CD Projekt Red will be releasing a Gwent card game.

This is cool . Via HeartbreakRidge:

 

For those who are unfamiliar, gwent is the in-game collectible card game for Witcher: Wild Hunt.  It was and is addictive; it was also genuinely clever as a CCG. Basically, you get dealt ten cards. You have to win two out of three matches against your opponent, with only those cards; and cards used during a match are discarded going forward*. It’s a perfectly valid strategy to lose one of the three matches, if you think that you can get your opponent to waste his best cards; there’s definite strategic thinking, there.  Plus, since you had to build the deck actually finding all the good** gwent cards meant that you had to explore the entire map and talk to all of the important NPCs, which was a good way to encourage people to progress in the story.

So, I guess that they’re going to sell a physical copy of the actual gwent game. I wonder if it’ll be compatible with the Special Edition gwent promotional deck that my awesome readers got me? Guess we’ll find out…

Moe Lane

*There are cards that allow you to break all of those rules. Which in itself drives your deck building strategy, of course.

**You’ll end up just trying to find all the gwent cards.  Good, bad, or indifferent.

11 thoughts on “CD Projekt Red will be releasing a Gwent card game.”

  1. Nice to see CDPR recognize when they have money just sitting on the table waiting to be picked up! Yes, collecting all of the cards in the main game was quite a task, I recall a spreadsheet being involved.

  2. Given that Magic, Pokemon, and Hearthstone etc. have such cult followings, I’m surprised this wasn’t their opening cross-promotion i.e., much like Saturday Cartoons, the video game could have just been the infection vector for the cards.

  3. They could scatter good cards around at conventions, encouraging people to interact with each other. It wouldn’t work with someone like me, but other, more socially adjusted people might get a kick out of it.

    1. Probably wouldn’t be a good idea. I used to be a judge/volunteer for a CCG company back in the day when CCGs were a bigger deal. We had a fairly constant problem of judges scheduling tourneys, getting the prizes/promo cards and then just distributing them among their friends/ebaying them without ever telling the players “Oh, we have prizes for you.” We even had a few brick and motor places who’d do that. If you only distribute the promos at cons where CD Projekt had a physical presence, folks who can’t get to Essen, Pax or GenCon or the like will scream bloody murder (and the secondary market will be insane.) I suspect there’d be less headaches for everyone if they go with the current Living/Expandable Card Game model, where you just get a set with all the current cards.

      1. I was just thinking that people who enjoyed it the video game would want to have a similar experience in real life. It didn’t occur to me that people might take a card game so seriously. You’re probably not far from the truth in your prediction.

        1. Oh, I know horror stories from when the Pokemon CCG came out. Folks take little pieces of laminated cardboard very seriously.
          .
          I mean, it’s a good thought that players wander in and talk to random merchants to buy Gwent cards like in the game. But as a practical matter, it’d likely end up as a mess.

  4. They need to work on the card game balance though. I pretty much always played a “spy” card laden deck and did not have many issues, aside from getting bad draws. Maybe put a cap on the number of spy cards you can use?

    The quest in blood and wine which forced you to use the skellige deck (which seemed to be a monster style deck with some new elements) was fun.

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