Gwent update launches Ale Festival event and makes cards more flexible

The latest update to the Witcher-based competitive card game Gwent lifts the curtain on the game's first holiday event, the Mahakam Ale Festival, and makes more than 40 cards in the game 'agile', which means they can be placed on any row on the game board.

The boozy festival comprises three new single-player challenges that you complete to earn experience points. There's event-specific goodies up for grabs if you're successful, including a new avatar, frame and title, and it lasts until the ale runs dry on October 12.

Perhaps more interesting, though, are the gameplay changes that the update introduces. It's called the 'Agile Update' for a reason: it makes more than 40 cards agile. It should makes decks more flexible and allow for more imaginative tactical decisions but, as some players in the forums have pointed out, it somewhat reduces the importance of the row mechanic and potentially makes units that are locked to one row less viable. Let's wait and see how it affects the way people play.

The update also changes the strength of certain cards, primarily in Northern Realms decks. You can read the full patch notes to see how it will affect you. There's the usual bug squishing too, including fixing an error where the game would freeze when an opponent resurrected or consumed a card in a Graveyard while it was being previewed by the player.

What do you make of the changes?

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.