Hearthstone

[Revolver]

Not sure if any of you played Warcraft but this is now in open beta. It's a card game very loosely in the Might & Magic mould but a lot simpler. Surprisingly addictive and free to play. You just need a battlenet account.

9 classes with their own hero power and class cards that complimented by neutral cards (available to all classes) you make a deck of 30. Each card costs between 1-10 mana to "cast" and depending on who goes first you start the game with 3 or 4 cards and 1 mana. You gain 1 mana per round up to a maxiumu of 10. It's 1v1 with both heroes starting on 30hp. Aim of the game is to drop your opponent to 0hp before they drop you.

It's too hard to explain but incredibly simple. Games only take 15 mins at max so it's pretty handy. Give it a download and run through the tutorial. You don't need to know Warcraft to play but obviously it helps with some spell recognition etc if you did. Joe/Shrike/DemonWrath plays it fine and he didn't play WoW.

[skeletor]

Play a similar sounding game on my phone called Tyrants Unleashed as you can only play while you have energy which replenishes at 1pt per minute so you can play for around 5 minutes then wait 3 hours before you can go again (unless you pay for expensive add-ons).

[Revolver]

Play a similar sounding game on my phone called Tyrants Unleashed as you can only play while you have energy which replenishes at 1pt per minute so you can play for around 5 minutes then wait 3 hours before you can go again (unless you pay for expensive add-ons).

Doesn't work like that. It's literally a one off game vs an opponent.

There are different play modes.

Arena - This costs Gold to enter, I think 150G. You choose from one of three random classes and create a deck on the spot from random cards (so you can end up using legendaries even if you don't own them) then you go into a series type thing. In that you can win 9 (i think) or lose 3, whichever happens first your run ends. At the end of the run you get gold, cards, packs of cards of arcane dust.

Practice - Play against AI (normal or expert). You unlock the classes at the start of the game by beating them in AI. You start with Mage for free from tutorial then beat the other classes. Then the idea is you unlock their basic cards (20 in total) by levelling up to lvl 10 in each character. That only takes a few games.

Play - Normal and ranked modes. This is where you can use your own custom decks to fight an equal level opponent in match making.

Gold is earny through daily q's which are simple things like "win 3 games" or "win 2 games with rogue or druid". They earn you about 40G each. As long as you win a few games in an arena run you nearly always break even. Personally I just play normals at the moment. Still haven't unlocked all the basic cards for Paladin and Shaman so doing that against AI too.

The only thing real money is used for is arena entry and packs of cards. 6 cards in a pack, at least one rare or better. Packs are £2.99 each I think, 3 for £6.99 and so on. I bought the £6.99 bundle just because you got a free rare (gimmicky, and ultimately useless) card for helping test the shop in Beta. I got lucky and ended up with quite a few rare cards too. So happy days.

If you get duplicate cards or cards that are useless to you, you disenchant them into arcane dust which you then build up and can create cards of your own choosing. Ranging from as little as 40 dust up to 1000's for rare cards. Idea being that you can create a deck to your tasting without relying completely on luck.

All in all, its completely free. But you can spend cash to earn things quicker. Even then though you can't guarantee what you get in card packs. Seems to me that it's worth buying a couple of packs towards the start a bit like Pokemon and Merlin football stickers, but as your colection grows the packs become more and more useless as you only need rarer and rarer cards.

It's the variation that makes it fun. And it's a different pace. Me and Joe have had a few games and like he said, it makes a difference to play something where you can chill out, have a laugh about something and not get all ragey about it. If you play competetive or arena you really have to pay attention because if you play a few cards wrong it can literally turn a game and more than once I've kicked myself for screwing up. But then you just play again and it doesn't make any difference.

Fuck me that was long.

[skeletor]

To be honest other than recharging energy before you can play it sounds very similar to Tyrants Unleashed.

You get cards from completing AI missions (you can replay missions and they get harder and harder, up to 10 levels) and you get gold for winning.

Gold has only 1 real purpose (can do a few other things but they're not important) which is to buy cards. Buying a single card costs 100G.

Cards come in different rarities, but can be upgraded through salvage points which are gained either through salvaging cards you buy/win (rarer cards give more points but you're more likely to keep those) or by beating other players (you are playing against their deck of cards but their cards are played by AI).

There are also fusion cards where you can fuse 2 or 3 cards together to create a better single card. Takes a long time to get salvage points though so it's quite slow going. You can only do 5 human battles and it's 5 mins until you can play again. So 5 matches every 25 mins.

The missions are worth different amounts of energy, harder ones use more energy. You have 250 energy and gain 1 energy per minute although you can upgrade the total energy for £££.

There are also artifacts which can be won randomly in missions or stolen off people in battles, but it also means if you have artifacts other people can steal yours. But once you have had one of your artifacts stolen, no one can battle you for another 12 hours.

The artifacts can be used to get selective cards. So 4 artifacts of a certain class will get you a low rarity card of that class, 6 artifacts will get your a medium/high rarity, 8 artifacts will get you a medium/high/ultra rare card. Getting 6 artifacts is a pain let alone getting 8.

They also roll out random extra missions which are only available for a certain time frame which can allow you to get some decent rewards but I don't know how often they come along as I haven't had the game for long.

May have a look at Hearthstone later on if I remember.

[skeletor]

I'm shit at this game...

Edit: Really really shit.

[Revolver]

Lol, you'll have to add me. It's easy really. Just a few things to get used to I guess!

[skeletor]

I put in your gmail address if that's the one you used.

Went through the tutorial missions thinking "this is piss easy". Then all the others have been a pain. I've unlocked the Hunter and that's it.

[skeletor]

Battle.net is ridiculous. Wouldn't let me login because my password was wrong so I went through reset password (which is a needlessly long process), only to tell me that I can't use the same password as I currently have even though that didn't work when I tried to login using it.