Over the weekend Blizzard announced a new free-to-play game known as Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. It’s a digital collectible card game for the PC, Mac, and iPad that’s meant for people to be able to jump right in and start playing within 5 minutes. Blizzard’s tagline for the game is “Deceptively simple. Insanely fun.”
Each deck is based around one of the nine World of Warcraft classes, where some cards are available for use for every class, while other cards are limited for use to a single class. There are multiple ways to get new cards. You can win new cards from defeating opponents, or you can purchase card packs of 5 for about a dollar. You can even “disenchant” cards you have multiples of and turn them into Arcane Dust, which you can use to create new cards.
There are three modes of play in this game. There’s your standard play, a practice mode, and a third mode called “The Forge”, where each player is given a choice of three cards, and choose which card they want in their deck. They keep choosing cards like this until there deck is built, and should provide a level playing field. At this time, there is no release date for the game, but you can sign up for the beta here, which will be starting this summer.