👽 [ANN] Age of Chains: Bitcoin NFT Trading Card Game since 2016 👽

[domob]

How is the structure of the game actually planned to be?  Have you considered making the game playable in a decentralsed or partially decentralised P2P fashion in addition to providing a server for it?

Also, what do you think about making the game-play provably fair (can also be done with a central server)?  Using commit/reveal schemes, one can implement provably fair, trustless and decentralised card shuffling between two players.  I think that adding this will give the game a bit more "blockchain" touch (even though a blockchain is not the technical solution here).

[m4nki]

How is the structure of the game actually planned to be?  Have you considered making the game playable in a decentralsed or partially decentralised P2P fashion in addition to providing a server for it?

Also, what do you think about making the game-play provably fair (can also be done with a central server)?  Using commit/reveal schemes, one can implement provably fair, trustless and decentralised card shuffling between two players.  I think that adding this will give the game a bit more "blockchain" touch (even though a blockchain is not the technical solution here).

By structure do you mean the game mechanics? It has similarities with MTG and Hearthstone but we want to have some uniqueness to it, too. So far, we have restrained from making all of our game mechanics publicly available to protect our IP as there are so many copycats in crypto. The digital prototype will provide more clarity for our core community about the gameplay. Also, I am more than happy to show you or anyone else how an AoC match feels through a physical playtesting session. We want Age of Chains to teach people a little about the crypto universe, making it nice to play both for people that have not much of a clue about crypto but are interested, as well as for crypto OGs.

I know from snailbrain that with XAYA you are looking to enable a more decentralized way of creating the game instead of running it on a server. It certainly sounds interesting but for now we just want to do it the simple, known way. One could think about migrating the backend at a later stage but this is still far out.

Having provably fair card shuffling certainly would be great. Since I am not a coder I do not know how easy that is to implement but I will talk with our CTO. Once we are at that stage and if he has questions about how to get that done, I will come back to you to ask for more details!

[domob]

I know from snailbrain that with XAYA you are looking to enable a more decentralized way of creating the game instead of running it on a server. It certainly sounds interesting but for now we just want to do it the simple, known way. One could think about migrating the backend at a later stage but this is still far out.

I think what we try to do with Xaya is a bit different, though.  Xaya is all about decentralised, global game state and mechanics - in terms of AoC, that would be more the part that Counterparty does for you.  (And in fact, something like Counterparty could be implemented easily using Xaya.)

For simple player-vs-player games that are not about money as in AoC, you don't need a blockchain at all (except for tracking of card ownership).  You could still build the game in a way that makes the games played in a P2P fashion, simply by having the two players connect directly to each other rather than your server.

But I agree that this is certainly not something very important, especially not for the start.  At a later stage, I think it would fit well to the general decentralisation theme that you try to teach also with AoC, though.  After all, you're a citizen of Milky Way and not Andromeda I assume?

Having provably fair card shuffling certainly would be great. Since I am not a coder I do not know how easy that is to implement but I will talk with our CTO. Once we are at that stage and if he has questions about how to get that done, I will come back to you to ask for more details!

I'm not a cryptographer myself, but I've spent quite some time thinking about provable fairness and random numbers in that context for Huntercoin and Xaya (and discussed with snailbrain).  I don't think that provably-fair card shuffling is hard to implement, and there are multiple approaches to achieve it; so yes, let me know if you think you are ready for it and I'm happy to discuss that with your CTO!  (But also here, I don't think this is important for the start - it can be added later anytime you feel like it.)

[domob]

Will the series-2 presale end at a certain time and unsold cards be burnt as with series 1?  If so, when will that be?

[m4nki]

I know from snailbrain that with XAYA you are looking to enable a more decentralized way of creating the game instead of running it on a server. It certainly sounds interesting but for now we just want to do it the simple, known way. One could think about migrating the backend at a later stage but this is still far out.

I think what we try to do with Xaya is a bit different, though.  Xaya is all about decentralised, global game state and mechanics - in terms of AoC, that would be more the part that Counterparty does for you.  (And in fact, something like Counterparty could be implemented easily using Xaya.)

For simple player-vs-player games that are not about money as in AoC, you don't need a blockchain at all (except for tracking of card ownership).  You could still build the game in a way that makes the games played in a P2P fashion, simply by having the two players connect directly to each other rather than your server.

