There’s a tremendous amount of hype around blockchain games this year. Let’s talk about five of the best NFT games of 2021 so far.
Sorare
First on our list is the most popular card game in the NFT space—Sorare. It’s a Paris-based NFT fantasy sports game that isn’t just about playing football. This game basically allows you to manage and construct your own virtual squad of virtual playing card NFTs that feature real-life football players. You collect nonfungible token player cards in the game, which you will use to compete in fantasy football tournaments for ETH prizes and rare cards.
That could sound odd, sure. However, SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 recently led a $680 million Series B round in Sorare. This valued Sorare a new valuation of $4.3 billion. And it’s not just the VCs that have invested in sorare either. Many key players in the game have invested, including Antoine Griezman, Ceasar Azpilicueta, Rio Ferdinand, and Gerard Pique.
Gameplay
So, how do you play?
You pick a team of five players and enter them into a league. You’ll need a goalkeeper, a defender, a midfielder, a forward, and an extra player who can play in any position.
How do you earn points to win those top prizes?
You will then earn points based on the players’ performance in real-life weekly football matches. In other words, the better your players perform in real football matches, the better the score they will gain in the league you’re competing in. The teams with the most scores win the league and bag the top prizes, including rare cards and ETH.
There are three levels in this game: unique, extremely rare, and rare. As per standard NFT game mechanics, you get total possession of a card when you collect it. This means that you can also sell your cards to other players. Some can be sold for over $100k in ETH.
But how rare are these special player cards?
Each player within the game will have one unique card, 10 super rares, 100 rares, and 1000 limited cards minted in a given season. Naturally, the better the card, the better it is in-game.
When you sign up to sorare, you pick a card and get 11 common cards. There are a host of leagues you can join to compete for prizes that include the likes of the starter league rookie, global all-star league, challenger Europe league, and many more.
Each of these leagues will have a different prize pool, and every league, apart from the rookie league and special weekly one, has different divisions. Division one will have the most challenging competition and bigger prizes, whereas division five will be weaker but offer smaller prize pools. The starter rookie league allows you to win a tier-1 rare card for first, a tier 2 for coming second or third, and the other prizes listed in the game.
Tougher leagues have even bigger prizes. The global all-star league offers a star super rare card for first and over $3000 in Ethereum. That super rare could be a Christiano Ronaldo—a copy of which was sold in the marketplace for a staggering €290,000.
Is it easy to win in this game?
Even though Sorare is technically a play-to-earn game, you’re less likely to win much in terms of valuable cards that are tradable on the Sorare marketplace. Likewise, those ETH prizes are hard to bag unless you buy a solid team to start with.
Of course, this game is not for everyone, but if you’re the type of person who loves football and crypto, then we’d certainly recommend Sorare for you to try out.
Decentraland
Decentraland is an Ethereum-supported massive virtual reality platform where users can buy, experience, create, and monetize in-game content. This is specially built for content creators and businesses or anyone seeking business opportunities, a new artistic medium, or a source of entertainment.
Gameplay
In the game, you can buy plots of land to build on and create whatever you want. You can purchase accessories or utilities for your character using MANA, the game’s currency. One of the most popular ways of utilizing land in this game is to build an NFT art museum where you can display your NFT collection to flex your NFT pieces, sell them, or both. If you think about it, this is a brilliant and very excellent way to sell your NFTs, if you have one. You don’t only get to play mini-games, socialize with other users, watch live vents, and earn from the in-game items; you could also market your existing NFTs. As a matter of fact, when NFT art started becoming popular, MANA multiplied five times in price due to it being a perfect setting for digital art.
It’s important to note, though, that the land can be expensive. The entire Decentraland map comprises 90,601 individual plots of LAND, each represented by an NFT. Most of the landowners have just one parcel. Some owned chunks of 5 to 10 parcels, and others owned in mass amounts by organizations.
Decentraland’s MANA currency has solid tokenomics (from the two words “token” and “economics”) with a properly decentralized supply, and this gives the project trust. On top of that, this game has many solid partnerships and a small but strong active user base. So, there’s no question that Decentraland is one of the best in blockchain gaming and worth looking further into.
The Sandbox
Another popular metaverse that tops the NFT gaming space is The Sandbox. In this voxel-based game metaverse, users can create and trade virtual assets. It’s very similar to Decentraland, where players can do or build anything they want. Sandbox, however, started off as a simple community-driven pixel art game that quickly gained traction in the years following its beta launch. We can think of it as a blockchain-based version of popular games like Minecraft and Roblox that allows users to modify and monetize voxel objects.
The game has its own universal currency called SAND, an ERC-20 coin. Users can use this to buy in-game products from the platform’s marketplace and sell land or items. Besides SAND, there are also LAND tokens. These are NFT tokens that are among the most valuable and sought-after assets in the Sandbox game. A total of $8.5 million in LAND transactions was completed in April alone. And like Sorare, The Sandbox also closed a funding round led by SoftBank, which amounted to $93 million. Many NFT gamers view this as a huge step to the metaverse.
