittridge, and Olotka, along with Greg Olotka and Jack Reda.
Related Research Articles
Paul Atreides is a fictional character in the Dune universe created by Frank Herbert. He is a main character in the first two novels in the series, Dune (1965) and Dune Messiah (1969), and returns in Children of Dune (1976). The character is brought back as two different gholas in the Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson novels which conclude the original series, Hunters of Dune (2006) and Sandworms of Dune (2007), and appears in the prequels Paul of Dune (2008) and The Winds of Dune (2009). According to Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert's son and biographer, House Atreides was based on the heroic but ill-fated Greek mythological house of Atreus.
Dune is a 1984 American epic space opera film written and directed by David Lynch, and based on the 1965 Frank Herbert novel of the same name. It was filmed at the Churubusco Studios in Mexico City. The soundtrack was composed by the rock band Toto, with a contribution from Brian Eno. Its large ensemble cast includes Kyle MacLachlan's film debut as young nobleman Paul Atreides, Patrick Stewart, Brad Dourif, Dean Stockwell, Virginia Madsen, José Ferrer, Sean Young, Sting, Linda Hunt, and Max von Sydow.
The Bene Gesserit are a group in Frank Herbert's fictional Dune universe. A powerful social, religious, and political force, the Bene Gesserit is described as an exclusive sisterhood whose members train their bodies and minds through years of physical and mental conditioning to obtain superhuman powers and abilities that seem magical to outsiders. The group seeks to acquire power and influence to direct humanity on an enlightened path, a concerted effort planned and executed over millennia.
Melange, often referred to as "the spice", is the fictional psychedelic drug central to the Dune series of science fiction novels by Frank Herbert and derivative works.
The Fremen are a group of people in the fictional Dune universe created by Frank Herbert. First appearing in the 1965 novel Dune, the Fremen inhabit the desert planet Arrakis, which is the sole known source in the universe of the all-important spice melange. Long overlooked by the rest of the Imperium and considered backward savages, they are an extremely hardy people and exist in large numbers. The Fremen had come to the planet thousands of years before the events of the novel as the Zensunni Wanderers, a religious sect in retreat. As humans in extremis, over time they adapted their culture and way of life to survive and thrive in the incredibly harsh conditions of Arrakis. The Fremen are distinguished by their fierce fighting abilities and adeptness at survival in these conditions. With water being a rare commodity on the planet, their culture revolves around its preservation and conservation. Herbert based Fremen culture, in part, on the desert-dwelling Bedouin and San People.
The Spacing Guild is an organization in Frank Herbert's science fiction Dune universe that possesses a monopoly on interstellar travel and banking. Guild Navigators use the drug melange to achieve limited prescience, a form of precognition that allows them to successfully navigate "folded space" and safely guide enormous starships called heighliners across interstellar space instantaneously.
Arrakis —informally known as Dune and later called Rakis—is a fictional desert planet featured in the Dune series of novels by Frank Herbert. Herbert's first novel in the series, 1965's Dune, is considered one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time, and it is sometimes cited as the best-selling science fiction novel in history.
Alia Atreides is a fictional character in the Dune universe created by Frank Herbert. She was introduced in the first novel of the series, 1965's Dune, and was originally killed in Herbert's first version of the manuscript. At the suggestion of Analog magazine editor John Campbell, Herbert kept her alive in the final draft. Alia would next appear as a main character in both Dune Messiah (1969) and Children of Dune (1976). The character is brought back as a ghola in the Brian Herbert/Kevin J. Anderson conclusion to the original series, Sandworms of Dune (2007).
Chani is a fictional character featured in Frank Herbert's novels Dune (1965) and Dune Messiah (1969). Known mainly as the Fremen wife and legal concubine of protagonist Paul Atreides, Chani is the daughter of Imperial Planetologist Liet-Kynes and his Fremen wife Faroula, and later the mother of the twins Ghanima and Leto II Atreides. The character is later resurrected as a ghola, appearing in Hunters of Dune (2006) and Sandworms of Dune (2007), Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson's novels which complete the original series.
Princess Irulan is a fictional character in the Dune universe created by Frank Herbert. She first appears in Dune (1965), and is later featured in Dune Messiah (1969) and Children of Dune (1976). The character's birth and early childhood are touched upon in the Prelude to Dune prequel trilogy (1999–2001) by Herbert's son Brian, and Kevin J. Anderson, and she is a principal character in the Herbert/Anderson series Heroes of Dune (2008–2009).
Count Hasimir Fenring is a fictional character in the Dune universe created by Frank Herbert. He is featured in the 1965 science fiction novel Dune by Frank Herbert, and is also a key character in the Prelude to Dune trilogy by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. He later appears in the 2008 novel Paul of Dune, and the Caladan Trilogy (2020–2022).
Dune 2000 is a real-time strategy video game, developed by Intelligent Games and published by Westwood Studios in 1998 for Microsoft Windows. It was later ported to the PlayStation in 1999. It is a partial remake of Dune II, which is loosely based on Frank Herbert's Dune universe. The story of the game is similar to Dune II, and is continued in Emperor: Battle for Dune.
Hunters of Dune is the first of two books written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson to conclude Frank Herbert's original Dune series of science fiction novels.
Emperor: Battle for Dune is a real-time strategy video game, released by Westwood Studios in June 2001. It is based in Frank Herbert's science fiction Dune universe. It follows its predecessors, Dune II and Dune 2000. While Dune II was a distinct story to that of Dune, and Dune 2000 was a remake of Dune II, Emperor: Battle for Dune is a direct sequel to the previous games. In particular, it is a sequel to Dune 2000, carrying on from where it left off, with several of the characters and actors returning. Like Dune 2000 and many of the other Westwood games that came before it, Emperor features live action cut scenes filmed with actors.
Jeux Descartes was a French publisher of roleplaying games and board games. Their most popular lines included: Eurogames, a set of serious board games, previously published by Duccio Vitale's independent company; Blue Games, small card games for larger groups; and Games for Two.
Dune is an out-of-print collectible card game produced by Last Unicorn Games and Five Rings Publishing Group, and later Wizards of the Coast. Set in the Dune universe based on the books written by Frank Herbert, the game pits two or more players against each other, each in control of a minor house vying for entry in the Landsraad.
This is a list of terminology used in the fictional Dune universe created by Frank Herbert, the primary source being "Terminology of the Imperium", the glossary contained in the novel Dune (1965).
Multiple organizations of the Dune universe dominate the political, religious, and social arena of the setting of Frank Herbert's Dune series of science fiction novels, and derivative works. Set tens of thousands of years in the future, the saga chronicles a civilization which has banned computers but has also developed advanced technology and mental and physical abilities through physical training, eugenics and the use of the drug melange. Specialized groups of individuals have aligned themselves in organizations focusing on specific abilities, technology and goals. Herbert's concepts of human evolution and technology have been analyzed and deconstructed in at least one book, The Science of Dune (2008). His originating 1965 novel Dune is popularly considered one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time, and is frequently cited as the best-selling science fiction novel in history. Dune and its five sequels by Herbert explore the complex and multilayered interactions of politics, religion, ecology and technology, among other themes.
We've a three-point civilization: the Imperial Household balanced against the Federated Great Houses of the Landsraad, and between them, the Guild with its damnable monopoly on interstellar transport.
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