Thursday, April 24, 2014

iOS Smackdown: Hearthstone vs. Yomi

Last week, two games that I have been looking forward to for a while came out on iPad. They aren't exactly alike, but they have a number of similar qualities (e.g. physical card games with asymmetrical factions played on a mobile device against randomly matched human opponents) and I have been playing a lot of both since there release.

Hearthstone is a card game themed to the setting of World of Warcraft. In it, you choose one of nine classes, with a set of cards that represent abilities that a character in the video game might have, and build a deck out of those cards and whatever "neutral," or general use, cards you have unlocked by playing (or by paying, of course). You take that deck and are randomly matched against other real human beings to test your skill and luck. The game plays a lot like Magic: The Gathering, if it were been simplified to keep turns entirely asynchronous, and the changes make it accessible to pretty much anyone. I don't know that it's based on Magic, but it would be hard to convince me that there was no influence at all...

I've enjoyed it a lot in the first week. There are a lot of choices to make in the creation of a deck, and since the game has been in beta for several months, there are experts out there who are giving really great advice in that realm. I've seen some discussion of the game as basically an "over-simplification" of Magic, but I feel like much of what it loses in complexity, it gains in tactical variety. 

As a quick example, in Magic, there are several distinct and more or less sacrosanct phases to a player's turn. You get one, and only one, chance to declare attacks, and you generally don't get to choose the targets of the attacks. In Hearthstone, each creature you have can attack once per turn, but they can attack at any time, and you choose their targets. This creates a sort of puzzle each turn as you try to determine how you can regain control of the board. Or maybe you should just ignore the creatures and attack your opponent? What about cards that have to be attacked first, or really powerful assault creatures with low defense? It makes the game much more about control and tempo-exchange that it might otherwise be.

Other simplifications include a lack of turn interrupting abilities, an entirely automatic resource building mechanism, and automatic calculations and maintenance. The latter is an obviously great benefit to anyone who has tried to track bonuses, enchant targets, token creatures, and recurring effects in Magic. Hearthstone, being a computer program, keeps everything straight in a clear fashion, and even signals to you what cards you have left to play, what creatures you have left to use, and has a clear indication when you are out of options on a turn. 

But let's get back to interrupts and resources - these are two of my favorite "simplifications." First, there is only one way to interrupt someone's actions and react, and that is to have a specific kind of card called a secret, and to play it before the situation occurs, sitting and waiting for your opponent to take the activating action. It creates the kind of "Two untapped blue mana" dynamic you find playing against a Counterspell deck in Magic, where you never really know what you'll be able to do (when your opponent has a secret card sitting there), but it makes it simpler and doesn't rely on me remembering that you were planning on countering X, but not Y. As for resources, you gain one crystal each turn, and each crystal provides you with one mana each turn. There is no chance for mana drought, you don't have to concern yourself with your land-to-spell ratio when deck building, and your resources are consistent, which makes choosing and playing cards more straightforward.

As you play, you gain experience which unlocks a certain number of basic cards, and then you have to start winning matches to gain gold, the in-game currency that you can use to buy randomized packs of cards that you can add to your deck. Yet again, it takes a lot from Magic; these packs assure that you will get at least one rare card, and you can spend real cash to buy them (instead of just playing to win and gathering enough fake cash to do it). This can theoretically get expensive quickly, but the game is free to download and play, and you can easily never pay a cent to Blizzard.

Whereas Hearthstone is only available in a digital format (Mac, PC, or tablet), Yomi was a physical card game for years. There has been a web-based client for playing the game online against other players for a while, but it has taken until now to get the mobile version out. In Yomi, you choose a pre-built deck representing one of twenty characters in a fighting game, and you try to use your knowledge of your cards and your opponent's cards to out-guess and out-play whoever you are matched up against.

Yomi is dramatically different from any other game I have played, and that's coming from someone who has played a lot of games. Instead of a deck full of creatures, spells, equipment, and whatever else you find in a competitive, asymmetrical game like Hearthstone (or Magic), the cards here are basically a mix of attacks, throws, blocks and dodges. Each round, the players choose and play one of these cards face-down, and then simultaneously reveal what they played. Each kind of card interacts differently with the others: attacks beat throws and slower attacks, dodges avoid attacks and provide openings for counter-attacks, throws break through defensive moves and have a tendency to knock your opponent down, and blocks stop most of an attack's power while building your options for later through card draws.

