So yesterday I booted up Witcher 3 for the first time in a while and was prepared to get sucked into the universe once again and do sidequests and all that jazz. And I did, but all I did was clear up those Gwent sidequests. Gwent is so addicting for some reason. Simple but very strategic, tense, and rewarding.

Would you play Gwent if it was a real physical card game? Never in my life have I been someone who loves card games or table top board games but this is one I'd be all over. Do you think it'll happen? It has to. It just has to.

I would for sure. I actually found it to be more fun for myself than hearthstone. Maybe it's because the AI is more consistent and predictable than a human player, but I found myself planning out my hand and overall strategy in Gwent more than I do in hearthstone. There's a lot less of that annoying rng, so I can pretty much know what each faction is capable of and work around that provided that the AI I'm playing isn't setup to be bad at the game.

It really doesn't. It is a fun distraction within the witcher, but ultimatrly is is a hugely flawed cardgame. Even more so then some others.

Its very fun but its to shallow and poorly balanced to be a "real" cardgame without a complete redesign.

I have no idea how you would make it work in real life, but I do love it as a mini-game it is a ton of fun.

Yeah I'd love that.

It'd be hard to play in real life because it's so deck dependent. I don't think it's as poorly made as @rethla and @cheappoison claim, but it does suffer from all the standard CCG problems. Namely if you play me in Magic I will always beat you. Always! :P Whatever deck I choose to build will be multiple times over better than any "rookie" deck you could assemble. Gwent is the same thing. I'm not a CCG buff by any means but having played a good number of them I don't see what makes Gwent less balanced. I've had lots of close calls, comebacks and tons of tension. I've played the same hand multiple different ways against many different opponents. If the decks are out of sync (a master deck with tons of special cards vs some pleb deck) than yeah, that'll be a blow out. But that's not a poorly balanced game. That's just how the game works. In fact, I'd argue that Gwent's round setup makes it more interesting than many CCGs because you can win on Strategy instead of Tactics. I've won many games with awful hands because of Strategy and that doesn't happen often in card games.

You don't need anything to make it work in real life other than the cards. You can treat the rows as card types and just have a symbol telling you Front, Middle or Back, basically.

While still not real life, there is a mod for Tabletop Simulator that is just Gwent. It tries to balance deckbuilding for multiplayer. Can't recall how but I think it's something similar to XCOM multiplayer. i.e. you have a max number of Points your deck can be worth and then a max number of 10 point cards, 15 point cards, etc so on.

@geraltitude: I feel like my Northern realms deck would win against anything from the other factions, rookiedecks or not, all the time. There aint much randomness to it as i pretty much get to draw all my cards every game and i win by a clear margin while having around 5 cards left to play.

@frostyryan: Separate from the board game they made. I'm pretty sure it already is. I thought they talk about it in the pre-release coverage. I can't be bother to double check but it might have just been that they made prototype ones so they could test it in their office to see if it was any good.

Sure I could see that, especially if you're pretty good at the game, but this isn't a knock against the balance of the card game, it's a knock against the balance of NPC card players. They just aren't being given good enough cards is what I would argue. Which I think is less of a balance problem than having a card game that is truly out of balance at a card-to-card level.

I fell deeply in love with Gwent. Admittedly, it is probably a little light on depth for a fully-fledged card game - at least, one that might attract more than just avid Witcher fans - but with a little bit of work adding in extra nuance to the existing cards and maybe a new array of spells and secondary abilities, I could see it working. What might be better, though, would be to build it as a standalone digital game for tablets and PC, ala Hearthstone, where they could easily iterate based on player feedback. I'd get hooked on that!

I could see them releasing decks as a novelty, but the game is pretty impractical for real-world applications. I don't think it's very well balanced, and I think you'll run into a lot of issues playing against a real person instead of AI. Some card combinations are too easy to exploit, and there isn't enough randomness to your initial hand.

I am obsessed with gwent, though.

Yes to this

There is an official physical version of Gwent. It only came with the Xbox One collector's edition. I got the ps4 edition of the game but I loved the card game so I ordered one off ebay, it's pretty pricey now though. It comes with a Northern Realms deck and a Nilfgaardian one, both have more than enough cards for a 'deck' so you can experiment, but they don't come with all the available cards in the game to ensure that they're pretty balanced. They're lots of fun to play with.

@geraltitude: @rethla: @cheappoison: As a long time fan of Magic and to a lesser extent other TCGs I agree that Gwent is pretty unbalanced. There are a few key cards that just win the game for you, like Siegemaster Foltest for example. You just stack your deck with the best possible cards and win all the games against AIs with no real difficulty. With two people having the best deck it would just come down to pure luck as to who drew the better cards; there is no strategy element whatsoever.

@getz: The Gwent tournament in game, where you're playing against guys with all the best cards in their deck, was a seriously irritating experience. So I guess there's your evidence of what Gwent is like when you have evenly matched opponents.

It's a fun addition to an already huge game, but no way does Gwent stand on its own in the real world. Someone would have to retool the mechanics completely first.