When you think of tabletop card games, what comes to mind? Most likely, the first card games that came to your mind are Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and maybe Disney’s Lorcana. Yesterday, we shared with you an upcoming tabletop game from Riot Games called Riftbound: The League of Legends TCG.

The day after the meeting with Riot Games, we met with No Loading Games to preview their tabletop version of a popular digital card game. For those who are unaware, No Loading Games is working on and is set to release a physical version of the beloved digital card game, Gwent from the Witcher franchise.

Below, we will be sharing with you our preview of Gwent from No Loading Games. 

For this preview, we had the opportunity to try out two of the upcoming decks. The first deck revolved around Cerys

To start the game, you will draw ten cards; these 10 cards are the only cards you will draw throughout the game, however, there are different abilities that allow you to search your deck to bring allies to the field. Once the game starts, you will need to use these 10 cards in order to win a best-of-three rounds.

The player with the highest team score wins the rounds. If you lose a round, you lose a gem; if you lose both gems, you lose the game. Hero cards are powerful cards that can be used, and they are unaffected by spells or weather cards; a Commander Horn will not increase the strength of a hero but will buff other units. 

Once the game starts, you will either play your Hero card or a regular card; a Hero card can only be used once during the game, unless a special circumstance occurs. Players take turns playing cards until they decide they no longer want to, at which point they can pass.

If a player passes, the other player can choose to play more cards or proceed to combat. The player with the highest combat score wins the round. Units must be placed in their appropriate combat row: Melee, Ranged, or Artillery. With the Commander Horn, you can empower one of these rows. 

Let’s start off with what happened in the first game. For the first game, we played against our instructor, Pearl from No Loading Games. The first round was a bit slow because I needed to figure out what each card did, but I ended up beating Pearl in the first round.

In the second round of playing Cerys’ deck, we were forced to use all the remaining cards in our hands to try to overpower each other; since Pearl had lost the first round, she was forced to play all of her remaining cards to stay on par; this led to her overpowering me with different vampire units. For the third and final round, it all came down to luck and fate.

With no cards in either of our hands, fate was the deciding factor. For her Faction ability, she got to keep one random card from the previous round and add it to her hand. For my faction’s ability, I got to take two random cards from my discard pile and it them to my hand.

Since my opponent had an infiltrator in my discard pile, it was easy to see it. So, rather than having an unfair advantage, we let the couple at the table next to us pick my two cards randomly; these two cards ended up being the Berserkers, easily overpowering my opponent’s creature.

Now comes the fun part, the opinion part of the article. At first, the concept of only using 10 cards from a 40-card deck seemed appalling. The level of deckbuilding skill needed to have a functional and strategic deck seems like it might be a lot of work at first. In order to fully build a good deck and come up with a reasonable strategy, you will need to actively follow what cards are released with each set. 

Once we got into the actual gameplay, it all started to make sense. Yes, the rows for the units were a bit confusing at first, but the symbols and the little guide card made things a lot easier.

Deciding when to play your cards vs when to just end your turn can be difficult at first, but it can come down to knowing your opponent or playing psychological mind games. In a way, our time with Riftbound the day before helped us prepare for Gwent since it changed how we look at TCGs and resource costs. 

Overall, once I got the hang of it, Gwent was fun to play. Looking at how the game is played in the Witcher, No Loading Games has done a great job bringing the card game to life. It will be interesting to see if Gwent catches on when it releases later this year.