I’ve never played The Witcher before, but I know a lot of people who have and who enjoy it a huge amount. Apparently within the game there’s a card game called Gwent, and now it’s a real card game that you can play. I love these types of games so when I heard it was going into Open Beta and anyone could try it out, I decided to jump on it. I downloaded it from GOG (pretty easy to set up) and it’s almost a 2gb download but it went smooth. You can find me on GOG as Stargrace if you’re looking to add friends for matches.
The game is pretty easy to get into (at least the basics). I haven’t done any deck building nor do I know what all of the ore etc rewards are for that I keep getting, but the basics are simple.
You have 11 cards. They have to last you at least 2 wins, or a total of three rounds, whichever happens first. You need to score more points than your opponent in order to win that round. The round ends when you either pass (as does your opponent) or when you run out of cards and are forced to pass.
There’s a few different decks, each with different abilities. There’s a leader card that can only be played once in any given game, and weather cards that can affect the board. You can trade cards in at the beginning of the round for some different ones, and it basically plays the same as any other virtual card game out there. Strategy comes into play when you’re running low on cards. Do you eat a loss one round so you can save cards for the next one and potentially win, or do you want to make your opponent run out of cards first.
The tutorial does an excellent job of guiding you through the initial game and I imagine if you’ve ever played the game in The Witcher you’ll already be pretty familiar with it. If you’ve ever played any other types of card games like this (Magic The Gathering, Legends of Norrath, heck even Harthstone) you’ll be familiar with the basics and you’ll be able to pick the rest up. I’m not sure how long the open beta lasts for, but I had a good evening playing vs. a few friends and streaming it over on Mixer. You can catch the VOD replay for the next 14 days (just scroll down my channel to where it says previous broadcasts) before they’re taken down.
As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!