GWENT: Geralt's card game outgrew The Witcher 3
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Players who loved the pastime inside The Witcher 3 get a colder, more calculating duel here — and the harshest words come from the people who once adored the original.
A card duel born inside another game
Geralt of Rivia played cards to clear his head between contracts in The Witcher 3, and the pastime grew so far that it walked out of the original game and became a title of its own. This spin-off is what reaches the store: Geralt's adventure stays behind, and what remains is the card duel and nothing else, in online matches of player against player, with Geralt, Yennefer and other names from the series turned into pieces you command rather than characters you inhabit.
The deck spreads across two rows, melee and ranged, and a single hero or spell card can settle a round on its own. Victory takes two rounds out of three, and the opening hand of ten cards is already the first decision: do you lead with your strongest unit, or hold your best piece back for the end? Three modes split the duel — a quick match against a friend, ranked seasonal play, and the more experimental Arena — all inside a progression system that hands out new cards as you play.
The game also sells cards and crafting materials to anyone who wants to move faster, and that storefront, more than anything else, explains the discontent in the reviews.
Born inside another game, and the studio has already moved on
CD Projekt Red released GWENT as a standalone game on 19 May 2020, but its roots run deeper: the studio's own material tells how the game started out as the card pastime Geralt pushes on everyone else in The Witcher 3, and how it gathered enough momentum to break away and stand alone.
On 17 October 2023, a patch notice marked the turn: from that update on, card strength adjustments would no longer be the studio's call alone and would pass, in part, into your own hands, the hands of the people playing. The studio let go of the reins; further down, the weight one long-time player already puts on that decision becomes clear.
The most recent post on the studio's board, from October 2026, shows where part of that team went: GWENT's design director, Damien Monnier, has his name on a new game, one of cards and storytelling, set during the French Revolution and made alongside another studio.
The players who never leave the table
GWENT sits well with the people who play it, and a relative newcomer with 18 hours logged sums up what catches the eye first: every premium card is a small animated artwork, and the board and the soundtrack carry the mood of Geralt's world. The same review insists the system is generous to anyone who only plays — you can assemble any card simply by playing, with no need to pay to compete.
From the side of those who all but live in the game, a person with 1,327 hours spent on the counter calls GWENT one of the best card games they have ever played — and in the same breath says goodbye to it. For someone who plays that much, the very system that gave players the power to tune card strength is what stretched the game's life the furthest, and also the reason it will one day die.
Players who came from the Gwent inside The Witcher 3 are not always thrown by the swap: two reviews in Turkish describe the same discovery, finding that the card game had a life of its own outside Geralt's adventure, and getting hooked on this version as well.
The duel that lets the nostalgics down
One player who returned after years away, 7 hours in since coming back, did not recognise their own deck builder: an attempt to change a collection ran into an error that demanded a duplicate first. Unhappy as they are with the current game, that same person swears the Gwent inside Witcher 3 is still among their favourite pastimes. Another review, after a single hour of play, is blunter: it has nothing to do with the Witcher 3 version, it feels like an odd mix of a new game and pieces of the old one, and whoever wrote it has no plans to return.
The complaint that comes up most is about money: a player with 5 hours sums it up as every duel getting harder and harder for you without purchases, or without grinding match after match, and argues the game should sell cosmetics only, never cards or crafting materials. Another person uninstalled in anger after just 2 hours, tired of in-game transactions popping up at every turn and of facing decks far stronger than their own, with nobody around to help them learn.
A third group never gets as far as arguing whether it is worth the effort: for those who tried to play, the connection drops constantly and the match never finishes — 3 hours were not enough to close out a single round. The thread linking these complaints is not a bad game: it is a different one. Almost every harsh criticism comes out of the comparison with the Gwent inside Witcher 3, not out of what this one is trying to be on its own terms.
Who stays at the table, and who walks away early
Anyone who likes strategy card games, is willing to study a dry, mathematical system and would rather pay in time than in cash will find a table here that holds people for hundreds, even thousands, of hours. Anyone chasing the exact pastime they played inside The Witcher 3 walks out inside the first hour: this is a different game with a different mood, and the reviews that sting most come precisely from the people who loved the original. For anyone with no patience for either side of that ledger, the measure is simple: competing here always costs you something — if not money, then time, and rarely neither.