Jagex takes on the card game genre

Take a quick glimpse at Chronicle: RuneScape Adventures and it’d be fair to assume it’s a Hearthstone clone. The look of the cards conjure up a sense of familiarity, while the dilution of numbers - at least of the surface - looks to take from Blizzard’s incredible success perhaps a little too liberally.

But if you look a little closer, as we did recently with a hands-on session, you’ll discover there’s quite a bit more to it than just a quick attempt at cashing in on the sudden surge of popularity for CCGs. Its core gameplay is completely different, for example. Rather than the traditional arena where cards are placed, each dealing damage to one another with the goal of chipping away at your opposition’s health, Chronicle is really rather different.

Each game is a series of rounds with your avatar - think of them as a class with unique playstyles and options available - marching across a string of spots, board game-like, overcoming obstacles that you decide. There may be enemies to slay, bonuses to gain or even abilities that will affect the enemy player - from dealing damage to stealing their gold. From your deck of cards you’ll pick which your avatar will face, the idea being to give yourself as much of an advantage as possible.

You’ll want to pit yourself against enemy cards, for example, which will provide gold, armour or damage boosts or even activate certain abilities to alter the enemy’s gameplay. It feels like a clever condensing of the RuneScape RPG systems, a quest where - through cards - your character increases in strength and fortune.

Each of the rounds progress simultaneously, however, and though you’ll have your own set of cards to place in each round, the enemy will as well. Their avatar fights alongside yours, and any abilities or skills will affect your character and vice versa. Therein lies the unique strategy.

While Hearthstone or most other CCGs require you to pre-empt many of the possible decisions available to the opposition at any one moment, rarely does the sense of disruption you can impact onto them ever feel quite as tangible as this.

Of the characters revealed so far each has a unique set of skills. The thief, for example, can pilfer the other player’s gold, impacting their ability to buy strong weapons and armour - providing they have those cards - and utterly decimating a player who’s deck is built around amassing a bounty of gold.

It’s this sort of subtle strategy building that should help Chronicle stand out from among its contemporaries, providing the complete roster of characters are both varied in their gameplay styles and flexible to allow for a range of different strategies. It’ll be disappointing to see every class playing the same as every other since it won’t allow for experimentation or personal strategy.

All the same, there’s a good deal of promise here. Though the rounds each play out across a board game - and therefore a little more ‘animated’ than the likes of Hearthstone - they are finite in their end. There are only so many rounds, and in most cases you’ll find either yourself or your enemy has been destroyed before then anyway.

So far it’s an entertaining game of second-guessing. It’s easy to place down your cards without much ado for your enemy’s strategy, but that simply won’t work against smarter players. You’ll end up attempting to predict how each round will play out, resulting in a card game that has you placing a greater emphasis on the order of the cards you play, rather than simply which you choose to use.

It’s still early days yet, but with the game heading into open beta in March the swathes of players testing out the systems and finely honing the gameplay should result in a set of mechanics that could well rival Hearthstone, but will do something completely different at the same time.