Article written by Worldopo community member @perm

A couple of years ago I used to play a Swedish geo game called Turf. It was — and perhaps still is — a competitive game where you get points by locking down certain spots/areas. It was plenty of fun and two times stand out in my memory. The first time was when I climbed a snowy hill in the middle of the night, waiting in the freezing cold watching the progress bar creeping along until I had taken the spot. The second was when I was taking a central bridge and watching another player — my closest competitor in the city — approaching on the map, just then I got locked the spot and I looked up at him a few hundred meters away. I waved and biked off to get another one and the points that day gave me the edge to beat him that month. It was fun for a couple of months, but eventually, I got bored of it. The novelty wore off and the game didn’t give me any long-term reason to stick around. After that, I’ve pretty much-ignored geo games, including Pokemon Go, until this year when Worldopo piqued my interest thanks to joining the location aspect with my currently biggest tech obsession; blockchain & Crypto.

In Worldopo you collect crystals randomly placed in the world. The crystal is Worldopo’s currency and will let you buy stuff like buildings in the shop.

I’m quite new to the game and couldn’t find a beginners guide so I put together these first steps I have taken in the game.

Collecting crystals

This is the game view you’ll be seeing the most of. It’s the map view where you’ll hunt down crystals. As you can see in the screenshot below I’m quite close to one. However, I recently collected another crystal and now I can’t collect this one until the timer in the bottom right goes to zero. When you collect a crystal the timer starts at 10 min. 10 minutes passes quite quickly, but it sure can be frustrating when you have 3 minutes left on the timer and you decide to wait it out

And this is where I waited for the timer to expire. Would be pretty cool if I could bring up an AR view to see these two crystals placed as objects in the real world! Well, who knows… perhaps that’s something they plan to add.

The timer eventually expired and unlocked the capture button. You’ll only get access to the camera when there is a crystal nearby and there is no timer.

The actual collection is a bit annoying since the crystal is bobbing up and down so you’ll have to move the phone a lot. I didn’t manage to get a good screenshot thanks to that.

That’s pretty much the collection part of the game. It should be mentioned that the crystals appear in random places and seems to stick around for a limited time. That is a good thing though because I frequently find them in hard or impossible to reach locations. You also have to move around to see them, there is no indication of a “fog of war” in the app, but crystals will only be visible if you are close enough so it’s not possible to “plan” a maximum route before you leave home.

There is also a “level” aspect to your profile as you can see in the top left corner where I have a 1 and an almost full yellow bar all around the button. I didn’t know it at the time of the screenshot, but it turned out that only a few crystals later I had levelled up to 2. You don’t get any indication more than the number changing to indicate that this happened though. However, it turned out that it does affect hex buying as you’ll see soon.

Hexes and buildings

The next part of the game comes when you have collected a crystal… or rather a number of them. You can start to buy hexagonal parts of the map. These are quite small when mapped to the real world so even covering a house will cost you quite a few crystals.

There’s also a limit to the number of hexes you can buy during a day. In the beginning, level 1, of the game you’ll be able to buy 15 hexes and then you’ll have to wait for 24h until you can buy any more as you can see below.

A few more crystals got me to level 2 and there my limit is 16 hexes per 24 hours. I’m still at level 2 so I can’t say if the level/hex ratio continues to be incremented by one, but it seems reasonable to assume that’s the case.

Eventually, you’ll have enough hexes to put some buildings on the map. There are only a few buildings in the shop right now, but I’m pretty sure we’ll see more added over time. This screen shows the gem production buildings. The info is a bit lacking currently, I know the cost and the number of hexes required. I don’t see any info about production rate though and I don’t see the actual shape of these required 37 hexes.

You can also buy paint to paint your hexes, which is the kind of vanity item I usually ignore unless they give some sort of bonus. No hints of that just yet though. Then there is the IAP part of the shop where you can buy gems for fiat. I’m in Sweden so as you can see the price for 20 gems is 59 SEK which translates to 6.46 USD and 5.75 EUR today which is November 12.th 2018. Feels quite steep to me, but fortunately, I got the option to collect them in the wild with only a little effort which of course is a big part of a game like this.

The World

There is no search or another easy way to jump to a different location on the map to view activity in for example well-known places. I scrolled around a bit and saw action in a few places. Here is Taj Mahal where one or a number of people have bought several hexes and as the dollar signs indicate on a few of them also put them out for sale.

Taj Mahal

Same story at the Vatican. Most famous buildings have been bought. There is no clear indication to me that it makes a difference if you own a hex in a well-travelled place though. I guess time will tell.

Paris seems to be very busy, here is the Eiffel Tower and the first and only building I’ve seen. There are also a few hexes with paint on them.

There is one more piece of info to be had from clicking the building, there is a “hashrate” of 2% for the Lumix building. Good? Bad? Who knows… This is a relative number according to the whitepaper:

This is a dynamic indicator that takes into account the number of players, farms, and the amount of commissions within the game. The level of this indicator will be constantly changing. The higher the indicator, the more complex mining occurs. Everything is just as it is in real life.

The Future

The website has a roadmap and development seems to be a bit behind, which of course is normal for such a big project. Here is the roadmap for the rest of 2018. Looks like the game will keep on getting more and more interesting as time goes by. Most stuff looks good, but I’m a bit sceptical about moving the game on-chain before Ethereum has solved it’s scaling issues. I have played several other on-chain Eth games and these experiences have been extremely slow. Hopefully, the Worldopo team has some alternate plan like using a sidechain (Loom?), waiting for main Eth to improve, using something like EOS instead or some other solution. Well, time will tell.

I guess the Game Loop mentioned in the roadmap is the ecosystem depicted in the picture below. Currently there only seems to be Crypto Lords in the game and it will be very interesting to see how it all works when it’s fully implemented.

The whitepaper has plenty of details about the team’s plans for the game, the different roles, what to do with the WPT token etc. but I won’t go into that here. Anyone interested in the vision for the game can dig into the whitepaper themselves.

The bounty system will give you the opportunity to earn some gems to get started by joining social networks, retweeting/sharing etc. There are two ways to enter via the bounty system:

Web: https://worldopo.bountyhub.io/login

Telegram: https://t.me/WorldopolyAirBot

Download the game:

Android: Google Play

iOS: App Store

Join Worldopo in social media!