I had some fancy alliterative sentence featuring the words sol, sole and soul but I gave up on that because the amount of effort to smash all that together just wasn’t worth the effort. That’s the kind of quality assurance I try to deliver in each and every post.

My nights lately have been taken up with more than just watching Hearthstone streams. I’ve been playing SolForge. It’s another free to play online strategy card game. It has some interesting mechanics it brings to bear to the lane based card game genre. I’m not sure if that’s really a genre but for the purposes of this post it will be. Currently in open beta there are plenty of planned features that aren’t in yet, but so far the basic game play seems solid. Play two cards a turn in one of your five lanes and try to damage your opponent and bring their life to zero. One novel mechanic is that your cards each have three levels and after you play a particular card the next level card is placed in your discard pile. The higher level cards feature better stats and abilities than its predecessors and are generally more useful. It creates a nice overall flow to the game since as your cards level up the tension level also increases and hastens the end of the game.

The game has both single player and multiplayer modes and they feel the same. The computer opponent is generally not as good as a human player but it does make a nice easy method to test out new deck ideas before braving the wilds of multiplayer arena. Overall I feel with 300+ cards in the opening set there is good mix of themes and abilities spread across four factions with each faction having its own particular shticks to fit a good variety of play styles. I’m not a huge lane based card game fan, but SolForge offers a few interesting ideas to the genre.

Next up we hunt cards!

-v- out.

I am become Lust, demander of awesome online card gaming… awesomeness.

Let’s start with Hearthstone seeing as how that’s probably the game that I’m most looking forward to playing out of this tantalizing trio of temptation. I have not played the game myself, but I’ve watched/listened to many hours of streams on Twitch TV of others playing. It is basically a clone of the, soon to be retired, World of Warcraft Trading Card Game. Many aspects of WoWTCG have been streamlined and beaten into what is now Hearthstone. Gone are potentially confusing timing rules, the resource row constraints and overall fiddlyness of having to manually track your health and your enemy health. Many of the cards from the original game are even found in Hearthstone so the feeling of familiarity is fairly overwhelming. That could be good or bad depending on your experience with Hearthstone’s cardboard counterpart. You’re left with, what I believe to be, the core game experience which is what makes it something I’m looking forward to playing for myself. In particular I like the look of the Arena, which is a limited draft and its one part of the WoWTCG (and CCG/TCGs in general) I wish I had done a lot more of since I found it to be some of the most fun I’ve had in the game. Speaking as the Midwest Regional A Game of Thrones Draft Champion of 2005 I speak from experience. Game mechanics aside, the interface for Hearthstone seems very inviting and just screams Blizzard/World of Warcraft. Blizzard has taken nothing for granted when it comes to delivering what looks to be another high quality experience to one of my favorite genres of gaming.

Next couple posts I’ll share my views on the other two games which I’ve actually been fortunate enough to play.

-v- out.