This Witcher mod turns all your fights into games of Gwent

I know more than a few people for whom The Witcher 3's world was a sort of fantasy-themed purgatory between heavenly card games. They'd ignore monster hunting, sorceress seduction and the looming threat of interdimensional elf Nazis just to become an itinerant Gwent pro. The Hearts of Card mod (as spotted by Kotaku) has been made for these people.

It's a simple change, but a big one - every time a sword swing connects with an enemy, it triggers a game of Gwent. Win it, and every enemy nearby gets insta-killed by sheer force of your card prowess. Lose it and Geralt falls down dead, probably with shame. Here's how it looks works, in video form:

The mod's creator reckons you can play through the entire campaign with no problems using the mod, and even accounts for the game's general difficulty curve - the higher the enemy's level, and the higher the difficulty level you've chosen, the better their decks become.

Quite apart from anything else, there's something quite appealing about the idea of walking into the middle of the Wild Hunt's ship, challenging a dog to a game of Gwent and killing all the game's hardest enemies as a result. I'm in.

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Joe Skrebels
Joe first fell in love with games when a copy of The Lion King on SNES became his stepfather in 1994. When the cartridge left his mother in 2001, he turned to his priest - a limited edition crystal Xbox - for guidance. And now he's here.