Gods Unchained is a new digital trading card game, similar to that of Hearthstone (or Magic the Gathering, Pokemon, Yu-gi-oh, etc).
As a game, it is *very* similar to Hearthstone - each "God" has cards that can only be used by that God, and each God has unique powers. Players start with 30 health, a deck of 30 cards, and has mana that gets unlocked each turn. Cards can be spells, "creatures" (or minions), or weapons. It also comes with a handful of starter decks for each God. Each deck is actually quite balanced and capable, as one streamer demonstrated advancing to the top competitive rank with each starter deck.
What differentiates it from Hearthstone are subtle, but significant.
- The mana curve is not exactly "one mana each turn" as it is in Heartstone. Instead, once you reach 5 mana, 6 mana takes two turns, and 7, 8, and 9 mana each take 3 turns. This gives greater emphasis on the "mid-game" cards, and allows making the 8 and 9 a little beefier.
- Each god has 4 unique abilities (instead of one on HS) you can choose from at the beginning of a match (once chosen, that ability remains the same throughout the match). This means you can build decks not just around Gods, but around specific God powers, and also means, you can change up your god power depending on which God you're facing, if you suspect you need change something up.
- Cards, once purchased, are tied to the Ethereum blockchain. This means you truly own the cards you've bought. Unlike Hearthstone, where a user does not really own their cards, cards purchased in Gods Unchained are locked to the blockchain, and are therefore transferable between accounts, and Gods Unchained cannot change that.
- As a side effect of this, there is no disenchanting or "dusting" of cards. Instead, cards can be bought and sold as singles on websites like https://tokentrove.io/GodsUnchainedCards or if you're savvy enough, by transferring them directly on the Ethereum blockchain. This fundamentally changes the dynamic of the game economy, as there is now a proper after-market for cards, and could potentially allow you to make some money from your cards.
- There is the concept of "Fusing" cards, which allows you to take duplicate cards and fuse them together to produce the same card with a higher "quality" - basically like taking two standard cards, combining them to become a "foil" card. This doesn't affect gameplay at all, and is purely visual.
- The site http://gudecks.com has a pretty comprehensive database of users, and matches. I don't know how far back the data goes, but you can look up every user (I'm currently ranked about 5,000 out of about 12,000 there), and clicking my profile shows every match I've ever played (I only started about a week ago), each match showing the user they played, the god they played, which god power, and the mana curve of their deck. The current top-ranked player (username: saints) shows about 260 matches going back around 4 weeks. So it seems pretty comprehensive.
Overall, I've enjoyed playing Gods Unchained so far, have bought a few more than a handful of packs (I'm a cryptocurrency junkie, so I enjoy being able to actually do things with my crypto), and the experience overall has been enjoyable.
The game is still in beta, so there are definitely some bugs, but a few things I recommend doing if you're interested:
- Get the game and start playing with the starter decks. If you find you really like it, advance to the next 2 steps,
- Get your hands on some Ethereum. I personally prefer using coinbase.com (being US based), and have used them for all my crypto-buying needs for 5 years now.
- Use Brave Browser (brave.com) - this is similar to Chrome, except it blocks ads by default, has the option to display its own ads (and pays you for it), and also has a crypto or ethereum wallet built in (this greatly simplifies the purchase process).
If you're interested in the game, head over to
GodsUnchained.com (this is a referral link where if you buy stuff, I get little bonuses), but if you don't want to help me get free stuff, that's cool too, head to godsunchained.com directly and get started.
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