There was a period of time in the last few years when my partner and his friends got really, really into . One of them was rated top 300 in the world at some point, which means nothing to me but was a point of celebratio🍸n for them, so I’m happy for them. Gwent is a free-to-play digital CCG that was originally playable in and was later developed to be a standalone game that made its way into esports.
I didn’t take to Gwent. I played a couple of rounds in The Witcher 3, but didn’t find it particularly compelling, and the rules felt a little too abstruse for me to care about getting better at it. Generally, ꦡI don’t find myself getting sucked into games within games🦋 – I’m more interested in what story a game has to tell than losing hours to playing cards with a game’s characters. Saltsea Chronicles got my ass with Spoils, though.
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I’m introduced to Spoils in a small tavern on the first island my crew finds itself on. I pop in to talk to someone who might be able to get my shiౠp free fro🎃m the locks keeping it on the island, and see an icon in the corner indicating I can play a game. Sure, I think, I’ll bite. That was a mistake, because I ended up playing for a whole hour, time which I probably should have been putting into the game proper so I could finish my review.
Spoils is a fairly simple game. You play in teams of two, with teamm🦩ates sitting across from each other. For each ‘trick’, everybody plays a card. The first card played sets the lead suit, and everybody has to play a card in that suit as long as they have one. If not, they can play any card. The highest-ranked card of the lead suit wins the trick, unless someone plays a card of the sweeper suit – that’s bid for each round by both teams, and the highest-ranked card of a sweeper suit will always win. Each card has a point value, and the points of the winning card go to the losing team, while the points of the remaining cards go to the winning team. Whichever team has the highest total score after three rounds wins the game.
It sounds fairly simple, but it’s deceptively difficult. I absolutely destroyed my opponents in one round, only to find out about the hoarding rule – accumulate 100 or more points in a round, and you’re considered to be hoarding points. You’ll then score 0 and your opponents score 100 points. I thought I was a genius, decimating my opponents without giving them a chance to bounce back, ♑only to find out they’d won the round. It forces you to be𓆉 extra strategic about how you distribute points between you and your opponents and even gives you a last-ditch method to win if you’re getting destroyed: give away all your points.
I got the impression I only had one chance to beat my🥂 opponents, and while I didn’t know if it would have any impact on my story, I was determined to win. Spoils reminds me of the kind of card games I play at house parties, when everybody&rsquo🍸;s too drunk to play Poker, or in my case, refuses to learn how to play Poker. It’s easy to pick up but hard to master, and requires enough strategic thinking that winning feels satisfying without making you feel like you’re playing 8D chess. I might get really, really good at Spoils, and then start teaching it to people just so we can play it whenever. And, of course, I intend to always win. I’m never going to get competitive like my friends did with Gwent, but I love that Spoils is a game that I can easily bring outside of Saltsea Chronicles. And I love that I want to play it outside of the game at all.