I’m still playing Hearthstone, but one thing that I dislike about it is that it is very slow in terms of the collectible part of the game. It’s very slow to grind to get new cards – there is opportunity to do it, but beyond a certain limit each day is incredibly difficult. So I’ve been looking around for an additional collectible card game (I think Hearthstone will be around for a long time, so it’s worthwhile to keep collecting it).

The game that most caught my eye was one based off the Adventure Wars franchise called Card Wars. I don’t watch the show but it had a lot of downloads and seem pretty popular. I was wary though, because it cost $4USD to buy AND reviews said that it had a lot of freemium features. Fortunately for me, Amazon had a promotion recently and it was offered for free, so I was able to try it out.

The card game itself is not bad, it has some mechanics that are similar to Hearthstone, and some ones that are different. The best part for me is that it (looks like at least) there is a long quest campaign from which I can collect cards (although it still requires active connection to the Internet).

The freemium mechanics don’t really affect my experience that much. There is a heart system that limits how long you can play. Each game takes at least one heart, and they regenerate one every 15 minutes (and fully if you beat a boss). You start with 5 but as you proceed through quests, you get more. This is fine for me because I’m no longer a little kid playing the same game for hours on end. I have yet to run out of hearts!

Then there is a premium currency (gems) which you can use to buy chests that can give you rare cards. I just ignore those. Finally, you are limited to only 50 cards in your “card box” and you have to pay gems to expand your box (1 gem for 5 spaces). This would probably affect me the most since I want to collect cards. You can get rid of cards by selling or crafting them, but there are different factions so you probably need to store multiple decks at once. I guess the good thing is that the price for expansion is pretty cheap. After a few days of playing, I had 11 gems so that could double my card box if needed.

There are a couple of bad things about the game though. The first, most worrisome thing, is that there is no way to save your progress across devices. While you have an account ID, I haven’t found any way you can sign in to your existing account. So if you lose your phone or it gets wiped, you’ve lost all the cards you collected. Maybe Titanium Backup will help with this though. The game itself is also buggy. It doesn’t feel polished at all, and sometimes the things that get unlocked don’t occur at the right time (you have to re-enter a section).

So far, I think the game is positive (especially because it was free) and worth some time investment. That might change when Hearthstone comes to Android/non-tablet and they release their single player campaign.