HoningStone: Building Creative Combos With Honing Theory for a Digital Card Game

In recent years, online digital games have left behind the status of entertainment sources to become also professional electronic sports. Worldwide championships offer prizes up to millions of dollars for the best competitors and/or teams among different game categories such as digital collectible card games (DCCG), multiplayer online battle arena, etc. Hearthstone, by Blizzard Entertainment, is a DCCG that has an increasing number of players up to the millions. In this game, individual players compete in one-versus-one matches in alternating turns, until a player is defeated. The greatest challenge in this game is to build a deck of cards and a strategy to combine these cards in order to be competitive against other players without a priori knowledge about their decks and strategies. This is a daunting task that requires deep knowledge of each existing card and great amount of creativity to surprise adversaries in this very adaptive environment. This paper presents a computational system, called HoningStone, that automatically generates creative card combos based on the honing theory of creativity. Our experimental results show that HoningStone can generate combos that are more creative than a greedy randomized algorithm driven by a creativity metric.