Where in the Witcher timeline do the games take place? I know the order of the books are as follows:

Short Stories
•The Last Wish
•Sword of Destiny

Saga
•Blood of Elves
•Time of Contempt
•Baptism of Fire
•The Swallow's Tower
•Lady of the Lake

I believe the first game takes place after The Last Wish, but before the Witcher saga and before Sword of Destiny.

I haven't read all of the books yet but I was under the impression that the games take place after all of the books. The books end with Geralt's death, but the games pick up with "Actually he was just mostly dead but lost his memory." Do I have that right?

All the games take place after the last book.
btw Geralt being almost dead at the end of the books has nothing to do with his memory loss, the reason for that is mentioned in the games it's because something that happened between the last book and the beginning of the game.

I think this is discussed in the thread for The Witcher and probably in the other Witcher game threads. But, as said above, they take place after the saga with important events referenced from that in the games.

All the games take place after the Saga, after all the books. Also, your list is missing the Season of Storms novel published some two years ago, a prequel taking place directly before The Last Wish. At least mostly before it, the short stories in that are not in chronological order, so it's actually set at some point in-between those.

Also, there's a short story The Road of No Return that was not originally meant to be part of the Witcher series, but sort of turned out to be, it sort of leaked into that world. It describes the meeting of Geralt's parents, or rather characters who turned out to be his parents. It was never collected with the rest of the Witcher stories, only with other miscellanous stories by Sapkowski in a separate tome.

I'm so glad for this thread. The games are on my agenda (already have 1 & 2 but not 3 yet) and I want to try the books too. Now I have titles to look for.

Thanks for all the replies! I don't believe the last two books have been translated/released in English yet, so I've been pulling information from Wikipedia. I don't believe Season of Storms has been released in English, which is most unfortunate.

For anyone reading the books, I do recommend reading them in order. For some reason or other, Last Wish and Blood of Elves were translated to English before Sword of Destiny. So the first time I tried to read Blood of Elves, I couldn't get into it; there were many characters I didn't recognize (Ciri, for instance, who the book opens with). Now that I've read Sword of Destiny, Blood of Elves will definitely make more sense.

Actually, I know a fan translation exists for Lady of the Lake and I believe there is a preliminary one done for Season of Storms but last I saw posted the latter supposedly wasn't very good.

The games kind of ignore the mostly nihilistic ending of the books and take the fake story Ciri was making up to make herself feel better as what happened. Pretty silly overall, but hey. Oh if that spoiled the books for anyone, remember, it's the journey, not the destination. Really, you should read these books if you haven't yet.

Not sure I believe that as Sapkowski himself has been quoted to suggest there could be more to the story. Trying to stay spoiler free...

I would assume that he pretty much considers the games to not exist. He's mentioned that, yes, the games use his characters and his names for countries and cities, but they are not his stories and can thus never be "true" The Witcher stories. If he writes more, they will most likely not take the games into account.

This is a minor spoiler for Season of Storms: there is something of overarcing... flashforward? (I'm not sure what to call it) in that book, a series of interludes set a long time after the "proper" events of the book, and even after the Saga, that tease certain... possibilities regarding Geralt. He's pretty much definately not 100% gone. However, I think it's still pretty much in the air whether Sapkowski uses that to write a sequel. He could write something that happens hundreds of years before Geralt's birth just as well, or go back to writing things unrelated to the Witcher. Sadly, Sapkowski writes even more slowly than R.R.Martin :D Well, not all that unfortunate. Maybe slightly unfortunate. It's not a bad book exactly, it's still way above the average fantasy stuff, but it's not nearly as good as the rest. It really feels like he took some unfinished stories he abandoned years ago, and put them together to form a novel.

I'd still like to read it nonetheless. Maybe one day they'll get around to releasing it in English.