GWENT: The Witcher Card Game Retrospective

GWENT: The Witcher Card Game started its journey as a humble minigame in The Witcher 3. But these days, it’s a standalone CCG with its own spin-offs. And if you’d like to know how we got to this point, you might be interested in this insightful IGN retrospective packed with quotes from CD Projekt’s developers.

A few sample paragraphs:

Three days later, the pair entered Badowski’s office to present their idea in its simplest form: a game in which two armies clash in separate rounds, representing the notion that, while you may win the battle, you may not win the war. Its name comes straight from Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher books, as does the rest of the extended universe, in which Geralt observes a group of dwarves playing a card game called Bridge, or in the original Polish version, Gwint.

Monnier and Jaki tried to explain all the rules during their pitch, but they ultimately won Badowski over by playing Gwent with him, using a stack of post-it notes to represent the cards. Production on Gwent was a go, but as Slama says, it “was a maverick endeavour.” Monnier and Jaki asked him to join the team as the sole coder of Gwent, and they began working on a Flash demo to attract others.

“But it was incomprehensible. It wasn’t really there,” Slama says. “So Rafal came in with the printed version, and we’re just sitting there in the cafeteria, and we played a few rounds, and I’m like, ‘Okay, this has quite a lot of fun potential.’”