323/365: Fireside Gathering @ Eevent Lan

I went to a LAN party.. it's been a long while since the last time.

A LAN party is something from my past. You get a bunch of people together. They all bring their computer and you waste the weekend away with binge gaming. Back when I went to a number of these events, another reason was to exchange movies and music (the internet was really slow back then) but I guess that is not a incentive anymore. 

It was cool to go but felt a bit weird. Maybe I just have to admit that I am too old. Then again, I have to admit that I wasn't there for the whole weekend. I only went for the Saturday and I only brought my Ipad. The LAN Party also featured a little Fireside Gathering and that was the reason I went. 

A Fireside Gathering is a little thing Blizzard invented for Hearthstone players. If you play a few games against players in the local sub-net, you get a special card back for your deck. Since I had just started playing Hearthstone a week prior to this event, it sound like a great idea to go. 

I was not wrong. It was great. There were around 12-14 people there that came just for the Fireside Gathering. It was cool to play against someone that was sitting at the same table.

They also organized a small tournament. I signed up of course, might as well if I am there anyway. I won one game of my first BO3 series aaaaand the tournament was over for me. Still, I felt good that I had actually managed to win a game. As I said, I had just started playing the game and had many things still learn, still have in fact. 

The whole thing was organized by Barcraft (look them up on Facebook) and I hope they will do something similar again sometime soon. I would really like to do it again. Maybe win more than one game.. 

315/365: Hearthstone

Damn you addiction.

On green thursday, the day before easter friday I made the mistake to download Hearthstone for the ipad. What is Hearthstone? It is a trading card game from Blizzard. Oh boy is it addictive. I am realllly bad at it bad I have been playing it whenever I found time over the last two weeks. I think I spent 3/4 of the time over easter playing the darn game. I only stopped when I had guests over (luckily quite often during those days).

It is easily the best game for the ipad and really a lot of fun to play. I like the fact that a game usually takes around 15min. So it can be played even if you don't have a lot of time on your hands.

You can buy card packs for real money but you don't really need to. You can buy packs with ingame gold. You have to be prepared to grind a long time to get the necessary gold though. You can get gold through three wins (10), daily quests (40-100) or playing in the arena mode. If you want to get anything worthwhile from the arena though you need to win at least 5-6 games.. I am not yet able to do that. You have to win a few since it costs 150 gold to just play in the arena. So when one pack of cards costs 100 gold, you can see that it can take quite some time to get them.

It has to be said though that you can win in the game even without spending any money on it. It is easier if you do spend money but many streamers have demonstrated that you can do really good with "free decks".
So far I think I spend 6.- on the game. I am trying to not spend more but hey, if you enjoy your time with it and spend many hours on it, why not invest some money in it?

I can really recommend you pick it up. It is also available for PC and MAC. Here is a little video from a guy playing it for the first time. Really gives a good introduction: