Overview: You may remember The Witcher as the Polish single-player role playing game that came out to a very positive reception. The Witcher: Versus has almost nothing to do with it, except it uses the game’s high-quality art and animations to make a simple web-based dueling game.

The duels are asynchronous, which is a fancy term that means both sides don’t need to be online at the same time to duel. You choose a similar-leveled player from a list, and then line up your attacks and defenses in sequence. There are three types of attacks matched with three types of defense. If you guess your opponent’s strategy correctly, you will block his attacks with the matching defenses and slip your own past him. If not, you’ll get to watch your character pounded into the ground with beautifully fluid animations.

If you get a challenge, once you’ve chosen your strategy the duel will play out and you’ll get your results. If you made the challenge, you’ll have to wait until your opponent gets around to responding to get any rewards. There is a “Ready to Fight!” button you can click that turns on a blinking red light next to your character name in the list – if you look for those, you’re more likely to find someone who will respond quickly.

Once you reach level 5, you can buy weapons and items that unlock stronger skills that often have special effects. There are still only the three possible types, but the strategy becomes a little more complex. Managing the Fury and Elements points the weapons and items give you is also another layer of complexity – different skills require different amounts of those two stats, but you can’t carry more than one weapon and one item at a time, so you have to decide how to specialize.

You can only fight players in your area in the game world – for a fee, you can travel to different areas on the map to fight new people. Travel itself is hazardous, takes real time, and can result in random encounters with positive – or negative – outcomes. You can also accept quests that take you from place to place and give you solid rewards of a variety of types. Some travel encounters and quests require combat, some are resolved automatically. You cannot fight duels, purchase items, or improve your skill while traveling, so make your preparations ahead of time!

Encounters when traveling are one of the ways you can acquire Mandrake without paying real money for it – Mandrake is used to purchase various potions that do things like give you more gold or experience per fight or improve your chances in travel or sieges. The Mandrake items do not give you more direct power in one-on-one fights, although certainly leveling faster and having more money can be an indirect advantage. Creating your own guild also costs 100 Mandrake.

The hardest part about The Witcher: Versus is remembering to come back to it after the initial thrill wears off. You can change your settings to have the game send you an email when your challenges are accepted or when someone sends you a new one – it’s probably the best way to stay engaged. It’s a neat game with pretty graphics, particularly on a high-resolution monitor, and it attracts an international audience – you’ll find many Eurpean, particularly Polish, players in the chat rooms. If you like dueling games, give it a shot – the rock-paper-scissors strategy is definitely worth a try, and the rest of the game is solid enough to support it.