In my "Is it worth your time?"-series I take a closer look at emerging crypto games in their earliest stages of development. Today's game is Crypto Brewmaster, a game that just launched on the main net last night. As the title suggests, it's a game about brewing your own beer. Powered by the Hive Blockchain, it's yet another title on one of the crypto gaming worlds most promising chains. As always, I'll first take a look at what the game is like, what you can already do in the early build and speculate a bit on where the game might be heading. Finally, I'll answer the most important question: Is it worth your time?
In Crypto Bremaster, you take on the role of an aspiring craft beer brewer. You start the game with some basic ingredients for beer brewing, a single recipe to brew an European Lager, and a small brewhouse to get your crafting going. Right now your ingame options are pretty limited. You can acquire additional ingredients through daily missions, brew the European Lager in your brewhouse and sell the final product in the pub.
The game itself is energy based with all actions you choose to do taking a certain amount of time and requiring a certain amount of energy. So if you order malt from a local homebrewing store, you'll have to spend 2 energy and wait 30 minutes to receive your malt. You start the game with 10 energy that slowly replenishes over time. Every mission at the bulletin board can only be completed once each day. You'll probably want to make sure to complete them all on a daily basis because you can't complete missed missions at a later date.
Each mission (so far) provides you with one of the required ingredients for the European Lager recipe. The ingredients come at different quality levels and most of the missions provide you with normal quality. I did have one mission that provided me with good quality barley malt though. I'd assume that these missions will change on a daily basis, so you'll have the chance to acquire better quality versions of all ingredients given time.
The brewing process is pretty straight forward as well. You choose the recipe you want to brew (with only the European Lager available right now) choose the ingredients to use and start the brewing process. Brewing doesn't take up any of your energy, it takes quite a while longer to finish it, though. Depending on the quality of ingredients you used you have a better or worse chance to create some beer that is actually any good. The better the beer the more money you can earn from selling it. That's really all there is to do right now but that's to be expected considering it's the very first playable Alpha build released not even a day ago.
At it's core Crypto Brewmaster is another Idle Game meets management sim. As with Rising Star, the game manages to create a unique setting that has not been used much in other (blockchain-)games. Craft Beer Brewing is still pretty hot right now and having a game in that setting is a breath of fresh air for the genre. I'm also really fond of the art style the game offers.
So what can we expect to see from Cryptobrewmaster in the future? The developer already announced to release a roadmap for the coming weeks and months in a few days and I'll make a separate article on that in case there's some substantial information in there. Until then we can only take some educated guesses by looking around the game.
One of the most obvious additions will be more of what we are already seeing. So more ingredients, more recipes, more daily missions and so on. On top of that, there are already many additional options shown ingame that are not usable yet. Just take a look at the pub above for example. We see an events calendar, a leaderboard, mini games, and so on. It seems the developers already have a lot of ideas what they want to see added to their game. It's too early to know for sure, but I'm confident to see some constant evolution in the game for the coming weeks and months. The beer brewing theme allows to add a lot of fun and interesting stuff to the game.
The Brewhouse already shows an upgrade interface to the left so another part of the game is obviously going to resolve around upgrading what you have. Getting a bigger brewing kettle, machinery to fill your bottles faster, and so on. We'll have to wait and see how complex this is going to be in the end, but again, there are a lot of possible options to add here and if the developers want to, they can make Crypto Brewmaster a rather complex management game with a lot of different aspects to consider.
Finally the game's main page already hints at different buildings that will be added to the game later. A Market Place to trade different ingredients, a beer academy to learn new recipes or get better at brewing what you have, and a Capitol Palace to... I have no idea what that's going to be used for. Anyway, we see lots and lots of ideas and concepts already in the game and I'm looking forward to see the game grow in the coming months.
With everything you've seen so far, lets get back to the initial question! Is Crypto Brewmaster worth your time? This time, I'll have to say: Yes, it absolutely is! Now don't get me wrong on this one, we're nowhere close to you jumping into the game and getting hours of enjoyment out of it. Right now it's more a proof of concept than an actual game. The things you can do are very limited and you'll be done playing for quite a while after you've made only a few clicks. My verdict is more about what to expect from the game in the future and I'm pretty confident we'll see a lot of cool things from it in the coming weeks.
It's pretty cool to see yet another promising game on the Hive blockchain. With the already established Splinterlands and many promising games in early development stage like eXode, Rising Star, or dCity Hive really seems to establish itself as one of the leading crypto gaming blockchains.
If you want to try Crypto Brewmaster right away, you can register here and claim some bonus ingredients to get you started. You can either register with your Hive account using Hive Signer or you can sign up simply by using your Google account. The latter is a pretty cool option as this will allow you to start playing the game without having to set up a Hive account first - something that's crucial to potentially grow into the mainstream market later on.
That's all from me today. Thank you all for reading and if you feel like, please share your opinion on Crypto Brewmaster in the comments. See you all next time!