Blockchain: The Cryptocurrency Board Game is our top priority game. We are trying to create a game that is not only offering great gameplay, but also some educational and even historical value, explaining the world of digital currencies to people in the hobby and capturing the current market state “on paper”.
Official description from BGG Database:
Blockchain: The Cryptocurrency Board Game is a highly educational board game about cryptocurrencies, mining and investment. Blockchain is an advanced engine-building, worker placement game where 1-5 players try to use their processing power to “mine” digital currencies and exchange them for Bitcoins and Ethereum, competing for the highest profit at the end of the last game round. Players can upgrade their hardware with more powerful GPUs or even ASICs, install advanced software and updates, and invest in token crowdsales while they are collecting, selling and even dumping their altcoins in favor of Bitcoin or Ethereum at the end of each round, or speculating that they will have a higher cost in the future.
Player interaction is achieved through card drafting each round and event manipulation during the game turns.
The game features:
Blockchain board game has been planned together with 4 expansions, bringing updated market state, new rules, new hardware and upgrades, creating an accurate historical representation of the mineable digital currency market.
The game allows up to five players to compete by building mining rigs or investing in ASICs, buying and upgrading high-end mining hardware with the goal of owning most Bitcoins and Ethereum at the end of the game. Bitcoin and Ethereum have a “floating” cost and it is set throughout the game as an optional rule, which adds another strategy layer (exchanging for BTC or ETH will raise their prices).
Blockchain simulates both the competition and cooperation between miners by using solo and pooled mining: each new coin starts at a low difficulty, but adding more miners raises it, opening pool slots and lowering the solo mining profitability, difficulty changes (as explained) and market development (heavily investing in a coin may rise its price), while player interaction is achieved by event manipulation (the algorithm deck has double-sided cards with events on the back) and a limited set of exchange practices (holding or dumping, more will be added in the Exchanges expansion). There are limited set of ICO offerings add some risk-taking elements for the endgame.
The mechanics are pretty self explanatory for most gamers, but here are few more pieces of information – you start by building a rig (actually 4 slots for each player, all comes through cards from drafting and the market), mine on it by assigning hardware (workers), sell, dump or hold at the end of a round. The little trick we used with the workers is that you actually assign a whole rig worth of them at once for each action point (4). Coins are populated with each new algorithm, and events are on the same cards, so whenever a new coin is out, conditional events trigger. The game will feature metal Bitcoin and Ethereum coins, and during the Kickcstarter campaign we will unlock new currencies.
Blockchain is in early alpha stage of development. We have the idea already dressed with working mechanics, and a nearly full list of features*, and we are in the process of creating a paper version for internal testing. After internal tests, we will draft a rulebook for blind testing, and hand the paper version to groups of players that have to play it without our help. We will do this in order to perfect the rulebook and check for any rules we didn’t explain well enough, and catch any bugs that escaped the regular testing. After we make any changes that might come up, the book will go for editing, and the design of the components will begin. Blockchain is fairly simple game in terms of components, the most complex component design was creating Bitcoin and Ethereum 3D models, as we intend to include metal coins in the Kickstarter edition of the game as part of the marketing process (also available to Cryptum Token owners), and we already ordered and received the design for the coin:
You can find the first 3D prints of the coins here. We plan to offer these as metal coins together with the game and as a separate pledge during the game Kickstarter campaign.
Of course, we already paid for the box initial design, and while it is not a final image of the box, we will keep the overall color scheme. Because of the process of manufacturing games, we do not have a pre-production copy of the game. Such games will come at high cost before launching the campaign for the game, and they will be sent to reviewers as part of the marketing the games.
We expect this game would be able to raise $250-350 000 though a Kickstarter campaign, and average wholesale and retail sales (1000-2000 boxes). As the first game in the line it will suffer from being much less known until our studio gathers fans, but we also planned 4 expansions for the game that will be release through one or two campaigns, and they will inevitably lead to further sales of the base game. In addition, there is a distant possibility for us to make a second edition few years later if there is such demand.
Because of the game simple graphics and components, we expect that the manufacturing process would cost us less than 25% of the total funds raised, and the development would only cost us less than $15 000. Game marketing would cost us about the same. The game expansions are expected to raise as much as the base game together with additional sales of the base game, but at a higher cost. 80% of the funds raised by the base game will be reinvested in the expansions (or in another of the games if it follows first), while with the expansions the amount would be lowered o 60% (20% shared profits for the base game, 40% shared profits for the expansions).
Our lowest expected shared from the Blockchain base game campaigns and its expansions is $75 000 - $125 000, not featuring and wholesale sales, which can amount even more in the long term. *As part of the marketing process, we proposed to major crypto exchanges to be presented in the game with a set of additional mechanics. We already have two exchanges expressing interest, and we are waiting for others to reply, but adding the mechanics for them would require some changes.
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