In the continuation of recent trending rubbish posted on this old blog once again (don’t worry, the boredom will set in soon and then it will be at least 6 months before you see anything new) can we tempt you to pull up a chair by the hearth as a wee Scottish announcer says and listen to a tale of misery, woe and some would wonder why? Why indeed?

The 2 is the mental age of the card….

When it comes to the realm of modern gaming, we get used to everything blowing up with a story written on the back of a cigarette packet with voice acting from the bloke who turned up in every video game going. So when this card game turned up out of nowhere over a year ago from the likes of Blizzard Entertainment, it was rather strange. But delve into it and it turns out to be something far more interesting and comical that you would expect.

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft to give it the full title, is a playing card game based on the Warcraft series, but nowhere near up its own arse. Basically Hearthstone takes the form of a match between two drunks / uber serious players who would die if their didn’t craft a golden chicken or whatever and all the while it doesn’t take itself seriously.

Trust me, a card in the deck which is an angry chicken? Yeah, not exactly what you think, is it? There are many many more cards which poke fun at itself and other things. Harrison Jones…the name remind you of anything? Does anyone else think a dragon called Deathwing has daddy issues?

The actual gameplay in Hearthstone is simple enough. It’s just turn-based with players playing cards from their hand to cast naughty spells, put up annoying taunts which you have few options but to hit in order to then hit the other guy, equip some weapons of various usefulness, or summon lovely little minions to do battle. With different little sounds, some of which are quite funny.

The end goal is to reduce the enemy hero’s health to zero before they can do so to you, so you can see them explode and shout various things about yo mama at the screen. But given what has been said above, you will go into battle with a crafted deck but you cannot guarantee what cards are going to end up in your opening hand nor of course will you have a clue what’s going to pop out afterwards, so basically you do the best you can with what you get.

It’s either this, or spending money at Spearmint Rhino…..

With this being free to play, of course, you’re going to wonder how the service will continue to run. Like all good free to play things, there are various options to throw money away, and with the recent expansion released called “Goblins and Gnomes”, we witnessed various YouTube types pissing away around $300 on card packs to try and get every single card, and in my own shame, I made American Express very happy with buying some cards too.

Blizzard basically make it very easy for you to lose money and you don’t feel bad about it until the bailiffs come round to repossess your TV and mother. Of course the option is that you play a lot and provided you play well, you can reap gold to pay for various things that way instead of paying hard cash for anything.

Come on, come on, Daddy’s needs a new King Mukla!

But given the time that the game has been out already, if you truly want to play for free, you’ve got to give up a huge amount of your time to reach the same level that a lot of other players have already reached and ain’t nobody got time for that!

Even if you spent your time on the toilet playing a couple of games while you emptied yourself, it would take quite a few months to get the real good cards that everyone else will feel free to chuck out at you.

As an experiment, it would be rather curious to test how effective you can be by starting from scratch on another realm or with another account. Perhaps it wouldn’t really be any different to how the likes of Angry Birds and the various Candy Crush things go either, but just with a far better production value.

A wall of bullsh*t….

But as the game is easy to play with a mouse or in the case of mobile devices, your finger, you will have to be prepared to lose. A lot. A lot lot x 2000. To the point where you curse everyone you know and possibly go on a real world rampage. The learning curve can be fine to start with when you’re playing the AI, and even then you will lose quite a few times as you build up the pool of basic cards for each class.

But when you start climbing into the public area and the Arena, which you play with random cards against real life beings of unquestionable meh, you will just get so annoyed as it seems at first they always have the answer to any card you play at a moment’s notice.

When you start winning of course, it’s going to feel all the better as you launch the last giant f**k you into your opponents face and you watch it explode, along with a nice sound effect of a crowd cheering your efforts, and just before you had to flush and carry on with your day.

When two cards go to war…..

However, does this then mean that given the amount of time and money that potentially you have to p*ss away on the fun times, does this mean it’s actually not a casual game in the same free to play arena as the aforementioned cash cows of the birds who are annoyed?

Pretty much, this thing from it’s simple beginnings has blossomed into a massive e-sport in of itself, plus you can’t swing a dead cat meme around on Youtube without hitting yet another person who has made a video about their latest game or deck composition.

You could line them all up and basically have years of content at this point, that is if you really did want to give up on life.

Bear in mind as well, this is not single player, not really save for the adventure mode which of course requires money and your first born. The online connection requirement means that should you lose the internet connection, you wave bye bye till you get it back.

But for all the pitfalls and huge amounts required to get the most out of it, know this; this is a bloody good fun game to play, and you never feel like your wasting your time with it. It’s a nice experience which you can have for a few minutes or for a good slog through an arena run to get more stuff.

There are also plenty of stories to be had with your games, and you will tend to remember the good ones a lot more than the bad. If you’ve not had a good go of this, please do so from the link here. Don’t spend any money until you’re sure you actually would stick with it. If you do stick with it, you will not regret it, though your bank balance will shrivel as a result.

Oh by the way, ask someone about the “hearthstone throne” when you’re bored too…..