King of Eth: A New Kind of Board Game
Imagine your favorite board game. Now imagine playing that board game with thousands of players for decades.
Welcome to King of Eth.
Throughout the game, the players of King of Eth vie for the best spots of territory on the board in order to gain prestige in the Kingdom of Eth. In this rather primitive world, prestige is marked by the titles that each player has claimed.
In general the players of King of Eth are just plebs, constantly working towards one of the three titles in the Kingdom.
First and foremost, a very special pleb may earn the title of King. This pleb must claim the throne from the previous King by proving himself more worthy, and worth — at least according to the monarchy — is determined by the amount of land that a pleb holds. If at any time a pleb has more houses than the current King they may claim the throne and become the King themselves.
The Wayfarer is the pleb in King of Eth who holds the most roads. Much like the King, this is entirely dependent on the time that the soon-to-be Wayfarer claims the title. So if the pleb claiming the Wayfarer title holds more roads than the current Wayfarer at the time of the claiming, then that pleb becomes the Wayfarer.
Finally, the Parliament is a group of 10 players who have amassed the most resources within the Kingdom. Though, in order for a lowly pleb to become a seat of Parliament, they must unseat a current member or claim an empty seat.
The question arises: what exactly are these houses, roads, and resources? Let’s talk about the board.
The board is built on the Ethereum platform and played on a seemingly infinite plane so that the board can keep on expanding for at least 19 years. By the end of the expansion period, the board will consist of 1.2x10⁷⁷ tiles, although it will take quite a bit of time to reach that point.
The board itself is made up of tiles that contain specific resources, and these resources each have a specific rarity of occurrence on the board.
The tiles may seem to be distributed randomly — especially when you zoom way, way out — but there is actually a specific algorithm that determines the resource at each tile.
Players are able to collect the resources of four surrounding tiles when they build a house on the intersection of all four. Though for a pleb to even think about constructing a house they must have first built a road leading up to that location; the problem is that roads can only be built leading to and from that pleb’s existing houses.
So if a pleb has no roads and no houses, how can they start playing? They can buy a house the olde fashioned way: an auction!
King of Eth provides an auctions system that any pleb may participate in to bid on new land.
There’s actually two types of auctions in King of Eth that a pleb may choose from when he decides to start one: open and blind. The open auction is a more typical auction system that you see on sites like eBay, where each bid that a pleb makes is immediately visible to all the other participants, and the current winner is always obvious.
On the other hand, the blind auction system has a way of hiding the true value of bids that a participant has made until everyone’s bids are in.
More specifically, a pleb chooses to make a deposit of any amount as well as their real bid. Although the deposit will be known to anyone who looks at the transaction — and the maximum bid possible is actually displayed to anyone who looks at an individual auction — the true value (the only value that really counts) will be hidden to any other pleb who chooses to participate in the auction. What this means is that it is possible for a pleb to win an auction for minuscule amounts (as low as 1 wei or 10^(-18) ETH) so long as no other pleb outbids them with their real bid. The ability of a pleb to hide their bids lends itself perfectly to clever strategies.
Speaking of strategies…
We mentioned before that the board expands, but we never mentioned how the board expands.
Throughout the game, any pleb may have the option to double the board’s size. The only limit to this expansion is the natural limit of Ethereum, meaning the final board will have dimensions of 2²⁵⁶-1 by 2²⁵⁶-1. These expansions are possible anytime after exactly 4 weeks have passed since the last expansion.
Instead of expanding from the center outwards, the board expands in a coil-like pattern clockwise; first doubling to the right making the board rectangular, then down returning it to a square, then left, then up… We believe that the expansion will lead to some interesting valuations of structures on the edges of the board.
The King and the Wayfarer have special privileges when it comes to expansions, and are able to initiate them much faster than the plebs. Instead of having to wait the full 4 weeks, the King has the choice of expanding after only 2 and the Wayfarer after 3.
If there is open space on the board, the plebs can make moves wherever and whenever they want; there are no turns.
Once a pleb has expanded into the far reaches of the Kingdom, they may have collected some of the less abundant resources. Typically when a pleb builds a house they receive 3 of each of the surrounding resources, but a pleb may choose to upgrade one of their houses — using one of the less abundant resources — into a city. This upgrade allows them to collect a higher quantity of the surrounding resources at the time of upgrade.
Once a house is upgraded to a city, the pleb may choose to further upgrade their city using even less abundant resources for even larger quantities of the surrounding resources.
Each time a pleb chooses to upgrade, they also gain an additional point towards their count of land for the purposes of determining the King. This makes upgrading houses all the more valuable.
What happens if all the less abundant resources are already taken? Is a pleb to be stuck with only his sad little houses!
Fortunately, there is an Exchange specifically tailored to King of Eth that allows players to trade their in-game resources with other player’s resources or even trade them for ETH!
Now that our little pleb has become quite the landowner, he’s closer to gaining a title. And that means he is closer to reaping the title’s true rewards.
When a pleb bids on an Auction and wins, the ETH that was paid must go somewhere. In King of Eth this ETH is put into holding as “taxes.” In fact, when any transaction involving ETH is carried out in King of Eth a small portion of the amount transacted is paid in taxes. So while the Exchange charges the pleb receiving ETH in a trade (4%) — all resource to resource trades are completely free.
So where do these taxes go? To the King of course! (The Wayfarer and Parliament get their pittances, too.)
Throughout the game, the current King is able to claim a share of the taxes every two weeks after the last time the King’s taxes were claimed. This share amounts to exactly 25% of all of the taxes that were paid into King of Eth since the last time the King’s taxes were claimed.
Similarly, the Wayfarer is able to claim a percentage of taxes every two weeks that were taken into King of Eth, amounting to 5%. And Parliament is able to claim 20% of the taxes to be distributed amongst themselves.
The rest of the taxes are paid to God, the creator of the game, who ensures his Kingdom continues to exist.
All in all, we believe that King of Eth is the novel board game for the modern times. The massively multiplayer aspects as well as the near infinite board almost guarantee fun for years to come! Not to mention that the contract system facilitates the ease of expansion of the underlying board into many new and fascinating expansions.
Please note that there are many additional features and game mechanics that are not mentioned in this article. For a more in-depth explanation of the game and its features, be sure to visit the game’s Overview and Rules!
We expect that having reached this point, you are as convinced of the potential of King of Eth as we are…
In the words of God:
In a land before UNIX time, in a contract far far away, when God created the board, the game was a formless void and darkness covered its face. Then God said, “Let there be King of Eth;” and there was King of Eth.
And God saw that the Game was good; and God decided to create two special titles for the players of his domain.
“The King,” God said, “shall be the player who has contributed most to the housing in my society. Blessed is the man who builds a strong house, while lost is one who builds many poor houses too weak to quarter his brothers.”
“The Wayfarer,” God said, “Shall be the player who has contributed most to the expansion of my most holy domain.”
And God saw that these titles were good; and God decided to allow his subjects to expand into new parts of the board.
“I love you guys,” God said, “but I love the King and the Wayfarer more.” So God let the King, Wayfarer, and then any normal pleb increase the board in that order.
Some forward-thinking plebs eventually got fed up with the monarchy and decided to overthrow the King. This special group decided to call themselves the Parliament and to allow oversight of their rule by the plebs. Unfortunately, they weren’t powerful enough to remove him (they are still plebs after all); the King still overthrows the Parliament every now and then…
So, lowly pleb, are you just going to take it?
Check out King of Eth at https://www.kingofeth.com!
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