It’s a feeling I know well-it took me years to realise how little fun I was having in Hearthstone and break away. Just a few days after I first dipped my toes, I already feel like I’m wasting my time, a pathetic victim to Blizzard’s addictive design. And, thanks to long pauses between rounds, I find myself spending as much time checking Twitter as I am deciding team comps. A few key combos rule over all, crushing the meta into a narrow band. Randomness is a huge factor, giving newbies more chance at an exciting victory but diminishing any sense of actual control over events. Like the main game, it’s fun to win but deeply boring to lose. The simplified strategy still boasts enough little decisions moment-to-moment to be enthralling, and when your tactics pay off it’s deeply satisfying.īut before long I realise I’m experiencing all the same problems I had with Hearthstone in accelerated microcosm. It quickly becomes obvious that the familiar ‘tribes’ are the most important element-when Murlocs, Beasts, Mechs, or Demons are grouped together, they enhance each others’ abilities. Hearthstone’s new Battlegrounds mode was at first, then, a great relief-finally the genre comes to a game I not only already know well, but that deals in accessibility and clarity more than almost any other.ĭoing away with much of the genre’s complexity, Battlegrounds reduces the concept to essentially just buying minions to build teams with the best synergies you can manage, and watching them automatically scrap.

Not only impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t played one, the likes of Dota Underlords, Autochess and Teamfight Tactics are also reliant on players being fluent in the characters and conventions of another existing game to have even a hope of getting started.Īs editor of the world’s leading PC gaming magazine, it was a source of some embarrassment that I’d failed to make that leap myself.

Of all the genre phenomenons to rise over the last decade, auto battlers are the most baffling yet.

Big red button hearthstone