On-chain riddles
I love a good riddle. Escape rooms, puzzle platformers, etc. are some of my favorite games whether on my own or shared with friends and family.
Many years ago I was introduced to an obtuse series of riddles on a website called weffriddles. If you've never seen this before, each ugly old page of the website has an image or text or otherwise hidden information. When you think you have the answer, you plug it into the URL here: ".com/YOUR_ANSWER.html" taking you to the next riddle in the chain.
This is a simple concept, but it had a relatively difficult user experience. The riddles get difficult pretty quickly, you need to understand how to use your browser decently, and you occasionally download files and do less obvious things with them.
Despite these difficulties, the basic idea is a lot of fun. There's a million ways to implement something similar yourself, but I think building a riddle chain on blockchain would add to the fun.
Here's how I would do it:
- Deploy a smart contract with a clue and a way to submit guesses
- The first person to guess the answer earns an NFT
- The NFT grants the privilege to create the next riddle in the chain
With this model (or something similar) you get a built in leaderboard which makes it more competitive and fun for people who are into that sort of thing. Letting the winner create the next riddle allows you to release this game with very little work and immediately engage players' creativity.
This is a fairly slow moving design, but that's appropriate for riddles. You could adapt the general idea for other genres: competitions where the winner gets to design the next level, boss abilities, starting equipment, ruleset, etc.
The real power of games on blockchain is letting players control the future of the game.
-Luke
P.S. Build less. Play more.