The Witcher is one of the world’s most popular dark fantasy franchises, spanning books, video games, movies, multiple television series, and more. Netflix series The Witcher has become one of the most-watched shows on the streaming service, and Netflix has plans to continue expanding the universe.

With the recent release of The Witcher season 3, the franchise is front and center on many people’s minds right now. You might be curious about reading the book series that started it all by Andrzej Sapkowski or checking out the acclaimed video games from CD Projekt Red.

It will be a long time before The Witcher season 4 is released, so if you’re a diehard fan of the franchise, you’ve got plenty of time to check out everything there is to enjoy about this series before new episodes drop.

Here’s everything you need to know about The Witcher games and how to play them.

You’ll want to start with CD Projekt Red’s trilogy, which includes The Witcher, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, and The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt. All three games are roleplaying games and were well-received upon release, with The Witcher 3 becoming the most popular and beloved of the three.

Unfortunately, playing the first two games in the trilogy is hard these days. Neither has been remastered for modern consoles, and if you do have a PC, you might be turned off by the clunky gameplay and dated mechanics. Mods can significantly improve your experience if you have access to them.

For everyone else, I recommend at least watching a story recap of the first two games before you venture into The Witcher 3.

Luckily, The Witcher 3 provides tons of lore and worldbuilding, so you don’t need to have played the first two games, but it will help to have a general idea of their storylines beforehand. Book readers will also have a headstart, though the games veer off from the source material to provide new, intriguing storylines and characters.

CD Projekt Red is also working on an official remake of the first game, but we probably won’t see it released until 2025 at the earliest. Now is a great time to start with the third game because CD Projekt Red recently released a new and improved next-gen update for the PS5, which looks fantastic!

Outside the main trilogy, there are some fun, smaller-scale games you can pick up if you’re not ready to be done with The Witcher universe.

A couple of other live-service games were released, but their servers have since been shut down. CD Projekt Red will continue supporting Gwent: The Witcher Card Game until the end of the year. You’ll still be able to play the game, but new content won’t be added after that. There’s more information about how the game will be managed moving forward here.

Apart from the upcoming remake of the first game, CD Projekt Red has also announced at least two more entries in The Witcher franchise!

One is a mainline game codenamed Project Polaris, and the other is a spinoff known only as Project Sirius. The bad news is that we probably won’t see either game released anytime soon, but here’s what we know about them.