Both the iPhone and Android smartphone editions of Hearthstone will be fully compatible with the PC, iPad, Mac, and Android tablet versions, Blizzard has confirmed.

Eric Dodds, one of the principal designers of the popular collectable card game, said in an interview with GameSpot that--much like with the desktop and tablet versions--players will still be given no discernible hints about what device their opponent is playing with.

“When you start a match on a phone, you could be playing someone on another phone, someone on a tablet, on a PC, who knows? It's all one big ecosystem," he said.

One subject which he discussed with less confident language, however, was smartphone battery life. From a full charge, the iPad version can only be unplugged for a couple of hours before battery begins to reach a critical point. Whether smartphones can handle such demand, along with its day-to-day duties, remains to be seen.

"It’s a beautiful game, so it certainly uses power," Dodds said. "One of the things we’re always talking about is how to make sure that not too much of your power [is used], but it certainly does use some."

He also appeared to be unsure whether Hearthstone, with its always-online connection policy, would eat up excessive amounts of data on phones.

"I don't know. It doesn’t require very much data. . .you have to have a connection," he said.



"I certainly don’t know if I would recommend it if you were playing it on, say, a train that was going underground a lot and you were losing signal a lot… or at least I wouldn’t advise you playing an Arena match that way."



In February, Blizzard released the first images of how Hearthstone would appear on smartphones. Much of the background details have been cropped out, and the UI has been rebuilt, in order to maximize the visibility of minions and cards. The first images can be seen below.

The smartphone version of Hearthstone is expected to launch in a matter of months. Click on the thumbnails below for additional images

Meanwhile, Blizzard is preparing to release the game's next adventure, Blackrock Mountain, in April. At the time of going to press, nine of the expansion's 31 cards have been revealed. You can preview them all in the images below.

Click on the thumbnails below to view in full screen

In his interview with GameSpot, Dodds also takes questions on the Blackrock adventure, the ESL controversy, and discusses how Blizzard balances new cards during the design process.