Hearthstone is one of the more popular Digital Collectible Card Games currently out there, almost as popular as the king of them all, Magic: The Gathering. The game is free-to-play with lootbox-like mechanics, but it has a variety of modes that can be played with friends.
Hearthstone is available on Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows. All you need to do is download the game for your preferred platform.
Pre-requisites:
Before playing, there are only a couple of things you need to make sure of.
- That you and the person playing are in the same region. The game has three different regions: Americas & Southeast Asia, Europe, and Asia. You can’t play with each other if one or the other player is from a different region as your card collection is tied to a specific region.
- You can add each other with your Battle.net ID or by the email associated with that account. Make sure you know your Battle.net ID, its similar to your Discord username where your username will have a series of numbers following it, e.g. Username#4820
- Smartphone players can play against or with desktop players and vice versa, given they’re all signed in on the same region. There is no advantage of mouse or touch screen here unlike games like Fortnite, but some card animations can take a toll on your mobile or computer’s GPU and as such make your turn last longer than you intended.
Getting to the guide:
If you have got the game installed on your phone or desktop, all you have to do is install the game on another device that has another unique user logged in on it.
Hearthstones friend list lets you play with two types of players: Nearby Players and Online Friends.
Nearby players notify you if another player is in the immediate area of play, the effective range is not quantified but it should be very small, say at a wedding venue. Nearby Players saves you the trouble of adding each other as friends and directly matching against each other.
Online friends mean people you enjoy playing with, your real-life friends, or any type of social connection you have with them.
While it is unlikely or rare for you to find nearby players, the most common way to play the game is with online friends.
The first step is finding out the Battle.net ID of the other player. This will be something along the lines of UserName#1234.
If the person you’re adding is unsure of their ID, you can ask for their associated email with said ID and send a friend request through that.
Tap on the top left of the screen if you’re on a smartphone/tablet, and bottom left if you’re on a desktop.
Once they have accepted your friend request, or you have accepted theirs, you will see them in your online friend’s list and a new icon will appear to the right of their name, a small box that looks like a play button.
Tap on the Play Button and choose the game mode you wish to play.
If you can communicate with them, ask them what game mode they would prefer to play. Once you both have decided on the mode, choose it and they will receive a challenge invitation.
Once the invited player has accepted the inviting player’s challenge, the game will tell you to choose and/or build your deck accordingly.
You can also do Tavern Brawls (the weekly challenges), together, but only if they are competitive or cooperative.
Once you both have selected or made your preferred choice of decks, you both have to press the play button at the bottom right of your screens.
With that, you can now fight with each other.
If you wish to change the game mode, simply cancel the challenge, and start from inviting the other player with the play button next to their name. This starts a new lobby.
Keep in mind, playing against each other does not boost or decrease your rank. These are friendly matches against each other which won’t affect your ranking or battleground rating. As such, feel free to have fun playing against each other.
