I have never played Hearthstone, but I have played some of the games it inspired. Back when its servers were still active, I remember enjoying Duelyst a lot, in particular. Duelyst was an online CCG where players drew creatures, items, and spells and played them to a grid. Essentially, Hearthstone but with spatial positioning. While I don’t often care much about graphics, I found its pixel art style one of its most compelling features.
Recently, partially out of nostalgia for Duelyst, I tried out a similar game called Cards and Castles 2. I stopped playing after only a few minutes because I found the granularity of the combat mechanics to be unbearably high. Just as with Duelyst, each creature has an attack number and a health number. Attacking lowers your target’s health number and also prompts them to counterattack. However, the range of numbers used commonly goes into the forties and fifties. Worse, to see the current attack and health, you have to mouse over a unit, making it very difficult to understand each creature on the board at a glance.
Funnily enough, Battle for Wesnoth has similar combat mechanics and granularity, but I don’t mind it in that game. I think this is due to expectations. Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game often played against the computer, so you expect to consider each move carefully. Cards and Castles 2 presents as a CCG suitable for quick matches against other people, so the amount of processing required to understand each unit is more noticeable. Duelyst, by contrast, keeps most numbers under ten and displays them clearly beneath the creatures.
The moral of the story is that large numbers make it harder for players to grasp the game state because they make the arithmetic harder and less automatic. Another related issue with Cards and Castles 2 is that the abilities of the cards use percentages; “this unit gets 20% damage resistance” or “this unit takes 70% less damage when attacked from the front.” A percent value works for probabilities but serves as a barrier to understanding when it requires actual multiplication. The only percentages that most players can multiply without effort are 50%, multiples of 100%, and (to a lesser degree) 10%. Abilities phrased in terms of small integers are a lot easier to grasp.
In contrast to board game design, I think it is tempting when making computer games to assume that complex calculations carry no cost because the computer is performing them. But this isn’t entirely true – even though the computer can crunch the numbers, the player may still want to understand what they mean.
After my disappointment with Cards and Castles 2, I still felt nostalgic for Duelyst, so I tried another similar game; Stormbound. I was pleasantly surprised. The game takes place on a four-by-five grid where the objective is to damage your opponent by marching a certain number of units to their side of the board. Unlike other tactical CCGs, it is an auto-battler – you cannot issue commands to your pieces once placed; they move forward by themselves every turn.
Another unusual feature of Stormbound is the deck size – 12 cards. Most CCGs have decks of 30-45 cards, but Stormbound instead recycles cards so that you have no discard pile. You can have exactly one copy of each card in your deck and see all of them several times each game. Lucid works the same way, so I am well acquainted with its advantages. Among other things, this makes constructing a deck much less daunting since you only have twelve choices to make and don’t have to worry about how many copies of each card to include.
The most novel feature of Stormbound for me was the stats of its armies. Instead of the typical Attack/Health, each card has Strength/Movement. The first number is how many units you gain when playing the card; the second is their number of immediate moves.
When two opposing armies fight, they both lose an equal number of units such that only one remains. I have not seen combat mechanics of this mutually-destructive sort before; the closest thing I can think of is combat in Neptune’s Pride. My natural inclination before seeing Stormbound was that it wouldn’t work because it eliminates the possibility of one side gaining an advantage through combat – for each unit you destroy, you have to sacrifice one of your own, so what is the point?
I think I understand how Stormbound makes it work, however. Most units created are just a byproduct of effects that occur when you play cards. For example, playing a card might deal one damage to every unit in a line AND create a two-strength army at the origin of the line. Some units do have persistent special effects, but most do not. It doesn’t matter that your units mutually annihilate in combat because the game is all about where you play your cards.
The idea of having one number combine attack and health doesn’t seem quite so radical to me anymore. In Duelyst, combat hurts both parties as well; the only difference is that both might survive. It might be different in a multiplayer game where both suffer to the benefit of the other players; then again, this is already what happens with more than two players.
I don’t recommend Stormbound as a game. It allows players to level up their cards to make them stronger, which means that a player who has spent more money might have a better deck than a new player even with the same cards. But it has does have some unusual mechanics worth checking out that challenge the orthodoxy on digital CCGs.