Of the, by now, numerous games on HIVE, Cryptobrewmaster is the first one that I wanted to play. We sometimes brew our own beer at home (see my post about that here). So the chance to play a game of brewing beer, immediately appealed to me. The game has its own website. And if you'd like to try the game yourself, you can of course use my referral link
The game interface seems simple enough at first sight. There are just two buildings active and about six locked. They probably become unpocked when you advance in the game, or when the development of the game advances. The building to the left is the actual brewery, the building next to it is the bar. At first it is a bit of a mystery what you are supposed to do. There is no description of the game play available and the game itself does not provide a FAQ or something. I had to stumble and click through the game to learn how the game actually works.
When you click on the brewery, you get this screen:
This is where the beer is brewed. As you can also read in my post about our home breweing you need several ingredients to brew beer. Currently the brewhose has only one receipe for beer available,namely European Lager. Again, I guess that when the develepment of the game advances there will be more receipes available to choose from. Rigth now, there is one beer to brew and it requieres fives ingredients: water, malt, two flavors of hops and of course water. When you first start the game and you click one of the plusses the game responds with "There are currently no cards". So, how do you get the ingredients?
It took me a while to figure out you have to go to the bar, or pub if you like. Here you can see the leaderboard, buy or sell your beer (if you have brewed any), play mini games (though this is not yet available) and check the bulletin board.
The bulletin board is where you can obtain the necessary ingredients to brew the beer. You select which ingredient you want, click the "Start" button, and then wait for the production of the ingredient to complete. This can take from one to four hours. All that time you have to wait and you can not start the production of a second ingredient.
There is a way to make this quicker, and that is to use the "sales". What this means is that the production of an ingredient goes quicker, from 10 to 25 minutes, but it costs you money. The slow production is free, the fast production is not free. This is a rather unique use of the word "Sale" I've not encountered before...
The bulletin board refreshes once per 24 hours. This means that the bulletin board can run out of the ingredient you need for your next beer and you just have to wait till the next day. Or make use of one of the "sales" and pay for your next ingredient. Another thing to note is that the ingredients come in different qualities. The free ones are 'neutral', the paid ones are 'good'. The quality of the ingredient determines the quality of the beer and hence the price you can sell it fore. Buying an ingredient can therefore still be worthwhile if it raises the selling price of your beer more than the ingredient has cost you.
When you have finally obtained all necessary ingredients it is time to start brewing the beer. With the plusses tou select all the ingredients and then simply press the "Start" button.
And again, you have to wait. Brewing beer takes time. In real life it takes at least six weeks from brewing to bottling, in this game it takes a little over 6 hours. Again it is possible to make the process shorter by paying for it. As with the ingredients this is done with the in game currency, CBM. At the time of writing 1 CBM is a little over one dollarcent.
If you look at the screen of the brewhous, you can see some status bars in the left part of the screen, beneath the picture of the brewing equipment. One has a little cogwheel bext to it, the other one a small notice boards. When you click those the litlle status bars fill up. Otherwise it doesn't seem to do anything, so the purpose of this is entirely unclear to me. Perhaps again this is a feature that still has to be developed in the game.
Anyway, after six hours of waiting, the beer is ready to be claimed.
The beer can then be sold in the pub. To do that, click on the bar and then on the picture of the oldfashioned cash desk.
The beer I brewed was nothing special, so I got 29.05 CBM for it. Or in dollars, a little over 30 cents. I guess, that's not too bad for what in essence is no more work than a few mouse clicks.
As the game develops there will probably more nuances to the game play and more possible choices to be made. As it is now, it is an extremely slow paced game. In fact, it borders on the boring. Though you could call it 'relaxing' as well. Only a few mouse clicks are necessary each day. You collect five ingredients, start brewing the beer, sell the beer and repeat the proces. I have played it for a week now and I've earned 173 CBM till now. The game has a minimum of 1000 CBM before you can withdraw the CBM and sell it fot HIVE of LEO. It'll take me another 5 weeks before I'll reach that 1000 CBM. The leader board shows several players who already have well over 1000 CBM. They either are better in the game of are already playing it much longer than I am.
All in all, it is a nice game to try. It is not yet complicated, it does not take much time to play and ever so slowly you earn some CBM with it, that at one point, when you have collected enough, you can sell. Real money, earned with virtual beer. That does sound cool. Cheers!
If you want to try it yourself, here's my referal-link.