Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales

Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales Review

Azurephile gives this a solid "Rad" on the Ghost Scale

This is fun, with very few issues, and is well worth your time.

Azurephile gives this a "Rad" on the Ghost Scale

This is fun, with very few issues, and is well worth your time.

If you’ve played The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, you may be familiar with its mini-game called Gwent. Gwent is a card game played by various NPCs in the game. However, you no longer need to play The Witcher 3 in order to play Gwent as it is now it’s own free-to-play game. Gwent is a simple card game where most cards have values and the one who has the highest strength value on the board at the end of a round wins. There are three rounds. You can pass if you decide your strength value is high enough, saving some of your cards for the next round. This is sometimes a good strategy to use. Some cards also have abilities which can be helpful and there are cards that only have... Read All If you’ve played The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, you may be familiar with its mini-game called Gwent. Gwent is a card game played by various NPCs in the game. However, you no longer need to play The Witcher 3 in order to play Gwent as it is now it’s own free-to-play game. Gwent is a simple card game where most cards have values and the one who has the highest strength value on the board at the end of a round wins. There are three rounds. You can pass if you decide your strength value is high enough, saving some of your cards for the next round. This is sometimes a good strategy to use. Some cards also have abilities which can be helpful and there are cards that only have abilities.

Thronebreaker is actually more like story mode Gwent. You walk around on a map as a queen. You run into various things on the map such as resources, which can be used to upgrade your camp. Your camp has a few different buildings and some of what you can build makes available new cards that you can create. All combat in the game is actually a Gwent match. There are also puzzles you can find where you may have a limited amount of rounds to play, limited deck, and must complete the puzzle a certain way in order to win. Puzzles seem to have their own level of difficulty. One beautiful thing about matches is that if you’re playing on the easiest difficulty and lose, you can choose to skip the battle. This completes the match as though you won. This applies to all matches, including puzzles.

I’m not sure how I found out about Thronebreaker, but I watched a video about it on IGN. The person said this was a game that reminded him why he got into gaming in the first place. IGN also gave the game a very high score, 90+ out of 100 I believe. I don’t know that I think of it as highly as that reviewer, but it’s still a good game. The story is interesting and the characters are cool.

If you’d like to play Thronebreaker, you’ll need to hop on over to GOG to buy it as this game is not available on Steam (*edit* this game is now on Steam). There you will also find Gwent, which you can get for free. One cool thing is that even owning Thronebreaker unlocks cards that can be used in Gwent. You can also unlock other cards while playing the game. I think it’s pretty neat, especially since it seems that getting an achievement in the game always unlocks cards for Gwent.

If you like customizable card games, check out Gwent, since it’s free. If you like what you see then I’d recommend getting Thronebreaker.