Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has a Gwent, and it’s called Queen’s Blood

Once upon a time, Gwent was simply a humble county in south Wales, throughout the Severn river (and the border with England) from Bristol. Then, a few years in the past, this proud Welsh area misplaced its Google rating to an upstart name-stealer. That upstart was a collectible card recreation inside CD Projekt Red’s fantastic role-playing recreation The Witcher 3, and it grew to become an obsession for a lot of of that recreation’s thousands and thousands of gamers. Gwent took on a lifetime of its personal and influenced dozens of copycats, and now “a Gwent” is synonymous with any recreation inside a recreation, significantly if it’s a strategic, card, or board recreation that may be performed towards non-player characters.

Now the Final Fantasy builders at Square Enix, who had been seeding video games inside their epic RPGs years earlier than The Witcher 3 had even been considered, are again to reclaim their crown. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has a Gwent — and it’s among the best and most unique we’ve seen in a whereas.

Rebirth’s Gwent is called Queen’s Blood, and I received to attempt it out at a latest press preview in London, throughout which I had the chance to play by the sport’s first few hours. Rebirth, the second installment in Square Enix’s expanded and remixed retelling of the 1997 traditional, opens with a dramatic flashback chapter. After that, we be a part of Cloud Strife and his band of pals the place they’re hiding out and resting within the charming pastoral city of Kalm. Here, Rebirth fills out a few plot factors, recreation mechanics, and options — together with Queen’s Blood, which might be performed with a number of townspeople.

The player and opponent examine their hands in a game of Queen’s Blood in Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth

If you’re anticipating Queen’s Blood to be a card battler within the vein of Magic: The Gathering or Hearthstone, you’re in for a shock. It’s not even very like Gwent. While it’s a collectible card recreation, it really works very in another way from these different video games. The playing cards’ key properties aren’t particular talents, however moderately the patterns of affect they’ve on the board, in what is actually a very tight recreation of territory seize.

The two gamers vie for management of a checkered board; to start with, the board has three lanes of 5 tiles every (I assume there can be greater boards to play on later) and gamers work in from the left and proper edges. The objective is to open up the board on your playing cards and put down playing cards with the best potential energy worth. When the ability values of the playing cards are tallied, solely the best whole worth for every lane contributes towards the ultimate rating.

Players take turns to put playing cards primarily based on Final Fantasy monsters on the board, however can solely place them on tiles they personal, marked by little pawns of their colour. Once they put down a card, it opens up extra tiles to put extra playing cards in line with a sample marked in a grid on the cardboard. If the sample overlaps with tiles you already personal, these tiles achieve additional pawns and are ranked up, which implies you possibly can place extra highly effective, higher-level playing cards there. If it overlaps with a tile owned (however not occupied) by your opponent, you are taking management of that tile. Some playing cards even have talents that have an effect on particular tiles, marked in purple within the card’s sample; an instance could be that any card positioned on that tile has its energy worth doubled.

Cloud talks to a man named Ned who says “You... you don’t wanna play Queen’s Blood, do you? I was hoping that... Oh, what am I thinking? You look like you’d murder me”

It’s a easy however deeply strategic, virtually puzzle-like setup. In Queen’s Blood, the playing cards’ spatial relationship and their areas of impact are every thing. Each flip is dense with decision-making as you try to broaden your affect on the board, rank up tiles so you possibly can put down your greatest playing cards, and take advantage of environment friendly use of the playing cards’ talents. It takes some getting used to, and after the tutorial, it took me three or 4 fingers to beat the primary opponent I challenged (a nervous man named Ned, sitting on a porch, who loves a good cry).

I didn’t even start to get into the deck-building facet, which presumably has monumental depth; though the playing cards’ talents are fairly easy when in comparison with these in one thing like Hearthstone, the interaction of potential, tile sample, energy, and rank for every card provides you a lot of things to contemplate when constructing a balanced deck.

Queen’s Blood is dense and initially tough, however the visible, puzzle-solving factor of tile seize utilizing the playing cards’ various patterns actually appeals to me and units it other than different deck-building Gwents. I can see myself shedding hours to this one earlier than I’ve even set out from Kalm on the remainder of my journey.