I grew up playing Trading Card Games. I loved the Yu-Gi-Oh TCG and the Pokémon TCG, for most of my formative years. My biggest hurdle though was that I didn’t have very many people to play with. When TCG video games came out, I was excited, hoping that it would solve my problem. However, when I didn’t want to play with other people, it left me very few options. More online TCG’s have come out recently, and they all seem to have the same problem when it comes to a single-player experience.

For a new player, a casual player, or someone who isn’t well-versed in competitive matches, most online TCG’s aren’t very accessible. Using Hearthstone as an example, you can play against AI opponents, but it is difficult to earn in-game currency without playing against other people. With that being said, you can spend real money to buy card packs, but that adds a “Pay to Win” aspect to the game. In my experience, the matchmaking is usually not accurate, so I wind up getting demolished because either A) I don’t have many cards yet, or B) the other player is way more skilled and practiced at the game.

To a lesser extreme, you have The Elder Scrolls Legends, which has a full single-player campaign. The problem though is that its campaign is very short, and afterward, you either have to play against other people to win gold or do arena matches. This is a step in the right direction, and Bethesda has released expansions to the campaign and the game itself, but it still needs a bit of work.

CD Projekt Red did an interesting take on this though, as they not only made Gwent into a multiplayer competitive card game but also made an entire single-player story campaign that is entirely separate. Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales is a full single-player experience, entirely separated from the online multiplayer version of Gwent. It expands the Witcher universe through a campaign that not only has story elements similar to the mainline series but also is played entirely through card-based combat.

I would love to see more developers take this approach with their TCG’s in the future. Some of my fondest memories in terms of video games with card battles are games like Yu-Gi-Oh: The Duelists of the Roses and other games focused on blending stories with TCG combat. Keep in mind, the reason why these experiences were so fun, is that you could build a deck to suit your play style and test it on CPU opponents.

I have no problem with people wanting to play online with friends or compete with strangers. However, I think there is room for a full experience for those of us who don’t want to compete with real people, and just want to experiment with various builds. This discussion could probably edge into the territory of the necessity of single player games in a growing epidemic of multiplayer-only content, but for the sake of brevity, let’s just leave it with this simple takeaway. There is room in the industry for multiplayer and single player experiences.

Sometimes I think with the popularity of games like Fortnite, Apex Legends, and other specifically multiplayer games, we forget that we can have just as much fun in single-player experiences. Not everything needs to be a multiplayer experience, and there are people (like myself) who aren’t particularly interested in playing with strangers all the time. Perhaps the success of Thronebreaker will encourage other developers to make single player TCG’s, or at least more inclusive single-player modes in their existing games.

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