(Since I don’t play boardgames any more, I make too few posts about games to really justify maintaining a separate blog for them, so I’m moving those posts back here. This blog has more subscribers anyway, though more people tend to randomly wander into the games blog. I’m still maintaining as an archive of course.)

As you can no doubt see, my GPU is still MIA so I’ve latched on to yet another card game to fill my time. I’ve held off playing Hearthstone for the longest time because it’s a mainly online game against other human opponents and I just don’t do multiplayer. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how smooth and drama-free the experience has been. I’ll start with comments on the game design and move on to the online experience in a later post.

As someone who played a lot of Magic: The Gathering back in the day, it’s pretty obvious how much the mechanics of Hearthstone owes to the granddaddy of collectible card games. In fact, I was tempted to hold my nose at how watered down the rules here are. Each player essentially only acts during their own turn, so there are no interrupts and instants. Players choose who their minions attack, so no complex blocking rules. The whole design is overwhelmingly geared towards playing minions and fighting with them, so no discard decks, no truly viable milling decks etc. It seems less complex, and therefore less rich.

But the more I played this, the more I came to appreciate how brilliant it really is. The designers seem guided by two principles, first, to make gameplay flow as smoothly as possible, and two, to prevent players from being frustrated. Eliminating interrupt-type effects is essential for the first goal. Anyone who has played M:TG in any videogame format knows how tedious it gets when the game needs to stop on every phase and on every action to ask you if you want to do something. This ensure that gameplay is fast and games get done quickly which also helps with goal number two.

Players who become frustrated stop playing, which is doubly bad because Blizzard loses customers and the pool of players shrinks, reducing the quality of the experience for everyone else. Players become frustrated for many reasons but one common one from M:TG is when they have to play against deck types like discard and control which prevent the player from being able to do anything meaningful. In Hearthstone, there are no discard strategies and no meaningful counterspells. Players also get frustrated when they don’t get land cards, and the guaranteed mana curve here does away with. Because damage incurred by minions is permanent, you can always kill a big minion by ganging up on it with a lot of smaller ones, even if it is terribly inefficient. Combine this with how each hero has a unique power that can be used without requiring a card and the upshot is that you never feel powerless.

Then there’s how the designers leveraged the fact that this is a videogame to create effects that would be impossible for a game with physical cards. This most obviously allows the use of random effects but also really fun stuff like the priest’s Thoughtsteal. Plus of course, tracking permanent damage on minions, lots of tokens and effects that create new cards would be really tedious if this weren’t a videogame. As embarrassing as it is to admit it, I also really dig the presentation and the golden versions of the cards. The animations when of the golden cards and when the cards are played, the little clips each card had, you can’t get this with cardboard.

Granted, this is still a CCG and it still wants you to spend money on cards. Even if the basic cards you’re given are fairly decent, the power level of some of the rarest cards is totally ridiculous. It’s also disconcerting how the power level of some key cards are so off the charts good that there is little reason to play other cards that would otherwise be perfectly fine. I’m looking at you Sylvanas Windrunner. I do commend Blizzard for allowing the crafting of cards so if there is one card that you really, really can’t do without you can just collect the arcane dust to craft it instead of buying packs endlessly in the hopes of getting it.

Overall this is an amazingly polished, amazingly fun game and I haven’t even dropped a single dime on it yet! Though if I still don’t get back my GPU soon, I think I will end up buying the single-player Curse of Naxxramas adventure.