Hearthstone
A fantasy card game that’s welcoming to everyone
Hearthstone is a digital collectible card game for Mac and iPad that’s not just friendly and accessible, but free to play (in a good way).
The idea is that you choose one of nine ‘heroes’ and build a deck – composed of minions to fight for you, magical spells and weapons – of 30 cards around them, and go head-to-head against an opponent’s deck. You win a game by eliminating all of your opponent’s hero’s health points, by attacking them either directly or with minions.
Every card costs ‘mana’ to play – though when you play minions, they sit on the board, facing your opponent’s minions, and can attack on every turn, unless they die. The amount of mana you can spend increases every turn, so games are always building towards dramatic conclusions – by then end, you could potentially play two or three cards on one turn that totally change the course of the game. With almost 400 cards to build your deck from, there’s good freedom to build strategies. You can try to overwhelm with lots of weaker minions, or just play to contain your opponent for a while before unleashing the big guns later on. You could rely on directly attacking with spells, or on turning your opponent’s minions against them. At first, it’s hard to envision these strategies, but one of the great things about Hearthstone is that losing is… okay. Sometimes you just lose to bad luck in the draw of the cards, which is frustrating, but when you’re well beaten, analysing how they did it and being inspired to try a similar tactic is fun in itself.
It’s not always so simple, though. Sometimes, you get beaten by better cards that aren’t available to you yet. You start with some, but you need to buy new packs using either won gold or real cash, or by winning them in the Arena, a game mode
You can overwhelm with minions, or play to contain your opponent for a while before unleashing the big guns
that mixes things up by forcing you to build a deck from a random selection of cards and fight others who’ve done the same. You can also ‘craft’ any card from the game you want by turning your other cards into ‘dust’. You don’t need to spend any actual money to have fun with Hearthstone, but you might win more at the higher levels if you do.
Though most Hearthstone games are played online, you don’t need to worry about abuse – interaction is limited to pre-defined ‘emotes’, which are almost entirely positive. However, the online nature has disadvantages: you must be online to play at all, even against the AI, and though battles are turn-based, you have to play a whole game in one go. These are a shame, because asynchronous games and offline play would suit playing, on the iPad especially. Matt Bolton