When Blizzard turned their hand to turn-based tabletop-style gaming, many fans were curious as to how it would all turn out. Thankfully they took a rather substantial wedge of influence from Magic: The Gathering's book, and turned in a superbly animated free-to-play that revels in drawing you in with a vibrant colour palette, before reminding you under the hood there's enough going on to last for years of strategic domination. If you're unfamiliar with the likes of Magic, you basically cultivate a deck of cards comprised of creatures that have all sorts of abilities that can play off or with each other. MtG throws in all manner of spells, armour-buffs and other "A-ha! I was waiting for you to do that!"-style tactics, but Hearthstone streams the lot of it down to focus almost entirely on what your creatures are capable of, with a special move coming from whoever you're playing as shaking things up too. Booster packs are available to be bought if you're into that sort of thing - and it must be said the 'unwrapping' animation is pretty sweet too - but what's on offer as the free base game is still staggering, especially when you look at titles like Destiny and Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes and consider what fans paid for versus what they got. If any one of the hundreds of bones in your body has the slightest fibre of a tactician inside, give this a whirl.
