Disclaimer: None of this is financial advice. I’m just sharing my thoughts about the game. Do your own research before deciding to sink your money into the game. Some of the images used on the site are still on copyright protections so I can't share what those NFT look like but you can check those out on the site.
The game made its appearance on the blockchain around April and I’ve been playing the game since the pre-sale and testing phase. Not much has changed in terms of gameplay and the recent updates have been mostly about improving the UI and reward distribution. Below is a brief summary about the game and I won’t be covering all the specific elements of the game, just the bits I think people who aren’t into the game might be interested to know. You can also refer to its wiki.
dCrops is a farm simulation game where you buy packs that contain seeds and lands. You plant those seeds on the fertile land, wait for them to grow, and harvest before the season ends in exchanges for shares. Those shares give you a claim in proportion to the reward pool containing a max of 500,000 CROP tokens initially post ALPHA test (and decrease at a rate of 0.5% after each season). You can trade those CROP tokens on Hive Engine, buy more packs worth 2,000 CROP each, or hold them to earn some CROP power.
CROP power is your stake to the holding rewards pool calculated with the total value of CROP you have in game. You will notice that seeds and lands have different tiers and these are directly proportional on the CROP value they contribute to your CROP power. The more rare it is, the more CROP value in contributes to your stake in the holding rewards. Here’s a link to how CROP power is computed.
If a player has accumulated 20,000 CROP power, they are eligible to the holding rewards pool funded by 30% of the pack sales, curation rewards from the 
The argument I got over favoring passive cryptogames versus active play to earn models is that you don’t have to push yourself to be competitive to get the most out of the game you play. If you ever get bored, sick, or too busy to play a passive game, you don’t miss out on the rewards compared to someone that has to do a quota of tasks daily for their kickbacks. Adapting some investor mindset into the mix, I don’t want to constantly baby sit my game assets to make sure I get passive cash flow.
Tips and Strategy:
- If you’re not really interested in playing the game but want access to the holding rewards as quickly as possible, buying packs and holding them speeds the process. Each pack contributes to 2,000 CROP power (10 unopened packs) and you just need to wait 15 days to start that side cash flow.
- At the time of this writing, the current meta favors those who can get more CROP power as they got more access to the holding rewards. If you only bought a few packs and started playing with them, it’s going to take some time building up some CROP power to get to 20,000 value unless you decide to take a shortcut and just buy CROP from Hive Engine (also overvalued at the time of this writing).
- The current meta favors those who can afford holding a lot of unopened packs because attempting to get a stake on the holding rewards pool is lucrative enough. But as soon as those packs are gone and no news of Beta packs (if Beta would be the name for the second batch) are released, players that opened their packs and played the game can build their CROP shares even more. It’s a short term vs long term pay off.
- This is just a speculative side on my part but imagine if you hoarded a lot of DCALPHA packs and the game becomes a hit in the succeeding months or years. The seeds and land available on those packs would also raise in value by rarity through the artificial scarcity and hype. Naturally, unopened packs would be more valuable than 2$ as a consequence especially if new updates give more functional boosts in the previous sets of cards.
- At the current meta, it’s nearly a loss if you opened packs. Each pack contains 5 cards with 1 Rare card confirmed among the mix. The card is considered active when it’s being played for the season and contributes to your CROP power according to it’s burn value common (3), rare (5), epic (10) and legendary (50). Let’s say you got lucky and opened 1 Rare, and 4 Legendary cards, that like 210 CROP power already but only if they are active. The seasonal element prevents some seeds from being planted and contributes less CROP power to your account. Leaving the pack unopened gives you instant 2,000 CROP power all throughout the seasons.
- While I have stated a lot of points in favor of holding unopened packs, there is still merit to playing the game actively. Crops that have 3 star quality contribute to your total CROP power regardless of their seasonal affinity and depending on their rarity. So having some packs opened to play with earn you some shares in the reward pool and raise your total CROP power slowly. The cat has hinted some burn combining features will be introduced in the game which makes supplies on an existing NFT limited as a possible future update.
- You can hoard a lot of harvested crops and never sell them. Accumulate for 3 seasons and then sell at the last season to increase your shares on the reward pool dramatically. But this will only work if no one else is doing the same strategy. It's also a viable strategy to just sell half of the stock each season and dump it all on the last season just so as not to miss out on each seasonal pool.
The game is still fairly new and a lot of could change on a whim like nerfing the CROP value unopened packs gives, raising the holding reward pool, leasing in game assets like seeds and land, and even creating liquidity pools for added incentives to CROP holders.
There are no guaranteed returns when you put your money into the game. At the end of the day, CROP is just a game token and holding rewards may or may not be lucrative as the game progresses where more players can dilute your share to the reward pool. If you play for fun, great, if you play for ROI good luck on that. Just put some money you don’t mind losing.
Credits to 
If you made it this far reading, thank you for your time.