This week's Hearthstone Tavern Brawl has been delayed

Decks Assemble!

The latest Hearthstone Tavern Brawl, "Decks Assemble!" sounds like a good one. You'll begin with a small deck and hand of preset cards, and will discover a new card at the beginning of each turn. When you play a card, a copy of it is shuffled into your deck, and at the end of your turn, your whole hand is returned to the deck and replaced with four randomly-drawn cards.

You can't actually start brawling just yet, though, because this week's boozy throwdown has been delayed.

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The reasons for the delay weren't revealed, but the BlizzardCS Twitter account said the problem would probably be cleared up in hours, not days. "Our techs continue to troubleshoot the issue," it wrote. "We will provide additional info when we have it."

Of course, we will do the same as soon as we learn more.

Update: Blizzard has posted a message in the Hearthstone forums apologizing for the delay and explaining that it was caused by problems with disconnections in the European region following the launch of the Decks Assemble! brawl.

"We want to reassure our players that this is not a European server related issue. When we release new content, such as Tavern Brawls that introduce new mechanics or styles of play, there is a risk that unforeseen issues may arise. If an issue does comes up, the region where the new Brawl was first released (Europe in this case) will see the impact first while the team jumps on getting the fix identified and deployed as quickly as possible," the message says.

"That said, we acknowledge the stability issues we’ve seen with Tavern Brawl recently are unacceptable, and we recognize that we have not been providing a quality experience for our players. The Hearthstone team has been working on additional testing measures to identify these issues before our players experience them. This includes expansion of our automated testing efforts, an additional test effort dedicated to tavern brawl stability, and changes to our infrastructure to minimize impact in the event any issues do arise. These improvements will take some time to implement, but they are a major priority for the team and will remain so until Tavern Brawl is a great experience for all players in all regions."

"We greatly appreciate our players' patience and understanding. We will continue to improve our Tavern Brawl experience for all of our players, both in exciting new ways to play and stability, and we apologize for the disruptions in gameplay that have been occurring."

Andy Chalk

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.