Hearthstone's Dungeon Run wants to school you as it schools you

[Administrator]

I suspect that if you grew up with Indiana Jones and the Goonies, with Tintin and Fighting Fantasy paperbacks, the merest combination of words like "Dungeon Run" is likely to trigger a Pavlovian response. Luckily, Blizzard's take on Dungeon Run, employed as the wriggly, twitching spine of Hearthstone's recent Kobolds and Catacombs expansion, has much more going for it than the simple pulp poetry of its name.
Dungeon Run is a roguelike. It's a roguelike, right, that lives inside Hearthstone, which last time I checked was a collectible card battler. God, it is ingenious: a boss-rush composed of eight horrible jerks to tackle, each of them drawn randomly from a pool of 48. Defeat a boss and you win treasure, in the form of groups of themed cards to add to your hand. Die, and the whole thing wipes: you begin your next run back at the very start, facing off against a giant rat and with the most basic and unadorned of decks once again.
It's not hard to see why this works. Hearthstone is brilliant at building themed decks that have a sense of character to them. To put it another way, Blizzard knows how to slap the right physical presence - maddening, fire-handed - on Lyris, The Wild Mage, whose Hero Power sees her adding Arcane Missile to a deck that is otherwise pretty much composed of Flamewalkers. And Blizzard also knows that in a game about collecting cards, there's no better reward for vanquishing a nightmare like Lyris than, well, collecting a bunch of extra cards, cards you can then use as you try to take on whoever comes next.
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