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

Gwent was once just a modest county in South Wales, across the River Severn (and the border with England) from Bristol. Then, a few years ago, this proud Welsh region has lost its Google ranking to an aspiring name thief. This upstart was a trading card game as part of CD Projekt Red’s wonderful role-playing game The Witcher 3and it became an obsession for many of the game’s millions of players. Gwent took on a life of its own and influenced dozens of imitators, and now “a Gwent” is synonymous with any game within a game, especially if it is 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 Play in their epic role-playing games years ago The Witcher 3 who 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 long time.

Rebirth‘s Gwent is called Queen’s Blood and I was able to try it out at a recent press preview in London where I had the opportunity to play through the first few hours of the game. Rebirth, the second part of Square Enix’s expanded and remixed retelling of the 1997 classic, begins with a dramatic flashback chapter. Afterwards we join Cloud Strife and his group of friends as they hide and rest in the charming shepherd town of Kalm. Here, Rebirth fills in a few storylines, game mechanics and features – including Queen’s Blood, which can be played with multiple townspeople.

Image: Square Enix via Polygon

If you’re expecting Queen’s Blood to be a card battle in the style of Magic the Gathering or Hearthstone, you will get a surprise. It’s not even very similar to Gwent. Even though it is a trading card game, it works very differently than the other games. The most important characteristics of the cards are not special abilities, but rather the patterns of influence they have on the field, in what is essentially a very tight game of territory conquest.

The two players compete for control of a chessboard. The game board initially has three lanes with five pieces each (I assume there will be even larger game boards later) and the players work from the left and right edges. The goal is to open the game board to your cards and discard cards with the highest possible power value. When card performance values ​​are counted, only the highest total value for each row contributes to the final result.

Players take turns placing cards based on Final Fantasy monsters on the game board, but can only place them on spaces they own, marked by small tokens in their color. As they lay down a card, additional tiles are opened to place more cards according to a pattern marked in a grid on the card. If the pattern overlaps with tiles you already own, those tiles gain additional pawns and are ranked higher, meaning you can place more powerful, higher-level cards there. If it overlaps with a tile owned by your opponent (but not occupied), you take control of that tile. Some cards also have abilities that affect special tokens, which are marked red in the card’s pattern. An example could be that the power value of every card placed on this tile is doubled.

Image: Square Enix via Polygon

It is a simple but deeply strategic, almost enigmatic structure. What matters most in Queen’s Blood is the spatial relationship of the cards and their areas of effect. Decisions must be made each round as you try to increase your influence on the board, upgrade tiles so you can place your best cards, and use the cards’ abilities as efficiently as possible. It takes some getting used to, and after the tutorial it took me three or four hands to defeat the first enemy I challenged (a nervous man named Ned who sits on a porch and likes to cry).

I haven’t even begun to delve into deck building, which probably has a ton of depth; although the cards’ abilities are quite basic compared to those in something like this Hearthstonethe interplay of ability, tiling pattern, power, and rank for each card gives you many factors to consider when building a balanced deck.

Queen’s Blood is dense and difficult at first, but I really like the visual, puzzle-solving element of capturing tiles using the cards’ different patterns and sets it apart from other deck-building Gwents. I can easily imagine myself wasting hours on this before I even leave Kalm for the rest of my adventure.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth will be released on February 29th for PlayStation 5.