It's been a month or two now that Dark Country land play officially launched. To say this has been a long time coming would be a bit of an understatement. That's kind of how things seem to go in the crypto space though. While the technology itself is growing at a rapid pace, the development of projects seems to be behind the curve.
The fact that the Dark Country team actually delivered on one of their promises already puts them ahead of a lot of the competition. Yep, I'm looking at you Alien Worlds, wen Thunderdome?
To be fair, Dark Country has had a working card game for quite some time now. It follows the style of Hearthstone and can be played on your computer via a client download. I think it runs on the Unity engine which seems to be the case with a lot of off-web games these days. I've never really messed around with the card game too much. I always had my sights on land play and the introduction of Shadow Dimes.
I honestly think land play probably would have happened a lot sooner, but that whole Russian invasion of Ukraine really put a damper on things. In May of 2021 I was moving a lot of my earnings from RPlanet into Dark Country card packs. To the point that I spent enough money to earn a free T-Shirt from the team. I was a bit shocked when the package showed up and I saw it had originated from Ukraine. That tells me at least part of the team is or was in that country.
Being honest, I don't find the land play portion of the game entirely intuitive. I am sure there are some really great guides out there for play, but if you are just jumping in and trying to get the hang of it, you will likely struggle.
Now that I have been playing it for a while, I do feel more comfortable with the interface, but there are still some things that confound me and I have to undo and redo tasks several times to get the desired outcome.
Right now the world is separated into the ten or so sections you see in the photo above. Most of my time is spent either at the bank or the saloon, that's where most of the action is right now.
The first thing you really need to do in the game is stake your assets. You don't need land NFTs to play the game, but you do need heroes and cards to play the game, so if you don't own any I guess buying some is actually the first thing you need to do.
You can get them on the secondary market at Atomic Hub
Once you have everything staked, you can move on to the next step.
There is a metric in the game called "influence". Influence is deflationary and you have to keep increasing your influence to keep earning Shadow Dimes. As you can see from the photo above, the current deflation rate is 9.19 per hour. To be honest, I don't really pay much attention to that. I just play the game. If you want an in depth explanation of influence, check out some of the Dark Country articles on Medium.
Although I own quite a few pieces of land in the game, I am nowhere near the top of the influence charts. There are some heavy hitters in the game for sure.
The bank is where you move Shadow Dimes back and forth to your land and your account. Shadow Dimes are the in game token for Dark Country and you earn them by holding land, running quests, and doing other tasks in game. If you own lands, you can offer quests for other people to run on your land. When people run your quests they earn Shadow Dimes that you had staked to your land. In turn, you earn influence.
This are is one of the most difficult to navigate in my opinion. I think the should hide the land drop down at the top of this screen because this is one of the only areas that you don't actually use it to change between lands. Instead, you select your lands from the box in the middle of the screen. Which actually makes sense, except for the fact that every other screen uses the drop down at the top.
I had many occasions where I thought I was transferring Shadow Dimes to different pieces of land only to find out I had transferred all of them to a single piece of land that wasn't even the correct one.
This is also where I can move Shadow Dimes off my land to have in my account to pay for things like subscriptions (I'll get to that in a second).
As I said, the Saloon is where most of the action takes place. As you can see, on this particular piece of land I have two quests available right now. It looks like someone is running the bottom one, but the top one is unfilled right now. That x to the right hand side means I can delete the quest ergo it isn't being run by someone.
To start you can only offer one quest per piece of land. I have used my Shadow Dimes to upgrade all of my Saloons to level 2 allowing me to offer two quests per piece of land. Quests have different levels just like cards and land. Common, Rare, Epic, Legendary, and Mythical. The different levels usually offer higher rewards. I offer most of my quests at the Epic level because that is the kind of team most people are running.
Remember I mentioned subscriptions? Well paying (Shadow Dimes) for a subscription allows you to set your quests to auto repeat. Which is really nice otherwise you have to be continuously baby sitting your lands.
Also in the Saloon area is where you can create your own parties and pick up quests. Like I said, I had a ton of cards that I bought, so I have about twenty to thirty parties running quests at any given time. Different levels of cards reduce the amount of time it takes to run a quest. For example, if you have a full Mythic party, you can probably run a quest in ten hours or less. That means you could be running quests two to three times a day with one party.
Most of my parties take about 20 to 24 hours to run a quest since I don't have any mythic cards and only a handful of legendary ones. Which I think is the case for a lot of people and hence the reason I focus mostly on offering Epic quests.
There's also a Tournament tab in the Saloon that I haven't really messed with too much. Some of the higher level stuff you need to pay a lot of Shadow Dimes for or have a very high influence to take advantage of them.
The Sheriffs Office has contracts that you can post or accept. I haven't messed around with this area too much myself. I have some online friends who said the return isn't as good as just running quests and offering them, so I kind of put it on the back burner to focus on those.
It doesn't look like many other people are using it at the moment either...
I honestly don't know what the purpose of the Barracks is.
It might be tied to the Mercenary Outpost where you can put cards out for rent and let other people use them. Likewise you can lease other peoples cards if you want. I think they have this same thing setup for lands too, but I haven't even looked into that.
Finally, the last, but also one of the most important pieces of the game are the Factions. There are five factions that you can stake both Shadow Dimes and your land to. Each day, you get a payout that is calculated using some combination of amount staked to each faction and some other factors which I don't know.
Like I said, I basically just play the game. Those same online friends I mentioned earlier make it a full time job to analyze the payouts and determine which faction is the best to support at any given time. You can move your funds around, but there is a three day unstake period or something like that.
Quite frankly, the game can be as complex or as easy as you want it to be. One thing to keep in mind, if you have your cards setup in a party and out in a quest, they will not be available for you to use in the card game.
I am pretty impressed with what the Dark Country team has been able to put together so far. I think with the listing of Shadow Dimes on a couple of the major exchanges, we could see some real movement with the game. Right now I am just focusing on accumulating as many of those as I can.
I know when they were in the early stages of development, they talked about permadeath zones which could be quite interesting. Basically, if you send your hero and party off on a quest and they fail, you lose them. As of right now, the quests are pretty one dimensional, but I think they will be adding things like hero leveling and failing a quest in the future.
If you own assets and you haven't dug into the game yet, I encourage you to do so. If you don't own assets, but want to get started, just make sure you have some WAX and head over to Atomic Hub. You need at least one hero and up to forty cards to make a quest party.
Or you can try to rent out what you need too! Either way, you should get started today!
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