But I agree that this is certainly not something very important, especially not for the start.  At a later stage, I think it would fit well to the general decentralisation theme that you try to teach also with AoC, though.  After all, you're a citizen of Milky Way and not Andromeda I assume?

Having provably fair card shuffling certainly would be great. Since I am not a coder I do not know how easy that is to implement but I will talk with our CTO. Once we are at that stage and if he has questions about how to get that done, I will come back to you to ask for more details!

I'm not a cryptographer myself, but I've spent quite some time thinking about provable fairness and random numbers in that context for Huntercoin and Xaya (and discussed with snailbrain).  I don't think that provably-fair card shuffling is hard to implement, and there are multiple approaches to achieve it; so yes, let me know if you think you are ready for it and I'm happy to discuss that with your CTO!  (But also here, I don't think this is important for the start - it can be added later anytime you feel like it.)

Thank you, domob and sorry for the late reply. These are all great thoughts you have and I hope we will be able to implement some of the ideas.

Will the series-2 presale end at a certain time and unsold cards be burnt as with series 1?  If so, when will that be?

Great question! Yes, the Series 2 presale will probably end at some point, but first some things have to happen: First, we want to get to 20 published cards and then start our marketing efforts - the burn of the unsold Series 2 presale cards will follow, assuming we hit certain funding milestones through the sale.

Priority number one for us in the moment is to receive funding in order to move the technical development of the game forward. The immediate burn of Series 1 cards from last year left us with a lot of time with little revenue, as our card creation speed slowed down and people have been buying Series 1 cards only from other card holders, not us. We have to make sure we obtain the necessary funding (hopefully through a seed round) and depending on how quickly we achieve that, we will be more flexible with card burns and so forth.

Tomorrow I will be presenting Age of Chains at the Blockchain Masters Cologne event. It would be amazing to see you there!

[meyer]

good luck in Cologne 

[domob]

Great question! Yes, the Series 2 presale will probably end at some point, but first some things have to happen: First, we want to get to 20 published cards and then start our marketing efforts - the burn of the unsold Series 2 presale cards will follow, assuming we hit certain funding milestones through the sale.

Priority number one for us in the moment is to receive funding in order to move the technical development of the game forward. The immediate burn of Series 1 cards from last year left us with a lot of time with little revenue, as our card creation speed slowed down and people have been buying Series 1 cards only from other card holders, not us. We have to make sure we obtain the necessary funding (hopefully through a seed round) and depending on how quickly we achieve that, we will be more flexible with card burns and so forth.

Yes, I fully understand that - make sure you are able to proceed with the project!  I was just curious to hear about your further presale plans.

By the way, for you and anyone else who might be interested in participating in the presale:  Unfortunately I had a relatively bad experience with my latest orders through Tokenmarkets.  They failed to recognise my payment at first, and then they screwed up the token withdrawal (it tried to send 100,000,000x the correct amount, which then obviously failed).  Their support always fixed things for me and in the end everything was fine, but it was some hassle.  I hope they will be able to fix their stuff soon, but perhaps be careful and just contact support if something is wrong (and they will fix it).

For future card releases, would it be an option to (also) sell some through the Counterparty DEX instead of only through Tokenmarkets?  That is of course not as nice as the shop, but it would make it possible for power users to buy without an intermediary that can screw up like that.  And perhaps you can save some fees on the way as well.

[domob]

How's the project going?

[m4nki]

How's the project going?

Hey domob!

Thank you so much for your comments in this thread and sorry for the delay in response and the hassle you have been experiencing going through Tokenmarkets as a service. Please PM me your Counterparty address, so I can transfer you some Age of Chains cards as an apology. Tokenmarkets has shut down their service as of end of last year and due to your feedback as well as the shut down of Tokenmarkets, we will switch back to the Counterparty DEX as the main distribution method for our cards.

