I've been looking into Ethereum based games lately. Seems like a new one is popping up every week. Most of the games are simple collect a unique item or hotpotato games.

CryptoCities

A couple of weeks ago I checked out CryptoCities.net and immediately when landing on the main page got a good feeling for it. Why? Well, the simple reason was that I like the design of the game. Nice design tells you that the creators at least made an effort.

The main page starts out with telling you that this is Phase 1: Discovery. Later the game will move on to Phase 2: Games Integrating. This is, of course, interesting because the developers are eager to let you know that what you currently see is not what you'll always get. At phase 2 other developers can integrate with CryptoCities and that could expand it to an ecosystem.

I also noticed that the game has two dimensions.

• The Marketplace, where you can buy and sell cities, is the first. Here you buy cities and the price is set by the players. If you buy a city it'll be off the market and to put it back on you'll need to set a price.
• Premium, where you buy countries, continents, and the world, is the second. No, I didn't forget to include sell countries because the premium items work like the more traditional Ethereum games where you buy and the item is immediately for sale at an increased price.

These two dimensions hint about some bigger plans - and I like the thought of the devs having bigger plans. Other hints about upcoming features is rent and country dividends as you can see in these pictures taken from the webpage.

The features page also has a section for the Feature Tree with a lot of resources and these same resources show up in a random way for some cities when discovered. Resources are pretty much useless now unless you find a "resource" that is one of the rare Ethereum bounties. I'm looking forward to getting to know what resources will be used for in a future release.

All of these things got me thinking about some sort of strategy game with cities, resources, and countries perhaps like a simple Civilization game or something like Catan on a bigger scale. I might be delusional, but id didn't take my brain too long of a time to convince me to give it a go.

Civilization VI and Settlers of Catan

So I joined the game's Discord and did my first purchase of a level 1 city, just to try out the game. Having a level 1 city let me do a discovery which I promptly started.

Higher level discoveries will require a certain number of previous discoveries as well as city points. Well, no point in diving into the details since it's quite well described on the Discovery page. You'll see exactly what you need. This wasn't the case when I started out btw, then the required points were quite opaque so I made the mistake of selling to many of my cities at one time and ended up having to buy one back to be able to continue. That did, however, got me to ask the developer about showing more info or some kind of warning to stop that from happening. Others probably asked for that as well since we now have the requirements spelled out for us in a very clear way. This, responsive devs, is actually a very important point.

Developers, developers, developers

The developers (I'm actually not sure if it's one developer or several) are very responsive and active in the Discord channels. If you join Discord, you'll immediately see plenty of channels with different topics with plenty of good discussions going on. This should not be overlooked. A healthy community is very important and having a responsive and polite team is a huge part of this. Pretty impressive.

I'm also impressed with the pace of change to the game during the 1+ week I've been part of it. I'm a developer myself and when I have a fun project to work on it's quite easy to churn out features at a good pace. On the other hand, if the project is not so much fun then it's a much slower process. I can tell that the devs are having fun with this because they are engaged in discussions and releasing improvements and new features at a really good pace! Take a look at the Discord announcements channel if you don't believe me :)

It's all good then?

By now this probably reads like an ad for this game. However, of course, there are things I don't like. Would be pretty strange otherwise.

The main thing is shared with the rest of the Ethereum games. That's the ridiculous prices of course. It might not sound like much to pay the tiny amount of 0.03 for a level 5 city like Whitwarta in the game until you do the conversion. The exchange rate according to Coinmarketcap is 1 ETH = USD 863 = EUR 700 today. Which means that 0.03 ETH is USD 26 and EUR 21! Now keep in mind that a level 5 city is nothing. Whitwarta (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitwarta,_South_Australia) is a tiny place in the real world and this costs as much as a full game on for example Steam or several mobile games. Cities go up to level 50 and they will be more unique, have more resources and probably higher prices. Not to mention countries, continents and the world. Well, the game is only in its infancy and we have a second phase to look forward to so there might be a future for players with less money which I would be happy to see.

There is also the concern that smaller cities will be worthless. We, the players, don't know what will happen when the discovery phase is over, but I'm a bit worried about the small cities. A couple of days ago there was a competition to "consume" a city as a lottery ticket. One idea reason stated by the devs was that it's a good thing to burn some of the small supply and that there might be more competitions like this in the future. Does that mean that there will be no point for the small cities in the next phase and thus leave out players with small amounts of Ether? Well, we'll see about that as well. Hopefully, it's not the case!

And the last critical thing should probably not actually be criticism. It's the lack of actual gameplay. I want a fun game to play, but yes I know. The game is in early development and this is just the beginning so I'll not complain about that for a long time :)

The good and the bad considered, there is more potential in this game than I've seen in any other Ethereum game. That said, it still got a long way to go to face "real" games, either be it board games or computer games. However, I wouldn't put in this much effort into thinking about and writing about the game unless I liked it and the community.

I honestly think this will be one of the winners in the long run!

Website: https://cryptocities.net
Discord: https://discord.gg/P6EbeUK

A good getting started guide: https://steemit.com/games/@ethgames/what-is-cryptocities-net