Gameplay
Like Decentraland, you can buy plots of land in this game. These lands act as pieces of digital real estate that are tradable as NFTs. You can charge other players SAND tokens to visit your land and enjoy the cool experiences you built on your land, like a museum or an amusement park. As for the tools to create those, the platforms provide the items necessary for creating and animating objects, which can then be sold on markets. This is what allows users to develop and play their own games.
The Sandbox has quite a range of universes to choose from, including Walking Dead Land, Summer Jam Land, and even Snoop Dogg Land. You can socialize with other players in-game and play mini-games present in any of these universes or on your own.
Among the many notable features of this game, what sticks out the most is how anyone can use their community’s free software to build assets for the game. They can then sell those assets in the in-game market as an nft for SAND token. This feat allows everyone to earn money.
Aside from having some solid partnerships that include Care Bears, The Smurfs, The Walking Dead, and even Atari, Sandbox has something else that appeals to most players—the user experience. The game’s graphics are pretty straightforward with a Minecraft-inspired style. All the user interfaces are easy to understand. This means that anyone can play this game with or without experience. On top of this, consistent graphics gives the entire game, including everything that the community makes, a feeling of one cohesive piece.
As far as virtual open-world games go, this game is definitely a go-to investment for the NFT space right now.
Cryptoblades
Suppose an open-world space is not up your street, and you’re more into battle games. In that case, you’d probably enjoy Cryptoblades—a dungeons-and-dragonesque role-playing game. Here, you can earn skill tokens by crushing your enemies, going on a raiding party with friends, and staking your gains.
Cryptoblades is a play-to-earn role-playing game (RPG) developed by Riveted Games on the Binance Smart Chain platform. As with every RPG, powerful weapons can be used by your character to give you the edge in combat. Therefore, you will be acquiring legendary blades and powerful heroes to wield them. These special items can be used in-game or traded on the Cryptoblades marketplace. But not only these assets can you monetize in the game. Your very own character will be issued as an NFT too.
The native token of this game is SKILL, which you can earn by participating in combat using your digital assets. You can mint these assets in the ERC-721 standard and trade them on the Cryptoblades marketplace.
Gameplay
There are four different elements within the game: fire, earth, lightning, and water. These elements are assigned to characters, weapons, attributes, and enemies. Those elements reduce or increase the chances of victory in battle according to their properties—for example, fire is weak against water, water is weak against lightning, and so on. You will then go on to obtain SKILL tokens or rare NFTs as you fight enemies.
One important thing to note here is that on-chain crypto games like this one are not for everyone. Although Cryptoblades is easy to play for some D&D fans out there, it can be too much for others. After all, setting up Metamask and sending gas every time you want to fight in-game can be annoying to some players.
F1® Delta Time
Coming in last but not least on this list is F1 Delta Time. Developed and operated by Animoca Brands, this game runs on the Ethereum blockchain and uses the ERC-721 and ERC-20 standards. Everything in the game—from drivers and racing cars to engines and tires—exists as NFTs with their own attributes. You can buy your F1 cars, drivers, driver equipment, racing parts, tires, and everything else in OpenSea, the largest and currently most popular NFT marketplace.
Did we forget to mention that the game is authorized by F1 Formula One Racing League itself? This is probably why the game has been drawing Formula One fans into the NFT space since its release. In fact, the platform records more than $1M in weekly trading volumes. It also records up to 1000 new users every week.
Gameplay
F1 Delta Time is not just made for players who love and enjoy racing games but also those who simply want to enjoy an easy yet fun game. This is why this play-to-earn game has been one of the top dogs this year.
Players participate in racing tournaments using digital items, including cars, trinkets, race tracks, drivers, and tires. These collectibles come in different racing qualities and can only be minted in limited amounts.
The tradable collectibles come in rarity tiers: Common, Epic, Legendary, and Apex. All of these can be purchased using REVV—the game’s native token players use for tournaments. They can also be sold on secondary NFT marketplaces for potential gains.
It’s relatively easy to become an F1 driver and form a team in this game, but you will still need to buy your car and configure it. That aside, you will also have to familiarize yourself with the track and do some practices after the time trial.
Summing Up
NFT games are a fun blend of thrill and potential profitability, and these are just a few of the best ones we found this year. If you don’t have the budget to start yet or you simply want to look around first, check out our post on the top free NFT games you can play now.
Like any other type of game, it’s essential to learn the mechanics of the NFT game of your choice and how the NFT space runs. Being knowledgeable about this crypto space, in general, will get you a long way beyond the smooth gameplay and transactions.
Have any other topics you want us to write about? Hit us up about it through the comments below! Stay tuned with us and keep you updated with the latest news on NFT games.
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