Crown Gambit is a tactical, narrative-heavy card game made by Wild Wits, published by Playdigious Originals. It launched as a Kickstarter campaign back in 2023, and now the full game is here. It’s always wonderful to see a successful Kickstarter campaign come to fruition, and I was especially excited to finally dive into this gritty fantasy world and see how the team’s vision translated into the full release.

In Crown Gambit, you take control of three new paladins, Aliza, Hael and Rollo, as they make their way through the turbulent kingdom of Meodred. The trio begin as muscle to help protect the king and his youngest son on a strange journey, but what should have been an easy, harmless job completely spirals out of control. Aliza, Hael and Rollo now need to navigate their way through utter political turmoil, dealing with whatever chaos comes their way while shaping the fate of the city.

Is this your card?

The core of Crown Gambit lies in its card-based combat. Battles play out on a grid, where you and your enemies fight until all enemies or all three paladins are dead. The grid itself varies in size, but is typically quite small, encouraging careful movement and effective use of the space. While the visuals of the grid change each combat, I felt quite bored with it mechanically after a while, wishing that it had some tiles that added a gameplay element, perhaps mirroring Fire Emblem’s unique terrain tiles.

Combat bounces between your turn and the enemy’s turn, where you spend action points on four options: moving, performing a simple attack, offering encouragement, or playing a skill card. Each paladin or enemy has a set number of personal action points to spend each round, which can be used in any order. It’s when you spend these points on skill cards that the real fun begins, as these cards unlock unique, powerful abilities for your paladins.

One of the most intriguing mechanics, both in combat and outside of combat, is Ancestral Grace. In the lore of Crown Gambit, paladins carry weapons that allow them to wield divine might. In combat, this means each card has a heightened face that can be used instead of the base card. For example, Aliza’s Bloodletting card, which normally deals 9 damage, can turn into Ruz Blade with Ancestral Grace, which does a massive 21 points of damage. It’s incredibly easy to use Ancestral Grace to completely turn the tide of combat and decimate enemies, but it comes at a cost (unless you have a specific buff that negates it). Each invocation of Ancestral Grace removes the base card from the deck, banning it from the rest of the fight. Using a heightened card too early may give you a strong start, but you need to weigh the cost and judge whether you’ll need it later. Using Ancestral Grace also raises that paladin’s ancestral influence gauge, which has out-of-combat ramifications I’ll discuss later…

Combat difficulty really depended on whether I relied on heightened cards. Without using them, fights were quite difficult. You have to take care of your paladins, especially considering they don’t regain their HP or armour after each fight. When the paladins fall in battle, you can’t revive them, so you have to play carefully. But, with heightened cards, difficult fights were made significantly less so. They’re just so powerful and can make a hard fight easy very quickly. It was an interesting challenge not to use them. While I don’t think the consequences for using heightened cards, both in and out of combat, were a big enough deterrent to stop me from using them, I found that making the conscious choice to not overuse them does lead to more engaging combat.

Game of Crowns

The narrative of Crown Gambit is impressively well thought out, weaving together a tale of rival houses, personal motives and ambition for the crown. There’s a lot to take in, especially when you get introduced to many different characters, houses and alliances. 

The tone of the writing and the general world Crown Gambit lives in capture that dark fantasy atmosphere perfectly. It honestly felt like something straight out of Game of Thrones, with all the rival houses, betrayals, and dangerous politics. The choices you make along the way, both in dialogue and in choosing what path to take, felt meaningful. Not everything changed the story drastically, but even so, I encountered plenty of moments where I uncovered hidden storylines. I know there was just as much that I missed on my first playthrough, too. There’s definitely replayability here; your choices can lead to different paths and outcomes, making multiple playthroughs worthwhile.

While I tried to keep my paladins under control, I loved Aliza’s heightened cards and leaned on them heavily in combat. She has a passive that negates enemy armour, which made it too tempting not to heighten her attacks. So, after maxing out her gauge, there was a moment where she really, really lost control. My bad. She snapped, and it led to the death of an important NPC. While this death didn’t stop me from completing the game, it gave me this unique, interesting scene. It was such a standout moment, where a gameplay mechanic that I failed to balance combined its consequences perfectly with the narrative. It definitely makes me wonder how the scene would go otherwise, and what other scenes could be different based on my gauge level. 

The narrative, especially all the characters from different factions, can definitely feel overwhelming to keep track of, but thankfully, there’s an excellent tool offered to help. The in-game encyclopaedia lets you look up different characters, groups, factions, houses and more at any given time. You can even click on a name during dialogue to jump straight to their entry. It even has associated entries tied to character, making it easy to get a handle on the connections between characters. On top of all that, there’s also a detailed logbook that records the major events of the three acts, making it easy to pick up where you left off after a break.

While the gameplay is fun and the narrative is engaging, you have to give it to the art direction in Crown Gambit. It’s easily its biggest strength. Every inch of the world is captured carefully, with an overall design that perfectly fits the harsh world while still being visually interesting and appealing. The art is gorgeous. The character designs are a standout, with each paladin and NPC brought to life with expressive portraits that show up in dialogue that give real charm to the characters. The use of colour, too, is wonderful. Each character has their own signature colour that is reflected in their portrait and dialogue box. You can easily connect characters in the same house or faction together this way.

The UI also deserves just as much praise. Often stylised to complement the medieval theme, with ornate borders on the dialogue boxes, intricate arches on the level-up pop-up, and an old satchel design that contains your cards and weapons. The whole experience reminded me of the first time I played Persona 5, where I spent ages just tabbing through menus to look at the artwork. It’s truly that good.

All of this is paired with wonderful sound design: haunting melodies and Gregorian chants, to name a few. The sound effects are clean and satisfying for both the world and the UI. Genuinely, the artistry is so impressive, and the game is easy to get lost in because of it. It’s such a wonderful experience.