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Physical Hearthstone Knockoff Not As Good As The Real (Virtual) Thing
Blizzard's free-to-play collectible card game may have over 20 million players, but a Chinese online retailer is giving gamers a real-life (and totally illegal) alternative.
Games In Asia's Thomas Price has a full breakdown of the boxed set, which includes two sets of every class-specific card and four copies of every basic and legendary card. The game also comes with a variety of tokens to designate status effects, and counters to keep track of minions' changing health and attack stats. It probably goes without saying, but the physical adaptation is not officially licensed or endorsed by Blizzard.
Price says that while the physical card game is relatively faithful to the digital game (despite obviously missing changes made by Blizzard's continual patches for balancing), aspects of it are slower, awkward, and more tedious – not surprising since Hearthstone was built from the ground up to be digital. If paying roughly $50 for a counterfeit version of a free-to-play game isn't enough to stop you from importing a copy, there's also the fact that all of the writing is in Chinese. It is interesting to see what a physical adaptation of Hearthstone might look like, however, even if the digital version is still the way to go. Check out more photos and impressions at the link the below.
[Source: Games In Asia via Polygon, image via Games In Asia]
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