After years of iteration as a minigame and in beta, Gwent has come into its own as a great card game. It emphasizes keen decision-making over chance, and a great back-and-forth buildup ratchets up the tension across multiple rounds. With a great variety of decks and strategies at its disposal, as well as strong incentives to play match after match, Gwent proves great ideas can come from small beginnings.

Gwent clearly learns from other digital collectible card games that have carved their niche out of the market, but its play style offers up an entirely different type of challenge. It's one that requires some investment, and hard decisions on which Faction you'd like to invest in, but Gwent also respects your time by rewarding you for nearly every action in a match, tempting you to play just one more. Its matches could use some fine-tuning in their pacing and presentation, but Gwent is otherwise a refreshingly new take on card games that establishes itself firmly outside of the simple side activity it was in The Witcher 3.

The price of this intricacy is that Gwent is anything but accessible... It feels both remarkably grown-up, and finely aged by its years of open development. [Jan 2019, p.120]

Gwent’s greatest asset are its basic mechanics – simple, easy to grasp and engaging mentally. Gives the players a lot of agency and even more tactics to discover and choose from. [13/2018, p.60]

From Witcher III minigame to a proper title: let's try GWENT's final release.

Gwent is a nice card game, but its final version is totally different from what everyone expected.