I have posted an update on the Telegram group a while back which pretty much still sums up our current situation quite well:

The progress of the game currently mainly happens on the side of character creation as well as the 3D Arena. We have the game mechanics set up but need funding to involve our CTO as he currently has to maintain a full-time position in a different company to sustain a living. Unfortunately, until then, the digital realization of the game is on hold. We need to be able to pay salaries not only to our CTO but also to being able to build a team around him, such as a back-end focused developer since the main specialization of Enrico is the front-end. We want to build the game from the getgo in a scalable way and Enrico has stated he needs development help in order to proceed. Last year, I have been mostly living from my savings and have been financing all costs related to the project from my own savings and I am more than willing to continue so in the future but it is mainly sufficient for paying the costs associated with tax advisor and to tbe financial authorities but not to build a sustainable technical development team. Other crypto projects raise millions of USD - if we could raise approximately 500k, this would enable us the full realization of the game. I will surely expand the effort in that direction to secure us the needed funding, but first I have to get the accounting side of things straight - the least fun thing about the whole project. Once that part is on solid feet, we will expand our efforts to raise money from angel investors. We also thought about creating a Kickstarter campaign as we can create a lot of nice giveaways for donors.

I hope that the accounting related matters will be finished shortly in the future so that we can again focus more on card releases and speed up things drastically. A continuous card release schedule will help strengthen our position when moving towards raising a seed round involving angel investors.

Rare Digital Arts Festival 2019 in NYC

On some other news, the second Rare Digital Arts Festival in New York City will happen on 18th of May, 2019 and having been a presenting project in the first Rare Digital Arts Festival from January 2018, we are invited to exhibit our art at the show. We hope to be seeing you at the event and possibly play a round of Age of Chains on the side.

[domob]

Thanks for the update, it is nice to hear the project is progressing along!  It's clear that you can't go as fast without any funding, so I wish you best of luck for getting some seed investment in the future - this is definitely an awesome project.

Yes, I heard about Tokenmarkets shutting down.  You are obviously in no way to blame for that and their hickups (but in the end I didn't lose anything, it was just a hassle to get it fixed by their support!).  Preselling cards through the DEX is certainly a good idea - I'm looking forward to new cards being available that way in the future!

[RivAngE]

I see that Gods Unchained is following a Hearthstone-like approach to their gameplay.
What is your plans? Will you compete with Gods Unchained or are you planning to go in a different path, maybe something like Magic The Gathering, Steam's Artifact or something unique?

[domob]

How is it going?

At Xaya, we have now implemented a first demo version of our off-chain game channels framework: https://medium.com/@XAYA/xayaships-premieres-breakthrough-game-channels-technology-d53c4aadc124

You could use that to implement a truly decentralised and trustless version of Age of Chains if you want.  That would take care of some of the backend stuff for you.

[m4nki]

Thanks for the update, it is nice to hear the project is progressing along!  It's clear that you can't go as fast without any funding, so I wish you best of luck for getting some seed investment in the future - this is definitely an awesome project.

Thank you, domob, I appreciate your kind words! The first step towards possibly receiving funding is to increase our sales. In 2018 we only published two newly created cards and in 2019 we so far have not come out with any new card. This was due to multiple factors, including personal matters, the unclear regulatory landscape,  as well as laying the focus on more fundamental tasks such as the accounting.

Now I am finally on to more interesting tasks, involving new card creations as well as developing physical goods that you will be able to purchase besides the digital cards.

In order to raise funds from angel investors, raising our traction is key and I hope that we are now moving towards further accomplishing this goal.

For each card that we come out with, we are planning physical deluxe boxes. Do you have any wishes on what you would like to see in them? At this stage we are still flexible and posssibly can make adjustments according to your desires.

At Xaya, we have now implemented a first demo version of our off-chain game channels framework: https://medium.com/@XAYA/xayaships-premieres-breakthrough-game-channels-technology-d53c4aadc124

You could use that to implement a truly decentralised and trustless version of Age of Chains if you want.  That would take care of some of the backend stuff for you.

Thank you, for letting us know, domob! I forwarded the information to our CTO.

I see that Gods Unchained is following a Hearthstone-like approach to their gameplay.
What is your plans? Will you compete with Gods Unchained or are you planning to go in a different path, maybe something like Magic The Gathering, Steam's Artifact or something unique?

Age of Chains is truly unique in the way it is being played. Of course, we have been inspired by Hearthstone, Magic: The Gathering and many other non trading card video games but once you are playing it, you will see how it is different than the ones mentioned. At this stage, I restrain from posting too much about the gameplay, as the crypto world is famous for copying whatever they find out there. As we do not have the necessary funding yet that is needed in order to reach maximum development acceleration, I prefer to wait with publishing our game mechanics.

---

I will keep you up to date with more developments coming up!

Best,
m4nki

[domob]

Now I am finally on to more interesting tasks, involving new card creations as well as developing physical goods that you will be able to purchase besides the digital cards.

