The Witcher 3 is one of the best-selling and most acclaimed video games of all time, yet for all the countless play-hours that have been poured into its narratives and subsystems, there’s one in particular that stands out: Gwent. This is a mini-game within the game which sees the player collecting cards from diverse sources, building a deck and seeking out opponents, sometimes for money, often just for fun. Players loved it, swapped tips on where to get the best cards, how to beat the hardest foes, spent entire sessions just playing Gwent instead of furthering the game’s main plot and innumerable side-quests. Perhaps inevitably, it has now arrived in a stand-alone, physical version.
For clarity, there are actually two different versions of Gwent. There’s the one from The Witcher 3 game and a separate video game called Gwent: The Witcher Card Game, which is run by the gaming platform GOG and differs considerably from the original, leveraging online matchup play to let players go head to head. This physical card game is a faithful replication of the original Witcher 3 version, not the GOG version.
What’s in the Box
Just as the protagonist, Geralt, collects cards to play Gwent in the video game, so Gwent: The Legendary Card Game, is a box full of cards. It’s important to note that it contains versions of all the cards from the video game, plus its downloadable content, which amounts to almost 450 cards in total. They’re also very similar to the ones you’ll see on-screen, using the same layout, artwork and iconography.
While this is a little frustrating – some cards have explanatory text, which is very helpful, while others just have icons even though there’s room on them for a description – it does allow you to admire the art. Among the gorgeous polygons on the video game, it’s easy to overlook how good and how varied the card art for Gwent is. Here, it’s front and center, and it’s delightful, full of life and detail, and every card is different, even if they’re functionally identical copies.
Aside from the cards, there’s a tiny punchboard of tokens and a paper play mat to organize your cards during the game. These are both terribly disappointing, flimsy and prone to wear and tear. The play mat doesn’t lie flat easily, and the creases make the cards slide. Among the tokens is a score tracker and it’s often easier just to use that and organize the cards during play yourself.
Rules and How It Plays
Gwent is actually a pretty weird game, although you might not immediately pick that up from scanning the rulebook, which is overly terse and offers little in the way of examples. It’s played over three rounds and the first player to win two wins the whole match. At the start of the first round, you draw 10 cards and – this is the odd and critical bit – that’s all you get for the entire game. You don’t draw any more cards in rounds two or three. Your initial 10 has to last you the whole match, and learning when to dole them out and when to retain them is a central plank of the game’s strategy.
Your play area is divided into three rows, for melee, missile, and siege units. Most cards have a symbol indicating which row they’re played into. Playing a card is often as simple as placing it into its marked row. Such cards generally have a strength value, and you’ll add that value to your growing total of strength in play. This continues until one player passes instead of playing a card, whereupon their opponent can carry on playing cards until they, too, pass. Then, the player with the highest strength total wins the round.
While this sounds simple, it immediately throws down some challenges for the players. In the first round, either player can likely win if they just keep on playing cards, but doing so leaves them less likely to win the other two rounds and thus the game. So, you’re trying to read each other, considering the cards in your hand and deciding when to pass and when to push. There’s a Poker-like element to this, muddied by the fact that there’s no statistics to rely on in terms of predicting what your opponent is holding, which means there’s no real bluff element. In fact, if they’ve built the deck themselves, you might have no information at all. There’s a definite thrill of venturing into the unknown with each decision, but your choices to pass or play are being made in a frustrating vacuum.
To combat this, the game offers various cards with special abilities, which are denoted by an icon on the card rather than text, a minor speedbump to overcome while learning the game. They’re mostly very simple. Tight Bond multiplies the strength of the card by the number of other cards on your side with the same name. Cards with the Spy ability are played into your opponent’s half of the field, adding their strength to their side, but allowing you to draw two new cards in return. A Medic lets you retrieve and play a card from your discard, and so on.
These muddy the waters somewhat. You won’t want to play a Medic on the opening turn, for a simple example, as there probably won’t be any discards available.
In addition to unit cards are various categories of special cards. The easiest to handle are heroes, which behave largely as units do but are immune to special abilities, making them harder to destroy or nullify. Weather cards are played to the side of the board and affect both sides, reducing the strength of all cards (except heroes) in one of the three areas to one. These can produce huge swings, as can some other special cards like Commander’s Horn, which doubles the strength of all cards on its row, or Scorch, which sends the highest-strength cards in the game to the discard pile. These add to the excitement and anticipation of the pass-or-play mechanic and also give some tactical structure to play around. If your opponent is laying down ranged combat cards and you’re holding a Fog weather card that’ll reduce that row to strength 1, you can save your own ranged cards for next round and hope to spring a nasty surprise.
While the full span of card types and powers do make your turn to turn decision making more interesting, and up the stakes considerably given that some of them can be game changing, you’re still very much making decisions in the dark. That Fog card, for instance: the strategy is pretty basic, and isn’t actually all that useful if your opponent only has one ranged card in hand and it’s useless if they also have a Clear Weather card to counter it. You have no way of knowing what’s in their hand or deck. Gwent is an exciting game, but it’s not a particularly strategic one.
It is, however, a deck construction game, and deck construction games mostly draw their strategy from deciding which cards you’re going to include in your deck before you play. There are various rules about what you can include. A legal deck includes a single leader, who offers a special ability you can use one time during play, at least 22 unit cards, and up to 10 special cards like heroes and weather. There are five factions included in the game, each of which has a particular play style and set of powers, and you can only build with cards from your own faction. Nilfgaard, for example, specializes in card draw while the Skellige deck includes berserkers that can be triggered and replaced with much more powerful alternatives. And since you have all the cards from the video game at your disposal, you have a lot of deck-building options.
The trouble is that, however you choose to construct your deck, the game is eternally held back by that sense of randomness. You can put all the work you want into your carefully-curated cards but if your opponent just happens to have a card that counters your best abilities, you’re probably screwed. Or not, if they just happen to play it at the wrong time because they’re as clueless about what you’re holding as you are about their hand. Worse, it seems fairly clear that some cards and factions are better than others. That 10-card limit over the entire game is so brutal that the two extra cards drawn by a spy can be absolutely game-changing. Thus, factions that are good at generating card draws – Northern Realms, Nilfgaard, and Monsters – are better than those that don’t. And within those factions, you’ll generally want to include abilities that draw cards over those that don’t.
In addition, there’s a considerable frustration around tracking the game state. You’re given counters to mark your strength total in tens and ones, which is fiddly to start with. But as soon as you get effects like commander’s horn and tight bond, strength totals can rise and fall explosively, and there’s no way to mark this other than recalculating your total strength with each and every card play. In the original video game this was all done automatically, making it easy, but here’s it’s a right royal pain, especially given the way card effects can pile on card effects, making it easy to miss something and calculate a wrong total.
