Poker is a century-old game. Here’s why I’m bullish on Duper as a Poker challenger:
Poker originated in the 18th century. Despite the fun, its spread was slow, decentralized, and in various different forms. This only changed in the 70s when Poker tournaments entered Vegas with
What makes on-chain games unique?
@Bowenddex
and I have compiled 5 paradigms of on-chain games and ways each could be over/underrated, with examples.
Special thanks to
@0xAikoDai
,
@0xkydo
, and
@NicoVereecke
for review.
The flagship game we're building at
@0xcurio
will be ready for playtest by mid-March. It's a social diplomacy strategy game with elements from Poker and board games. Can't say how good it is objectively (until y'all play), but the team has had the urge to stop working altogether
A new player has arrived …
We raised $2.9M from
@BainCapCrypto
,
@tcg_crypto
and others to build the next generation of crypto games hyper focused on composable user-generated content.
A month since alpha launch and
@playduper
is making some small progress:
- 303 full games played (excluding playground)
- 13,660 in-game diplomatic messages sent
- $15,000+ player earning from game payouts and official rewards
- played on mobile by player
- played on Steam deck
Excited to announce our $8.7M total raise to build Duper.
Duper is where Poker meets Catan, with a twist of Diplomacy.
Season 1 begins today. Massive rewards ready. All details below.
"Onchain games today is like DeFi in 2019" is helpful but only scratching the surface imo.
Tokens need speculators; games need real players. DeFi projects can succeed wildly with a succinct mechanism; in the long term, games succeed with exceptional holistic experience.
@elonmusk
Curious whether you have thoughts on how to encourage people to have more kids. To my knowledge many don't because they need the extra time and savings for a better quality of life
@robinhanson
My guess
1. Inconsistency at old age compared to teens (someone at 75 could be very alert and open-minded or near-death and stubborn; 14yos are much more similar)
2. Earning rights is great, but losing rights feels terrible
Smart contracts are the easiest way to program not just amounts but standards of money. Money is at the foundation of civilization, a fancy term for human coordination.
A lone sentry tower stands vigilant on the desert planet, its gaze fixed on the horizon. The fleet’s arrival is imminent.
Initiating landing protocol ...
just watched The Wandering Earth 2 in an AMC, gotta say it's one of the best movies produced in China I've yet seen. it appeals to the common destiny and common experience of being human in a way distinct from American movies. cried twice.
highly recommend
Woke up and our players doubled overnight.
Here are 12 tips for those of you who are new 👇
1/4
Early game
- Prioritize NPC tiles over player tiles
- Upgrade capital ASAP
- Get tiles next to other players to start trading
I love gaming, but hate web3 gaming.
It’s plagued with unfinished games, awful economics, and empty promises.
However, I recently saw
@playduper
come up on my timeline and decided to give it a try.
I can confidently say this is the best web3 game I have ever played.
I
VCs today putting eggs in many crypto game studios in turn putting eggs in many games, and calling it "great risk diversification": this is a viable strategy for f2p because the formula of distribution&monetization is well established, only the game design is unclear. in crypto
internally at
@0xcurio
, we know that onchain games will hit rapidly and in drastically different forms than what ppl today may expect. will be in Paris to share a few big updates from the team and hopefully bring some clarity to the space.
see you soon 🇫🇷
Bonjour 🇫🇷!
Our cofounder
@0x1plus
will be speaking at EthCC about our onchain game engine Keystone, what we’re doing next with treaties, our flagship game, and practical lessons in game design!
We’ll also be dropping a limited edition Paris tee 🤔
One variety of game I want to see in onchain gaming is the 'single-screen game.' At any moment the entire game can be grokked from a single screenshot .
This is good because
1. It's inherently viral
2. It forces simplicity of design
3. It minimizes wasted experiences
Today we’re proud to formally introduce Keystone, the best toolkit to build highly performant and composable onchain games for the most ambitious developers.
2. Composability (aka. UGC)
Players can freely build content and logic on top of the game client and engine (eg. 50+ plugins and community rounds
@darkforest_eth
).
An epic game. Result is in:
- 👑
@0xLoso
"Yijia" was winner by tile count, earned 0.177 ETH ($661)
- 💰
@BenGiove
"Gaby0x" earned 0.385 ETH ($1,440, biggest earner) from holding 5 of
@0xLoso
's gems
-
@HedgeEconomist
"0xgaby" earned 0.03 ETH ($112) from holding 3 of
@0xLoso
's gems
For those of you who've got a few reps of Casual mode, come play Ranked in 30 mins!
Imagine playing Poker with stakes vs. for free. Same game, huge difference in experience. Practice for upcoming tournaments (we didn't raise those 8.7 mil for nothing 😉) while the stakes are
Introducing Ranked Mode, starting 10AM PT today.
0.005 ETH to play. 40 minutes of pure adrenaline.
To the thousands of Dupers so far, are you ready to step up?
a friend at a big CEX told me how boring the app space feels in this cycle. truly hope we'll change that! feeling more convinced now after witnessing some actual dupers in game
1. Interoperability
Players can meaningfully use a wide array of assets and identities in arbitrary games.