That sounds great - I'm definitely looking forward to any new card creations!

For each card that we come out with, we are planning physical deluxe boxes. Do you have any wishes on what you would like to see in them? At this stage we are still flexible and posssibly can make adjustments according to your desires.

I don't have any particular suggestions.  Personally I'm a fan of "physical bitcoin"-like products.  But those would present a bit of a dilemma, of course:  If the card is stored on a "physical collectible" like the ones given out in Minsk last year, you ideally don't want to redeem them immediately - but if buying cards is just that, you have to eventually or all cards will be unusable.

What you could perhaps consider is doing batches of "digital" cards together with physical collectibles.  E.g. selling 10 pieces of some card together, including one that is on a physical item and the other nine being sent to the buyer's wallet.  That's just a random thought, though.

[m4nki]

For each card that we come out with, we are planning physical deluxe boxes. Do you have any wishes on what you would like to see in them? At this stage we are still flexible and posssibly can make adjustments according to your desires.

I don't have any particular suggestions.  Personally I'm a fan of "physical bitcoin"-like products.  But those would present a bit of a dilemma, of course:  If the card is stored on a "physical collectible" like the ones given out in Minsk last year, you ideally don't want to redeem them immediately - but if buying cards is just that, you have to eventually or all cards will be unusable.

What you could perhaps consider is doing batches of "digital" cards together with physical collectibles.  E.g. selling 10 pieces of some card together, including one that is on a physical item and the other nine being sent to the buyer's wallet.  That's just a random thought, though.

I agree, the wax sealed paper wallet cards are more to be seen as a collectible and while it still is possible to "redeem" the card by breaking the wax seal in order to gain access to the private key, it would take away some of the magic of the physical collectible.

Your idea to mix digital card purchases with physical collectibles certainly is interesting. I think we are going to try that out in the future. Overall, we have now put more focus into creating physical trading cards with neat holographic effects but we still have to finish development of it.

The card sale has not resumed yet but we are planning to do so this year. There were a lot of bureaucratic things to take care of, which led to a decrease of our creative work, but we have found our way through it and more motivating work is ahead now.

We appreciate your patience!

👽

[m4nki]

New Blog Post:
Journey towards Intergalactic Blockchain Trading Cards



Since the inception of Age of Chains in November 2016, our vision to create an intergalactic video game with blockchain trading cards,
designed to bring peace and harmony to our world, has been guiding us through the unknown terrain that we entered.
At that time, blockchain wasn’t a mainstream topic yet and we intuitively worked our way towards realizing our vision.

--->  Read Further  <---

[m4nki]

Twitter Community Contest

We launched a community contest on Twitter!

Your chance to win a Battlefield Harvester card!



Click to participate!

[m4nki]

Card Shop Opening

We finally have the Age of Chains Card Shop up and running!

--> Read Blog Post <--

--> The shop release coverage <--

Become a collector of the finest blockchain trading cards on the market.

--> Start Collecting <--

[m4nki]

New Blog Post:

Crypto Collectibles in the Sports Industry

Recently, more and more key players of the sports are announcing their plans to release
their trading cards as crypto collectibles.
This comes at no surprise, considering that the sports industry served as an attractive collector’s market for a long time.
In particular, trading cards have been very sought-after since the very early days.

--->  Read Further  <---

[m4nki]

Card Release

Series 2
Card 016:
Xanthrax
Card Amount
Total: 14.000 Presale: 3.000

-----> Get Xanthrax <-----

Xanthrax climbed his way to the top by ascending into the highest form of the Maitory, a Czar Hadir. He became a being which could ingest and produce venom, toxins and gases at will.
It is rumoured that the extinction of the Olomy species was caused by Xanthrax alone as he created and released a nerve poison into the groundwater based on the Olomys DNA.

Learn more.

Only 14.000 Xanthrax blockchain cards will ever exist.

The distribution of the card is organized as follows:

1000 cards for 2€ each.
1000 cards for 4€ each.
1000 cards for 10€ each.

200 cards will be distributed among the Age of Chains team.

Unsold cards are going to become accessible through promotional activities, physical collectibles, community rewards or by purchasing card packs.


The card can be bought through the Age of Chains Card Shop.

Secure yourself one of the few available Xanthrax cards now:


-----> Get Xanthrax <-----