A hundred-million people around the world are playing Hearthstone, here’s why you should

Although the characters and classes in the game derive from Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (WoW), the gameplay can be traced back to the physical trading card game Magic: The Gathering of the nineties. Even the name Hearthstone suggests a similar coming together of kindred spirits around a cozy meeting place of sorts.

While the popularity of WoW itself has declined in recent years, Hearthstone has become extremely popular as a time-killer for casual players, but also as a professional e-sport. The World Championship boasts a total purse of one million dollars, and this makes it possible for many players to do this full time as professional e-sporters. Smaller local tournaments with good prize money also make it possible for many South African players to play this game very seriously on a semi-professional level.

How Does it Work?

It is a one-on-one game and you take turns playing your cards. You start with a health of 30, and the idea is to reduce your opponent’s health to zero, killing him or her and winning the game. You choose a class or character — warrior, mage, shaman, demon hunter, hunter, rogue, priest, paladin, warlock or druid — and build a deck consisting of class-specific and class neutral cards. There are 30 cards in a deck and in each game cards are drawn randomly.

A great thing is that you can use the same deck and card collection across devices — PC, laptop, tablet, or phone. You create one free account on Battle.net, and off you go. Just follow the prompts to install and play from there. There are also a gazillion videos on YouTube from how to start, to how to build decks. You can also watch professional tournaments that are often live-streamed.

It is a truly “free” game and the “pay to win” complaint is not relevant for Hearthstone. Of course, you can pay real money for card packs, but I have spent years playing with some success without spending a cent. If you do accumulate cards by buying them, it can, however, become very expensive very quickly.

Why so Popular?

The best way to find out whether you will like it, is to try it. At first the idea of playing against an actual person somewhere on the other side of the planet intimidated me. It seemed so confrontational. However, you get pitted against players with the same rank and level as yourself, so you and your opponent are evenly matched.
Playing against an actual person in real-time, somehow makes the game more intimate, and at the end of the game you feel that you have learned something about your opponent. By looking at their name/Avatar, you can usually ascertain the nationality of a player.

You can play this game on your own terms. It can be a 10 to 20-minute time killer, or it can become a fight to the death. In the case of the latter, winning can be sweet indeed, and losing leaves you bitter and twisted — for a few moments at least! That is part of the attraction of Hearthstone.

The game is very user-friendly and even older phones from about Samsung S3 should cope easily. Data usage is not too bad and I have rarely found a bug in the game. I can wholeheartedly recommend Hearthstone as a game that ticks most of the boxes and can provide hours of entertainment.