Someone at Bitcointalk asked us how far we are with the Blockchain: The Cryptcurrency Board Game development. It’s a great question, as somehow we haven’t thought of sharing more info, and there is a matter that would require public opinion anyway, so we decided to give you a status about the game.
First of all, you should definitely read the all the available information about the Blockchain board game on our website, but here is a less formal summary of the info:
This is informal summary with some expanded information:
Blockchain: The Cryptocurrency Board Game allows up to five players to compete by building mining rigs or investing in ASICs or even a limited number of ICOs, 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 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.
Blockchain is using well known engine-building and worker placement mechanics, and the game features 85 mineable coins and 15 of the top assets, as well as 25 mining algorithms and a large number of upgrades, hardware, software and events.
The mechanics are pretty self explanatory for most gamers, but here are few more pieces of info - 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 hodl 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 algo, and events are on the same cards, so whenever a new coin is out, conditional events trigger.
During the Kickcstarter campaign we will unlock new coins (you can help us with that, see the Voting paragraph further below, and we will have a stretch goal to unlock metal Bitcoin and Ethereum coins for the game (note that they are just game coins, and are not backed by real BTC or ETH).
The game in in alpha stage, we have all of the mechanics, yet they are not dressed with the final details, it’s only numbers. In fact, at this stage we could pretty much turn it into a fishing or football (soccer) game, although it would require some reworking.
What does this mean to you? Well, nothing, really. It’s a normal part of board games development, where there is a lot of arguing among the designers, and little to nothing made on the final looks of the game. Right now we are busy with the Cryptum ICO, so the game is a bit lower on the priorities list, but until we make this part of the game work well in theory, and do some more internal testing, we can get to the next stage, writing rules and doing a so called blind test, helping us catch some bugs we missed.
Before we actually try to put some graphics that we can show, we will try the game in a so called “blind test”. It involves people reading the rules (which are now just floating thoughts, and are often adjusted to fix something) and playing the game without our help, which it will help us catch mistakes in the rules, design bugs and, more importantly - to see if the rulebook is easy enough to understand, which in our opinion is one of the most important aspects of any modern board game that wants to be played by more than a bunch of fanatics.
Blockchain is a game that doesn’t involve a lot of art, and we have Zachary working on the layouts for cards and player sheets. At the last stage he will also work on the rulebook, adding graphic examples and make it look stunning.
We have a long list of coins (85 to be precise, not including the Bitcoin Cash, as the fork happened after we started the development) and algorithms that wold be included in the game. You can find it below. There are many coins missing there, and you can make sure your favorite coin is included in the game, or even one of the expansions, by suggesting it, voting or even (in case you are developer or for some reason you want it done) - directly paying us to include it in the cases where it would require more work.
We have 85 slots for the retail version of the game, some additional content may be added during the Kickstarter campaign of the game in the form of stretch goals, and we would like to prepare for it in advance. For those investing in the Cryptum ICO (you probably should if you are interested in the game), the additional content means we would release a 5th expansion, albeit a small one.
Here is a list of algorithms and coins, with “MRG” meaning these are merged-mined:
These are the ways to make sure a coin is included in the Blockchain board game. Any new coin to be included should have a fairly high-res logo available, its algorithm should be already included in the list (otherwise see paid services), and non-offensive name (otherwise the game will have to be marked as 18+ in some markets, and we will not accept that):
Free voting:
Please head to this thread in the Bitcointalk forum in order to vote.
*Protected coins: our own TBA Cryptumcoin, and VGZ, which is still unannounced but we have agreement to include it. Also BTC, LTC, ZEC, ETH, DASH, LBRY, BTX, SIGT, SIB, DCR, BLAKE and any multi-algorithm or merged-mined coin.
Paid votes
For a limited time all of them can be paid as part of the Cryptum ICO Stage I sale, essentially giving you CRTM and all of its features! After the Stage I sale is over or as an alternative, you can use one of the donation addresses below.
Fill in the form at the end of this article if you make a paid vote!
Donation addresses:
BTC: 3553KaQXv7VAWqjwaTPEcer17TXUBQSSzt
ETH: 0x8Fb4fe7977e93C485a1303C065aBf2c75954d08F
