Project: Hearthstone tracker [code]

I play a certian undisclosed amount of Hearthstone, Blizzard's online collectible card game. In the game, each of two players has a deck of cards which get played on alternating turns. There are many different kinds of decks belonging to nine "classes" of characters, and something like 700 unique cards.

Hearthstone screenshot: our character is at the bottom, and the opponent is at the top.

Last night I discovered that Hearthstone can be configured to create a log of every game-state change, which is awesome. People have used this information to create "deck trackers," which keep track of which cards you've drawn, so you know what's left in your deck. This is just scratching the surface, though. In principle, one could use a library of these log files to put together a sophisticated analysis of what kinds of decks people are playing, what cards are likely to appear together in a deck, and even list the most likely plays of an opponent next turn.

To start, I wanted to look at the log file and see what I could parse. Here is a link to a github repo where I've included a log file from an example game, and some Python code that reads the file and creates a DataFrame object with a list of all of the entities in the game (and entity can be a card, player, hero power, enchantment, and probably some other stuff). If at any time in the game the entity name is revealed, I update the DataFrame to include its name. The output looks like this:

	Name
	Entity ID
	1 NaN
	2 NaN
	3 NaN
	4 Anduin Wrynn
	5 Lesser Heal
	6 Twilight Guardian
	.
	.
	.
	65 NaN
	66 Fireball
	67 NaN
	68 The Coin
	69 Twilight Endurance
	70 Dragon Blood
	.
	.
	.

view raw dataframe_out.py hosted with ❤ by GitHub

where the "NaN" labels correspond to entities that were never revealed during the course of the game.

There's also a function that simply lists all of the cards I draw in the game, and that my opponent plays at some point, whose output looks like this:

	Holy Nova
	Blackwing Technician
	Dark Cultist
	Blackwing Corruptor
	The Coin
	.
	.
	.
	Power Word: Shield
	Blackwing Corruptor
	Blackwing Corruptor
	Bloodfen Raptor
	Sen'jin Shieldmasta
	Murloc Raider
	Raid Leader
	Wolfrider
	Nightblade
	Oasis Snapjaw

view raw list_cards.py hosted with ❤ by GitHub

where the first and second blocks are my cards and my opponent's cards, respectively. The next step is to integrate more card information into the DataFrame. I'm using regular expressions to do the parsing, so it's slow work. I'm not worried about putting a front end on this any time soon.