Mad Science is Provably Hard: Puzzles in Hearthstone's Boomsday Lab are NP-hard

TL;DR

This paper proves that determining a winning move in Hearthstone puzzles from the Boomsday Lab expansion is NP-hard, even when generalized to larger game sizes, highlighting the computational difficulty of these puzzles.

Contribution

It establishes the NP-hardness of various Hearthstone puzzles and their generalizations, providing the first complexity results for these game scenarios.

Findings

Winning puzzles are NP-hard in the original and generalized settings

Complexity holds across multiple puzzle types and game scale generalizations

Highlights computational difficulty of Hearthstone's puzzle solving

Abstract

We consider the computational complexity of winning this turn (mate-in-1 or "finding lethal") in Hearthstone as well as several other single turn puzzle types introduced in the Boomsday Lab expansion. We consider three natural generalizations of Hearthstone (in which hand size, board size, and deck size scale) and prove the various puzzle types in each generalization NP-hard.