Thronebreaker teaches the basics of Gwent for any new player. Thronebreaker uses various unique rulesets often and has its own default modified ruleset in relation to Gwent. These modified rules create a very interesting moment to moment gameplay dynamic. Bosses & Puzzles take the highlight. Bosses tend to be completely over the top which require thinking of a new strategy within the pool of available cards. Even after identifing a winning strategy some bosses can still win if you've misplayed or make it extremely close. Puzzles tend to have alternate win conditions and rules. There's several and near every one is expertly done. For what it executes, being a single player RPG with Gwent as the mechanical focal point, there's no comparison between this and other single player games tied to card games.
Gwent is a new way to play cards. If we speak of other popular Card Games, they have unique styles - Magic The Gathering: Very RNG but with the defacto resource system which dictate when powerful moves may come. (Barring formats such as Vintage.) Yugioh - Play as much as you can. This is very much a Turn 0 to 3 game and is perhaps best in show for a hyper fast game. Hearthstone - A mix of both. Resource gain is not RNG and stable which provides a big of stability and cuts down on RNG aspects in conjunction to a Hero who may use their ability. Then Gwent. Gwent is odd. You play one card from your hand per turn and have a Hero. If coming from a MTG PoV this will be odd as there are no traditional resources. If coming from a Yugioh PoV it will be odd you can only play one card per turn. Hearthstone players will likely have the smoothest transition as it's similar but one card per turn, no resources, but hero powers. Gwent: The goal is to have more points than your opponent for two out of three rounds. Cards have a power score which, across all cards you've in play, accumulate into your total point score. Minimum deck size is 25 - Opening hands are 10 Cards. One may shuffle 2 to 3 cards from your opening hand into your deck for new ones (Mulligan). Each round one draws 3 cards and has more mulligan choices. Since one is able to see almost all of their deck per game, factors such as RNG become more nuance and it almost always boils down to precise sequencing to set up major plays later in the round. There are still bad hands, but because of the three round nature, paired with liberal draw & mulligan mechanics one can realistcally draw out of a bad hand and play for the long game. It's incredibly fun with great art & music. Goal: Get more points than my opponent and win 2 out of 3 rounds. How we get there is the game. ☺ It would be a 5 out of 5 game, but it must be noted new card development has stopped. This brings it down 4.
