You reach down for the bag - but as you do, your arm breaks a hair-thin strand of silk.

But while his face is plastered with a merry smirk, his eyes are the frigid, glassy beads of a predator's. He is a small, round man in garish clothes, with a big floppy top hat and a ludicrous felt cravat. A new bag is set out on the ground, and a new opponent stands across from you. You do not look at the man's face, as he bleeds out onto the dirt. Your mind goes blank, so that when the shot rings out across the waste, it feels as if it comes from far away. Your fingers tremble as you fumble the slug into the chamber. An ancient revolver, heavy and rust-caked, with a single round taped to the barrel. Terror seizes you, but in the same instant, your hand closes on rough iron in the bag's polythene belly. He has a half-blunted Stanley knife in his hand, and a cringe of desperate, feral hope on his face. You search the bag for a weapon, but find only nonsense: a broken tin opener, an onion on a string, a faded novelty telephone that looks just legally distinct from Garfield. Ten paces away, an emaciated, dog-eyed wreck of a man is rummaging through a bag of his own, and you are struck with the sudden, brutal understanding that one of you must die here. You are just crouching to look, when you hear rustling. 'What's inside?' reads a note taped to it, in jaunty comic sans beneath a Hearthstone logo. You're naked, in the desert, with a grubby carrier bag at your feet.

Hearthstone duels