Americans Angry Play to Earn Gods Unchained Token Blocking USA

Americans visiting the whitepaper link get the above nice image telling them “the page is not available for visitors from the US for the time being.”

The anger is palpable. These games may lose a lot of money, enough to even make a living some speculate by playing this somewhat addictive card game while earning token rewards.

Blame SEC, they’re told. Go protest in front of the whitehouse. Write to your Congressman. Join the XRP guys in front of SEC HQ. Yet one has to feel for the people caught in these chains.

“Can someone email me the white paper pdf? Going to post on the internetz for my fellow peasant Americans to read,” someone says.

Gods Unchained claims to have more than 450,000 registered users. More than $10 million has been earned in total revenue to date as of July 2021, based on 880,000 trades with total volume at $23 million.

The new $GODS toke is “designed to become the core in-game currency for Gods Unchained,” they say. 34% of a 500 million total supply, so 170 million, will be given to gamers over six years in a play to earn airdrop.

Those god tokens can then be used to craft and purchase NFTs which can be sold for eth or to expand the game deck.

“$GODS tokens are designed to exist at the heart of the economy, being used by players to purchase new card packs and chests, craft their own NFT cards, and earn staking rewards,” they say.

What’s more, this is L2 through ImmutableX which is having its own airdrop of sorts to popularize the adoption of second layer scaling for NFTs. They say:

“Gods Unchained digital assets live on Immutable X, Ethereum’s first zero-knowledge rollup (zk-rollup) for NFTs.

Immutable X allows for gas-free NFT minting and trading at scale with instant trade confirmation. This creates a massively improved user experience and enables the high volume trading of low cost assets, a key feature of Gods Unchained.

Over 650,000 Gods Unchained NFT secondary trades have been made since migrating to Immutable X in late June 2021. In contrast, the entire Ethereum mainnet NFT trading volume amounted to 420,577 trades (source: nonfungible.com).

Importantly, Immutable X does not compromise the security of users’ assets, ensuring that players truly own their assets on Immutable X.”

The only other thing relevant to these American peasants may be the revenue stream. Gods Unchained tells to Europeans:

“A royalty fee is to be introduced to all Gods Unchained trades in any Immutable X powered marketplace: such as TokenTrove, OpenSea or the official Immutable X Marketplace. As our trading economy grows, our revenue in royalty fees will grow alongside it.

We foresee this becoming a primary source of revenue in the not too distant future. The development of this feature is completed and will be implemented within the ecosystem very soon.”

Presumably then token holders get a bit of that and so you go from an addicted peasant gamer to a European platform owner.

And the game is addictive. It can best be described as a mixture of poker and chess, but with cards. Each can select 30 cards from a selection of maybe 150 cards, but many of them are grayed out and unlocked through new packs given after game play experience, leveling up so to speak.

Each card has a mana cost, a strength and then a health. When the round starts, you have 3 cards, with one new card given each round. The round starts with 1 mana, so you can only put on the board cards that have 1 mana cost. The second round is then 2 mana point and so on.

You may not have any 1 mana cards on the first round, while the opponent does, and so there’s an element of luck, but also strategy, with the opponent usually being a real person.

Because of that complexity, it is fairly addictive. Not totally addictive in that you can’t put the game down because at some point all that strategizing probably tires you, but addictive in as far as the next day you want to play again.

The game can have some improvements however. Arguably it is better to go second because you get 3 extra mana points, one unlockable in each round. So if you don’t have a 1 mana card, you can unlock one mana and potentially get the upper hand.

In addition, more experienced players get better cards through leveling up unlocking, yet they can be paired with novices which still can win due to that luck element, but it’s obviously not quite an even playing field. However, it is not off balance either because you still have a decent chance of winning.

The cards can be NFTs. You can buy the NFTs yourself, and they’re the usual eth NFTs technically speaking. But in the game play you get a deck, which you can customize, and the NFTs you own might not quite play a role in that deck depending on which god you choose and what level of gameplay you have.

There’s quite a few gods, each god has their own soldiers so to speak, their own cards, and so making the dual battle more interesting and often full of surprises.

It’s a cool game thus, maybe 7 out of 10 as it’s a decent replacement for any chess player and maybe any poker addict with Gods Unchained probably pretty useful to get off tilt.

That’s especially once there’s play to earn, but even now the game does stand out a bit in that it does have users. Pairing is usually within a second, and usually it’s a different player at the other end, so this has gotten off the bootstrapping stage with the gameplay then from a UI perspective being as smooth as any game, though your fan might spin a bit or your SSD, but on decent laptops, it shouldn’t crash even with many tabs and windows open for other things, like bitcorn’s price or chat.

The game itself unfortunately doesn’t have a chat. Maybe to avoid collusion but sometime you miss it especially if the other player is taking forever, although there is a timer and ‘forever’ is about one minute.

This is one of the OG games as well. Maybe even the first blockchain game to still be, at full swing it looks like as it seems set to even take off really now that it appears all bootstrapped.

Hence after missing on the $1 billion dYdX airdrop, one can’t be very surprised at the anger of Americans who may keep missing thanks to daddy’s ‘protection’ from cool and fun stuff.

It just means more for Europeans, with it unclear whether this stuff goes into GDP, but a lot of euros should be feeling a bit less europoor and more civilized unlike their ‘peasant’ cousins that keep barking on about century old laws made at a time when black people had to give up their bus seat, as well as at a time when riding a horse through Times Square was normal.