Hearthstone
- Developer: Blizzard
- Release Date: March 11, 2014
- Genre: Card/Strategy
Hearthstone is a classic free game that uses characters and lore from the World of Warcraft series to create unique cards for you to collect. Each player chooses a unique WoW hero class like Paladin, Mage, or Demon Hunter and builds a deck of themed cards. Those include weapons, spells, and minions that are used to battle against opponents in a turn-based 1v1 duel.
At the start of every turn, you draw one card from the deck and then decide how to play with the cards you have drawn, or use your unique hero power. Unlike some CCGs, Mana ramps up automatically to streamline the gameplay. Your goal is to whittle the enemy’s health down to zero, while neutralizing their own threats to your health. However, this is much simpler said than done, as the strategy in Hearthstone can get extremely complex with the number of cards, abilities, and synergies at play. As Blizzard boasts, it’s easy to learn and difficult to master. Fortunately, there’s a variety of modes to test your skills, including an auto-battler called Battlegrounds, Tavern Brawl where special rules are at play, and a single-player mode that features CPUs as opponents.
As Hearthstone has been going strong for more than a decade now, Blizzard has made strides in how it on-boards new players and catches them up to speed. Every year the Core Set of cards rotates, giving a collection of cards to new players that the expansions build on. There are also giveaways of readymade decks and “catch-up packs” available for new or lapsed players, so it’s easy enough to jump in.
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