The award-winning game "Crypto Rumble" from the BNB Chain hackathon, another hit in the Web3 gaming sector?

In November last year, the BNB Chain held a 3-day hackathon in Istanbul, where the Zypher Network team won first place with their game "Crypto Rumble."

Recently, with new developments in the Zypher Network ecosystem, the first high-performance Layer 3 game Zytron Pioneer, based on the Layer 2 network Linea and driven by zero-knowledge proofs (ZK), has officially launched. "Crypto Rumble" has been endowed with many new elements on this brand-new platform and is officially released as the first heavyweight game.

"Crypto Rumble" is a highly entertaining card RPG + match-3 blockchain game. Unlike other games in the same category, it truly achieves a Web3 orientation through the server abstraction solution based on the Zypher Network.

The game is fully built on-chain and does not rely on centralized servers during operation. Game assets, processes, and outcomes can be verified on the blockchain, ensuring transparency and integrity, providing players with fair, transparent, and true asset ownership.

With the support of Zypher Network, the game itself adopts ZK technology solutions to ensure a secure and verifiable gaming experience. Additionally, the integration of native AA accounts provides a seamless, gas-free on-chain experience, allowing the game to reach a broader player base and breaking the complexity brought by crypto-native features.

"Crypto Rumble" is one of the most representative games in the Zypher Network ecosystem and will also be a new representative of the Web3 gaming paradigm and form. With the official launch of this game, it is expected to lead a new wave of Web3 gaming trends.

The Narrative of "Crypto Rumble"

"Crypto Rumble" is a strategy-based Web3 game that combines two popular gameplay styles: match-3 and SLG. The game logic and rules are not complex, but players need to think deeply about troop deployment and formulate lineup strategies while mastering certain match-3 skills to maximize block elimination with each move.

Before each game round starts, players need to select three heroes from their hero pool as their team members and can choose different equipment from their inventory to provide certain attribute bonuses to the heroes. The ultimate goal of each game round is to defeat the BOSS with different attributes.

At the start of the game, players need to move blocks to eliminate blocks of the same color. When blocks are successfully eliminated, the heroes will take turns attacking the BOSS. The more blocks eliminated, the higher the damage bonus to the BOSS. The battles between players and the BOSS are turn-based; if the player's team defeats the BOSS, they win the round; otherwise, they lose.

Some game levels will limit the number of match-3 moves, and if the player has not defeated the BOSS before exhausting their moves, it is also considered a challenge failure.

Hero Attributes and Equipment

In "Crypto Rumble," there are a total of 9 heroes, divided into three attributes: Mage, Assassin, and Warrior. Each hero has certain data indicators such as attack power, defense power, agility, and stamina. The stamina indicator represents the hero's energy during battles; each attack consumes energy, which will not recover linearly over time. Players need to spend $Diam tokens (in-game tokens) to restore the hero's stamina to ensure they can be used normally in the game.

Heroes have levels (1 to 100), and players need to consume experience points (gained by participating in games and completing tasks) and $Gold assets (in-game assets that can be exchanged for governance token $CR and other tokens) to level up heroes, continuously enhancing their attributes. Additionally, each hero has three qualities: Normal, Elite, and Legendary. Players can choose the same hero to fuse and consume a certain amount of $Diam assets to enhance the quality, which will lead to a qualitative leap in the hero's attributes.

As heroes level up and their qualities improve, players can challenge more difficult levels and gain better gaming experiences and rewards in various game modes.

To obtain heroes, players usually need to purchase mysterious hero boxes with $Diam assets to unlock them. Opening the blind box will randomly yield heroes of three types of attributes, with the quality also being random. (Currently, users can participate in staking to earn blind box rewards in the Crypto Rumble sub-event of Zypher's Treasure Ark Campaign: https://testnet.cryptorumble.io/)

Of course, players can also enhance the combat effectiveness of heroes by equipping them.

"Crypto Rumble" has three types of equipment: hats, weapons, and shoes. Similar to heroes, each piece of equipment also has Normal, Elite, and Legendary qualities. Equipping heroes before the game will enhance certain attributes to varying degrees, and equipment also needs to be obtained from mysterious equipment boxes.

The SLG gameplay of "Crypto Rumble" lies in its setting of hero attributes that counter each other.

The Countering Strategy of Troop Deployment

Similar to heroes, BOSSes also have three different attributes: Mage, Assassin, and Warrior. Different character attributes have countering characteristics. Warriors counter Assassins, Mages counter Warriors, and Assassins counter Mages.

Therefore, when a hero's attribute counters that of the BOSS, it triggers an advantageous confrontation, granting the hero a 50% damage bonus, thus showcasing their natural advantage. Conversely, when a hero faces a BOSS with an attribute that counters them, it triggers a disadvantageous confrontation, and the BOSS will receive a 50% damage reduction, reflecting the difficulty of battling a stronger opponent.

From the player's perspective, when facing different BOSSes, they need to deploy different lineups, and for heroes that can trigger advantageous confrontations against the BOSS, further selection of equipment is necessary.

Game Modes

"Crypto Rumble" has three game modes: PvE, World Boss, and PvP.

PvE

In PvE mode, there are two types: Challenge Mode and Hero Mode, with players needing to consume 100 stamina each time they participate.

Challenge Mode is similar to level clearing, currently consisting of 30 levels. The higher the level, the greater the BOSS's attack power and health, making the challenge more difficult, but the rewards are also higher. Players need to continuously upgrade their heroes' levels and qualities to defeat higher-level BOSSes.

Hero Mode doubles the attributes of previously defeated PvE BOSSes, and players will receive increased rewards for defeating these BOSSes.

