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During the early part of the year, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft has been rapidly gaining favor among gamers both hardcore and casual. Obviously, a collectible card game isn't going to be for everyone, but those who do give the game a chance have found Hearthstone to be an extremely addictive experience, albeit one that required sitting down at a PC to play.

Starting today, however, those bonds of PC gameplay have been broken, as Hearthstone has made its official debut on Apple's iPad. The mobile version of the game was originally soft launched in select territories, but it is now available worldwide. Check out the game in action in the trailer above.

While Hearthstone has seen some pretty significant updates since its beta testing in early January, this iPad rollout does not carry any meaningful changes to the game. It does, however, give gamers a free card pack.

More importantly, players' accounts on one platform will carry over to the other. That means the carefully constructed deck players have built over the past few months on PC will not be lost if they transition strictly to iPad.

In fact, Blizzard finds that, when given the choice, players devote the bulk of their time to the iPad version, as they feel that is the ideal way to play the game. The developer was hoping to get the version to the public around the same time the PC version exited open beta, but unfortunately those plans didn’t work out.

Hearthstone Available Today on iPad

Luckily, that extra time in development has helped the iPad version retain all of Hearthstone's bells and whistles. According to Blizzard, no compromises were made while porting the game to the mobile platform.

Speaking of mobile, Blizzard assures both iPhone and Android users that ports of Hearthstone are on the way; they simply don't have release dates for those versions yet. Obviously, the iPad — or at least the tablet market — was a key goal for Blizzard, and then they will presumably expand from here.

And expand Hearthstone will, with a new single player adventure mode called 'Curse of Naxxramas' on the way, as well as those all-important balance tweaks. Hearthstone is only going to get bigger and bigger as the year rolls on, so it's best to get in the action now.

Have you had a chance to play Hearthstone on the iPad? What do you think? How does it compare to the PC experience?

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Source: Polygon