Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft (iOS)

A good looking CCG based on WoW themes.

Hearthstone is a 1v1 card game of heroes, minions, secrets (i.e. traps), and spells where players aim to outlive their opponent in direct combat.

Although Hearthstone is a simple and approachable game, it is complicated to truly master. (If handed to a non-gamer they could play... they'd just lose... probably ~_^) There are nine different heroes, each with their own strategies, and hundreds of cards to choose from when building decks. Most cards belong to a shared pool usable by all heroes, however each hero has their own special ability and unique cards.

While all card games of this sort involve some luck of the draw (both in battles and booster packs), creating a powerful deck is an important part of the strategy. Do you want to focus on rushing lots of minions? Drawing lots of cards? Buffing powerful minions? Blasting your opponent with spells? Or building an iron curtain defense? With such a large variety of cards and heroes there are many different gameplay strategies available.

Despite all its charms, Hearthstone players have made complaints online about the use of grinding and paywalls, lack of social elements, and lack of battle variety.

While paywalls and grinding through daily quests are seemingly obligatory features in this genre, they can alienate players when designed poorly. Unfortunately, Hearthstone handles them in an average (i.e. somewhat clumsy) fashion making daily quests tedious and time consuming chores.

Hearthstone completely lacks any community building content, such as chat, guilds, auctions, and group battles. The PvP battles have so little social interaction your opponents could be replaced with AI bots of varying difficulty and none would be the wiser.

Hearthstone battles always use the same 1v1 format. Other games have more variety, such as larger PvP battles (2v2 or 4v4), Themed Dungeons (PvE with story elements), Boss Battles (PvE with a group of players), and Raid Bosses (1v1 PvE where players contribute to a joint goal).

Blizzard can't (and shouldn't) implement every player suggestion, but hopefully they are watching the interwebs closely and looking for meaningful ways to improve the base game. Hearthstone is a solid 1v1 CCG, but it hasn't yet strayed far from 'minimum viable product' for the genre.

Overall, Blizzard really nailed the core game design and Hearthstone could translate nicely into a printed card game.

Summary:

• + complex deck creation
• + good balance of skill & luck
• + large variety of cards
• + high quality artwork
• • quickly becomes time consuming
• - paywalls and grinding
• - lack of battle variety
• - lack of social elements

Hearthstone is also available on PC & Mac according to the official website.