Hearthstone is the one of the newest games being developed by Blizzard. Currently it is still in beta testing, so if you want to play it you need to have a battle.net account and apply to be accepted to the beta test. It seems like it is fairly easy to get into the beta if you are interested. When I applied for beta access to Hearthstone it only took about 2 weeks for me to receive a reply that I was accepted. Hearthstone is a fairly easy game to setup and install since you just download the game right off the battle.net site. It is a small game in size at just under 2gb, but large in gameplay.
Hearthstone is a game based off of their TCG (trading card game) that is set in the universe of their very popular World of Warcraft. The premise is very simple with two people (or 1 person against a computer opponent) that face off against each other with two decks to deal damage to the opponent and reduce their health to 0. Each player selects the type of deck they play based upon 1 of 9 different hero classes. The 9 different classes are druid, hunter, mage, paladin, priest, rogue, shaman, warlock, and warrior. Each hero has a different set of abilities and spells that are available for use in their decks as well as a unique ability that each hero can use at any time. Each player starts with 30 health,1 mana, and 30 cards in their deck.
On the first turn depending on whether you go first or second you draw 3 or 4 cards (second turn gets 4) and draw one additional card each turn until the end of the game. You also start off with 1 mana and earn 1 additional mana each subsequent turn up to a maximum of 10. Your mana is used to "pay" the cost of the cards in your hand so that they can be put in play, the more powerful the card the more mana it will cost. As an example say on turn 5 (you will have 5 mana) you could play 1 card with a cost of 5 mana or 2 cards one 2 mana and one 3 mana. Spending your mana like this will deplete your mana to 0 till the end of the turn. At the beginning of turn 6 you will gain 1 additional total mana and it will refill. There are two basic types of cards that use up your mana, minions and spells. Minions come into play and remain in play until the end of the game or they are killed. Minions have a printed value of attack and life and typically can attack once per turn. Minions are good to have because they can attack the enemy hero multiple times as long as they are alive or they can also become the first line of defense to stop incoming physical damage to your hero. Spells can do a large variety of thing such as buff heroes and minions, debuff heroes and minons, deal damage or heal heroes and minions. Damage dealing spells are useful because they can bypass minions that protect your hero and attack them directly.
Depending on what you want to do with your deck and what hero you play you can build decks in numerous ways. There are hundreds of cards to choose from (you don't start off with this many but will accrue more as you play) which make the number of combinations almost endless for deck construction. Just as a few examples you can make decks focused on buffing minions, offensive spells, healing decks, minion swarming, aggro decks (defensive), or control decks (debuffs and counters) and many more. You start off with 9 preset decks for each hero type and as you play and level up the different heroes you get 20 bonus starting cards for each class. After you collect enough cards you can go into your card collection and build your own custom decks for each class. As you play against other people and gain more levels and experience you will occasionally be rewarded with coins that you can use to purchase "packs" of 5 cards to further expand your collection. Along with leveling up you will get quests to accomplish and each quest you complete will reward you with more coins that you can also use to purchase additional packs of cards. If you are impatient you always have the option to spend real money to get packs of cards faster. There is also a disenchanting system to turn extra cards that you don't use into arcane dust. This arcane dust can then be saved up and used to craft specific cards to help progress your growing card collection.This game to me was a very easy game to pick up and learn. I also liked it because there are so many variations of decks you can construct and that you could encounter playing other people. It can suck you in for hours or you can hop on and and play one game in 15 minutes for a quick bit of casual entertainment. And even though this game is a very quick to pick up the learning curve is almost infinite with how many hundreds of cards there are and the endless possibilities of constructing decks. Even after very many games you can run into someone with a deck style you have never seen before and learn something new. Having this much of a learning curve really helps with keeping the game interesting even well into the "end game". For additional detailed information about Hearthstone please check out this page http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/forum/topic/9882328198.
Overall I found the game to be great fun and think it will have a bright future once it is released. I am not 100% sure but I do believe once it is released it will be free to play. I think that Blizzard will be looking to make money off of the micro transactions from the purchases of additional card packs in game. I also think that Hearthstone would be an excellent candidate for a smartphone or tablet port on the Google Play or iTunes market places. With the ease of use and the mouse only nature of the game play, which will be very easy to use on a touch screen, I think they are setting it up to be an easy crossover into the mobile gaming market.
As a side note to Hearthstone it seems that Blizzard is going to a battle.net launcher system. If you have played any of the newer games from blizzard like Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, or WoW you will be familiar with how each of them has it's own laucher that takes care of making sure the game is up to date and launching the game. The new battle.net laucher is an all in one laucher that takes care of all the games that blizzard produces in one consolidated program. If you are familiar with how Steam works it is very similar with the exception that battle.net will only support Blizzard games. Who knows though maybe in the future Blizzard will expand to offer games from 3rd parties as well through their battle.net system to become more like Steam as an online distributor of games.
