Gwent was once just a modest county in South Wales, just across the River Severn (and the border with England) from Bristol. Then, a few years ago, this proud region of Wales lost its Google ranking to a novice name stealer. That upstart was a collectible card game in CD Projekt Red’s beautiful role-playing game The Witcher 3, and it became an obsession for many of that game’s millions of players. Gwent took on a life of its own and influenced dozens of copycats, and now “a Gwent” is synonymous with any game within a game, especially if it’s a strategy, card, or board game that can be played against non-player characters.
Now the Final Fantasy developers at Square Enix, who were seeding games within their epic RPGs years before The Witcher 3 that were even thought of are back to reclaim their crown. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has a Gwent – and it’s one of the best and most original we’ve seen in a while.
Rebirth‘s Gwent is called Queen’s Blood, and I got to try it out at a recent press preview in London, where I had the chance to play the first few hours of the game. Rebirth, the second installment in Square Enix’s expanded and remixed retelling of the 1997 classic, opens with a dramatic flashback chapter. We then join Cloud Strife and his group of friends, where they hide and rest in the charming pastoral town of Kalm. Here, Rebirth fills in a few plot points, game mechanics and features, including Queen’s Blood, which can be played with various townspeople.
Image: Square Enix via Polygon
If you expect Queen’s Blood to be a card fighter along the lines of Magic: the meeting or Hearthstone, you are in for a surprise. It doesn’t even look like Gwent. Although it is a collectible card game, it works very differently from those other games. The most important properties of the cards are not special abilities, but rather the patterns of influence they have on the board, in what is essentially a very tight game of territory conquest.
The two players compete for control of a checkered board; To start, the board has three lanes of five tiles each (I assume there will be larger boards to play on later) and players work from the left and right edges. The goal is to open up the board to your cards and lay down cards with the highest possible power value. When the power values of the cards are added together, only the highest total value for each lane contributes to the final score.
Players take turns placing cards based on Final Fantasy monsters on the board, but can only place them on tiles they own, marked by small pawns of their color. Once they have laid down a card, more tiles are opened to place more cards according to a pattern marked in a grid on the map. If the pattern overlaps with tiles you already own, those tiles will gain additional pawns and be ranked higher, meaning you can place more powerful, higher-level cards there. If it overlaps with a tile owned (but not occupied) by your opponent, you take control of that tile. Some cards also have abilities that affect special tiles, highlighted in red in the map pattern; an example might be that for each card placed on that tile, its power value is doubled.
Image: Square Enix via Polygon
It’s a simple but deeply strategic, almost puzzle-like setup. In Queen’s Blood the spatial relationship of the cards and their areas of action are decisive. Each turn is filled with decision-making as you try to expand your influence on the board, level up tiles so you can lay down your best cards, and make the most efficient use of the cards’ abilities. It takes some getting used to, and after the tutorial it took me three or four hands to beat the first opponent I challenged (a nervous man named Ned, sitting on a porch, who loves to cry).
I haven’t even started on the deck building side yet, which is supposedly of enormous depth; although the abilities of the cards are quite basic compared to those in something like Hearthstonethe interplay of skill, tile pattern, power, and rank for each card gives you many factors to consider when building a balanced deck.
Queen’s Blood is compact and initially difficult, but the visual, puzzle-solving element of capturing tiles using the cards’ different patterns really appeals to me and sets it apart from other deck-building Gwents. I can see myself losing hours to this before I even set off from Kalm for the rest of my adventure.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth will be released on February 29 for PlayStation 5.