Instead of assets/identities designed around games, games are designed around assets/identities.
gf reported to me a bug in my product this morning. the bug was a big caterpillar. the product was a breakfast noodle soup i made.
turned out there was a bidding bug with Ranked mode soon after. sometimes there're signs 😂
Fascinated by
@wolfdotgame
, I hacked a small project to simulate the outcome of their upcoming Alpha Game.
Players now have the tool to articulate different strategies and test them against others players.
Have heard a lot of bearish takes on crypto lately which are super legitimate. But as long as this is true, crypto remains extremely valuable, esp. as a playground of coordination models.
Trying to find out the answers to “Why Onchain Game”?
Meet
@0xcurio
and their newest social strategy game
@playduper
at SEVENX NEW TRENDS SUMMIT | Web3 Game: The Next Big Thing🇭🇰!
🔗:
⏰: Apr. 7th | 9:30 AM - 6:00 PM
📍: 3F | JW Marriott Hong Kong
5. Persistence
Games can provide verifiable guarantees for supporting assets which operate under a fixed set of physical laws, forever, without a single point of failure (eg. server termination).
things I've been saying to different folks lately:
1. what onchain games are NOT uniquely solving: client-side engine & client-side player cheating;
2. for games, killer content/experience drives infra mass adoption, not the other way around. Doom -> Doom engine adoption;
Listen to me and
@boredape1234
shoutcast a live match of Duper in about 15 min! We'll cover everything from the very basics to more advanced strategy. It's easily the most fun and intense live onchain game.
Started reading the Mahabharata (in English) last night, and after the intro, the translator said something like "I unknowingly realized that translating this book has taken one fifth of my life." The thought of the recent LLM boom suddenly brought tears to my eyes.
Our weekly townhall with cofounder
@0x1plus
goes live tomorrow 7AM PT on X and Discord.
We're hyped to be joined by one of our top players
@PhyzixTeacher
and creator
@inhuman
.
Join us for quality game commentaries, upcoming roadmap alpha, and surprise raffles.
Scalability solutions are cool, but why do we need ultra-fast blockchains at the first place? I wrote some thoughts over the past week for entertainment 👇
@hosseeb
"Bad gamefi is using financial speculation as a substitute for fun. Blockchain games need to be fun as games" - approx quote I've said many times
I believe a similar thing for crypto social.
Registering a prediction: farcaster and lens will NOT be deserted in 4 months, or 1 yr.
Turns out LogSeq + Apple Notes (horizontal knowledge organization by topic and/or date) works way better for me than Notion (vertical knowledge organization with unbounded hierarchy). Creating docs inside docs can be such an ephemeral and counterproductive desire by the brain.
Texas Hold'em and Mahjong, the world's two most popular real money games, were both invented decades/centuries ago before the Information Age. Who's ready for something new?
3. Openness (aka. Permissionlessness)
All player actions — playing, trading, forking, modding, collaboration in the form of guilds — are available to anyone in the community.
📜🏰
We believe that treaties offer one of the most compelling answers to “why onchain game”. Dive into this guide by
@Modeo_C
on how treaties meaningfully improve what traditional games miss
Mind-blown by how vacuum tubes could have competed against transistors, and only a human coincidence made it not happen.
Even on a century-based scale, history does NOT move a certain way on its own. It moves because of specific humans and their choices.
Can't believe
@atari
celebrated its 50th birthday just over a month ago. Bought T-shirt this morning when I realized.
Fun fact
#1
: Wade's the CEO and Nolan's the founder. Reminds me of
@readyplayerone
.
Fun fact
#2
: It is still in business (in fact, now a web3 business).
Favorite quote by
@0x1plus
"In my view, if you're a company operating in the on-chain gaming space today and you're not investing in infrastructure, it likely means you're not innovating"
Very keen observation
@d20_eth
! Diplomacy the board game was indeed one of the big inspirations for designing Duper. The team loves the model of Diplomacy, but wanted to
1. Drastically shorten the playtime
2. Add structure to the objective but preserve win-win scenarios
3. Bring
Alpha leak time🚨
Today we give a sneak peak of our new custom on-chain game infra featuring
⚡️Massively parallelized ECS built into the chain
⚡️High frequency game tick with complex logic
⚡️Custom stateful precompiles
⚡️Built-in networking layer
⚡️EVM compatible. UGC ready
Excited to drop a new article on the inner workings of treaties! The time to express and enforce social agreements through code is finally here.
Stay tuned in the next few weeks 🗺️ And happy New Year!
On-chain ECS data, integrated token standards, player permissioning, treaty walkthrough
In this post we take a look under-the-hood on how Treaty is built.
How does our current game initialize a large map with coordinates within a short period of time? Check out article👇 and let us know if you have better ideas.
The problem with “web3 gaming is the next free-to-play” argument is that free-to-play is “free”, but blockchain gaming today is anything but free. Don't blame the gamers; name one precedent where a paid item wins more sympathy than its free counterpart, all else being equal.