Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft - Mobile Game of the Year

Plenty of great mobile games offer quick-hit experiences that fill those momentary voids when you're sitting on the bus or waiting in line. But a mobile game that's so good that you want to play even when you're sitting at home surrounded by the enticing pull of so much other entertainment? That's something special. Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is that game.

Hearthstone is simple enough that even if you've never played a collectible card game, it's easy to learn the basics, put together a decent deck, and start wreaking card-based havoc. But at higher levels, there are so many cards and combinations, that even competitive players from other similar games will find a satisfying, addictive challenge.

As a PC game, Hearthstone is still great, but it's truly at home on the tablet. The feel of moving your cards around the board or selecting the unsuspecting target of a spell is just better when you're doing it with your finger instead of a mouse pointer. And the Warcraft theme provides another easy way to get sucked in by the personality put into the the cards, the boards you play on, and the heroes you play as.

Free-to-play games still have a stigma to overcome in the gaming community, but Blizzard's experiment with the model shows that free doesn't mean lower quality. Hearthstone is a mobile game that's being taken seriously by the community, and the recent Hearthstone World Tournament had a $250,000 prize pool, so Blizzard is willing to invest big into it as well. But even without all that, Hearthstone is, at its core, pure and simple fun.