World Boss Mode

World Boss Mode is similar to a ranking competition. Players need to pay 1000 $GOLD tokens to obtain an entry ticket to participate in the game. Players can choose up to 3 heroes to fight against the World BOSS. Each challenge lasts 3 minutes, and the system ranks players based on the damage dealt to the World BOSS at the end of the battle.

World Boss Mode opens by season (each season lasts seven days), with the reward pool being 90% of the total entry fees from users. During the reward distribution, the system will adopt a mining ranking system, allowing all users participating in the World BOSS battle to mine rewards based on their rankings.

PvP

PvP is a multiplayer online arena mode that allows multiple players to participate and compete against each other. Each player selects 3 heroes to fight, chooses a betting amount: 100 $CR/500 $CR/1000 $CR (governance tokens), and uses the automatic matching system to find PvP opponents.

In the game, players need to compete based on the damage dealt to the BOSS within a 3-minute limit. When time is up, the player who dealt the most damage to the BOSS wins. The winner will receive 90% of the bet amount, while the platform will take a 10% fee. Additionally, the winner will receive an extra PK reward of $CR.

The Clever Combination of Match-3 and SLG

From the perspective of game modes, "Crypto Rumble" spans both match-3 and SLG game segments, and through their organic combination, it achieves a complementarity of the two game types.

In terms of match-3 gameplay, it is a game segment that has been validated by the market over many years. This type of game has a high acceptance rate, making it a potential player base among both young and non-young demographics. Data shows that the user scale of leading match-3 games reaches as high as 800 million, and the age distribution of match-3 game users is particularly broad. Match-3 games rank at the top in terms of overall app user scale, activity rate, and user stickiness. According to a Gamma data survey on casual games, 74.8% of players prefer elimination games.

In fact, the match-3 game model itself has simple gameplay and easy-to-understand rules, which significantly lowers the learning cost for players, thus reducing the entry barrier for the game. Match-3 games are usually categorized by shape or color, allowing players with color recognition or visual discrimination difficulties to enjoy the game easily, providing a user-friendly experience. Although match-3 games are simple in gameplay, they are easy to understand but hard to master, presenting considerable challenges and fun. However, many match-3 games often lead to player fatigue due to their repetitive content.

On the other hand, while SLG games have not been around for long, we see that these once "niche" SLG games typically attract a large number of dedicated old users who are highly loyal. These players usually have a mature gaming mindset and have formed solid gaming habits, and the sense of achievement gained through strategic gameplay further drives their intrinsic motivation. The combination with match-3 gameplay can effectively overshadow the aesthetic fatigue caused by the repetitive content of match-3 games.

Moreover, SLG games are strategy-based, so most players may need to spend considerable time cultivating their "game cognition" for the game. Compared to "hardcore" gameplay, the long learning time and the resulting sunk costs and financial costs usually make players reluctant to leave, gradually becoming "hardcore" players. Therefore, in terms of loyalty and user stickiness, SLG game players usually outperform other types of games.

Thus, from the perspective of these two game models, both match-3 and SLG gameplay possess strong user stickiness and can complement each other by using the SLG model to offset the game fatigue caused by the repetitive content of match-3 games. The SLG game model can also consume a large amount of output from the match-3 game model, promoting a positive cycle in the economic ecosystem.

Therefore, from the gameplay perspective, for "Crypto Rumble," using match-3 + SLG as an entry point backed by a vast potential audience is particularly clever and highly promising.

Empowerment by Zypher Network

Web3 games have attracted significant attention from gamers due to their P2E characteristics. However, due to insufficient infrastructure in the Web3 field, many Web3 games struggle to compete with traditional games due to high entry barriers, poor experiences, high costs, and rough production quality, leading many players to be reluctant to praise them.

In fact, Zypher Network is addressing the issue of insufficient infrastructure faced by Web3 games by building a brand-new engine based on ZK solutions. By adopting a server abstraction solution based on ZK technology, games can be written into the ZK circuits of the Zytron engine and run entirely on-chain.

During operation, nodes in the Zypher Network engine will aggregate action logs generated by players' continuous gaming behaviors into ZK proofs. Within a certain period, these gaming actions (each being a transaction) are aggregated into a single ZKP proof, and multiple proofs are submitted to the chain as a single transaction. For example, in the game "Crypto Rumble," multiple movements and eliminations of blocks will be aggregated into ZK proofs and verified, rather than verifying each gaming action individually. This approach not only significantly reduces gas fees but also ensures a delay-free gaming experience for many PvE games.

For many PvP game scenarios, Zypher Network's z4 engine will provide support. The z4 engine allows players to match into game rooms, which are stateless rooms where nodes do not store data, greatly enhancing the engine's scalability, fault tolerance, security, and responsiveness, facilitating the distribution of computing tasks across multiple nodes without worrying about data synchronization issues, thereby improving overall performance and efficiency.

Zypher Network has solved a series of problems faced by traditional Web3 games due to insufficient infrastructure. Especially with the adoption of the AA account solution, the game "Crypto Rumble" will be able to fully compete with Web2 games in terms of experience, focusing on high-quality game content while supplementing with P2E, gradually pushing Web3 games back to their original intentions.

Additionally, with the high integration of Zypher Network and the TON ecosystem, the Telegram mini-program version of "Crypto Rumble" is about to launch and will be marketed, further lowering the entry threshold for the game.

Backed by hundreds of millions of active users in the Telegram ecosystem, it will also be a massive attention market. "Crypto Rumble" is expected to capture users from this vast user pool through the Telegram ecosystem, becoming a hit in the Web3 gaming field with its unique game content and excellent gaming experience.