December 2017 will stay in history as the month cats broke Ethereum. The first (arguably) of its kind blockchain collectible — Cryptokitties — has congested the network. Thousand of people all over the world have been trading digital cat images for crazy prices. Since then many copycat projects have emerged offering to trade dogs, girls in bikini, tanks, ships and others. These games basically just provide a trading platform, where you can purchase and resell (hopefully for a profit) your collectibles.

But among them one project stands out — Etheremon. So far, the only blockchain game you can actually play.

tl;dr

Etheremon — the first blockchain-based game.

Features present:

Trading and lending monsters;

3v3 battles;

Evolutions and egg laying;

Features to be introduced:

Offchain solutions to reduce gas cost for operations (top priority for the devs right now);

1v1 battle mode;

Explorer mode;

VR support (Decentraland partnership);

Plus side:

Wow, blockchain pokemons!

Can make money;

Active community and responsive devs;

Marketing campaign ahead — that means you are early to hear about this;

Minus side:

Expensive to catch em all;

Activity highly dependent on Ethereum gas price;

Few market trades;

World of Etheremon

Etheremon, as you might’ve guessed, is inspired by Pokemon. You can catch your mons in the official store, buy them from other players and train them in battles.

So far the game offers a variety of 99 etheremons, icluding 3 free starters, evolutions and alpha version limited edition monsters you can not purchase anymore.

To purchase the free starters you only need to pay the transaction fee. Starters are not in any way inferior to other mons, except for being not as rare.

The gameplay is quite limited yet. The player may gain XP and in-game currency EMONT (which is a ERC20 token) by challenging other players in castle-mode.

A player pays ETH to build a castle and sends 3–6 mons to protect it. Anybody is now able to challenge the owner and earn 1 EMONT for each successful attack. After a set number of losses the castle goes down.

What’s in it for the owner? The owner gets bonus XP and avoids paying transaction fees, which ultimately results in faster and cheaper monster leveling. And stronger monsters are a better sale at the market and are more efficient at EMONT grinding.

A castle-mode battle log. The castles has 3 fighters and 3 supporting mons. To win the battle at least 2 of your fighters need to win the corresponding monster duels.

The castle mode outlines the Etheremon ecosystem:you gain money in battles and trading, you fight better if you pay for stronger mons or XP boosting. Looks pretty much like any other game out there and not particularly interesting per se, if you take out the money making element.

Plus, the whole blockchain thing seems to impede Etheremon’s widespread despite being its selling point: some rare monsters can be prohibitively expensive if you don’t have any spare ETH and castle attacks are only profitable at low gas costs.

Luckily, Etheremon devs have always been extra responsive to critics and kept updating the project regularly.

On the plus site, the game has an actively growing community. Lately Etheremons have reached 40'000 battles milestone and more than 13'000 market sales. Considering Etheremon is yet to present its most exciting features (1v1 and explorer gamemodes, offchain battle outcome calculation, VR integration) and perform a marketing campaign, that is quite impressive.

Each etheremon you own has its own card with all its stats. The first 3 caught mons of each type receive special badges that are intended to increase collector’s value. High level mons get the ability to lay eggs in exchange for XP — yet another way to make the game pay for itself.

Sure, CK boom was a unique occasion and sparking up masses’ speculative interest by something similar is unlikely to succeed. However, Etheremon aspires to become much more than just a CK clone and possibly even outshine its inspiration — Pokemon — by becoming the first blockchain based game in the world.

Etheremon is definetely not an investment, rather a peculiar titbit of emerging blockchain subculture.Sure you can trade mons, play-manupulate its ineffective market or gather the strongest or rarest collection out there, but the most interesting part of etheremon to me is watching it develop from a small scale project into something grand. Sure, it might fail, but oh how exciting it would be to be at the very source of a new game of the decade.

Follow Etheremon at

Update 12/03/2018:

Etheremon team has recently announced they are going to introduce an offchain-solution really soon! It will allow players to attack up to 15 castles at the same time with gas price reduced massively.

This “castle practice” game mode would require attackers to pay small fees to castle owners, which means that owning a castle is now economically incentivised too.