As I mentioned, each character has a different mix of these types of moves, different amounts of damage with each, three (or more) different special attacks, and a handful of cards that can be played as "special moves" instead of during the normal double-blind showdown explained above. Yet, there is no deck-building or design involved; the creator and play-testers of the game have spent years getting the mix of cards and the specifics of the special abilities balanced. Some people might feel put off by this, especially since so many other asymmetrical card games provide some method of customizability. But it does make me question the importance of such a thing. There is a lot to be said for spending time examining the depth of one particular faction/deck and how it can deal with the others, as opposed to losing a match, swapping around cards, and genuinely hoping to build a deck that has 90% uneven match-ups in your favor (the other 10%, of course, wrecking your deck in unexpected ways). With Yomi, the "meta," a term used to refer to the majority attitude of the community playing the game, is not focused on how to get the most imbalanced build, but rather, how to effectively use the well-balanced builds that already exist.

One of the things that makes Yomi so very different from other card games that I enjoy is the way that strategy is implemented during play. In Magic, Hearthstone, Race for the Galaxy, Summoner Wars, and countless other games, each card plays a part in building your board up, eventually with the hopeful culmination in a tableau that will defeat your opponent (or at least, has led to their defeat during the building). In Yomi, you essentially play one card per turn, and even if a few others are added to make a combo, activate a special effect, or take advantage of an opponent playing poorly, the board is wiped clean and you start the next round with a blank slate in front of you. But truthfully, the slate is not blank at all... it's just invisible. You have to consider what your opponent has previously played, what their goal for this round might be, what cards they have left in their deck vs. their discard, what special abilities remain that might interfere with your plans, and how you can best play or manipulate your cards to get the effects that you need... all while sitting there with no protective collection of cards laid out on the (virtual) tabletop.

For some people, this results in an empty feeling to the game. If every round is taken by itself, the game can look like a fancy alternative to paper-rock-scissors. But that neglects the depth of reasoning behind what card each player wants to play, why they want to play it, what they think their opponent will be playing and why, and whether some sort of second-guessing is worth while... while you can sometimes gauge how the momentum in going in a game of Hearthstone by a single turn and a glance at the board, to do so in Yomi requires looking at a dozen turns, possibly more. And, lest it be unclear, I think this makes for a really great game with a huge amount of play-space to explore. It's just that it might not be as immediately obvious a play-space as you get with Hearthstone.

The audience for Hearthstone is almost certainly larger, and the familiarity and ease of getting into the game is the biggest reason for that. If you know Magic, World of Warcraft, like humorous fantasy, or just want to try something quick and free, Hearthstone was designed for you, there is no question in my mind. It's beautiful, the interface is obvious and easy, and there are a lot of incremental rewards to keep people playing. I massively prefer it to Magic, for many of the reasons I explained above, and I love that I am able to compete against strong players with a bunch of rare cards with my free deck of basic cards.

Yomi is obviously more niche, and I think that is intentional. First, and foremost, the app is $10 upfront even to try. This immediately roots out a lot of casual customers who don't know what they are getting into. (In the long run, I feel like more people will spend far more than $10 on Hearthstone, just for the chance of getting some really great cards. I don't object, as much as I am against microtransactions in general - this is a collectible card game, and people like collecting.) The depth of the Yomi is a lot less obvious, too. It's not about getting a lucky booster pack with a super-cool creature and building a deck around that, it's about subtly tweaking how you use your deck's strengths, and learning (and then preying on) the weaknesses of the other decks. And that subtle tweaking and learning is not nearly as straightforward as swapping a few cards around is in Hearthstone.

If you were hoping to come to the end of this article and have me tell you which one to get, I'm afraid you are going to be disappointed. These games which have so many surface similarities and differences are actually both really well designed and really well maintained, and I hold both in really high regard. I'm not going to just be wishy-washy and equivocate, though. If you are looking for breadth, play Hearthstone. It has a huge number of cards, factions, decks, and already there is at least one expansion coming soon. There are so many different directions to go, and so many different things to try, that I can't recommend it highly enough for someone who loves combing through new stuff. On the other hand, if you are looking for depth, play Yomi. There is a lot of breadth to be sure; for $10 more, you can unlock another ten characters, bringing the total to 20 playable decks, each of which is exhaustively balanced against the others. But that is basically where the game will leave you for "trying new things." The real "newness" you experience with Yomi is by digging deep into one character, learning the ins and outs of their attack-throw-dodge-block ratios and special powers, finding workable or even ideal strategies against the other 19 characters, and mastering those. Of course, Hearthstone has depth, too, and you can take a single deck and work it over and over against every class, but the ever shifting "meta" and the ever expanding set of cards is going to force you to explore breadth even more.

I went with both. That's another option.

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