It's been quite a while since I last wrote an article about a blockchain game and that is not without reason. While there's painfully slow progress coming from the few established titles out there, all the new stuff is either not really a game or web 2 disguised as web 3. This finally changed when I came across a game called Parallel a few weeks ago on one of @aftersound's live streams. The game is still in Closed Beta but I was lucky enough to be let in almost instantly and I have to say, I've been pretty impressed ever since. After a long wait, this finally looks like a promising title that I do want to be involved with during the next bull run!
So what kind of game is Parallel? Not too surprisingly, it's yet another trading card game. Unlike Splinterlands, though, this is not an auto battler but more like a classical TCG where players take turns drawing and playing their cards and attacking each other. If you've played titles like Hearthstone or Gods Unchained, you already know pretty exactly what to expect. The one major difference there is that the game is a bit more involved as you often get to act during your opponents turn, making different decisions and reacting to what your opponent is up to. As with a lot of these TCGs, things are a little overwhelming in the beginning but it only took me about 5 games to really get the hang of it.
Parallel features five different factions ("parallels") that each come with a quite different play style. You have the classical aggro deck in Marcolian, a control deck in Shroud, a swarm/combo deck in Kathari, a midrange deck in Augencore, and finally a defensive big guys deck in Earthern. Each deck consists of exactly 30 cards and 1 paragon. The paragon is the equivalent to a hero in Hearthstone or Gods Unchained but works a little different than what you might be used to. Each paragon has a passive ability that you always get for having him in your deck. On top of that, each paragon can be played once as an actual card and is then treated like other cards you played from your deck. Right now, each parallel offers three different paragons which offer some very different and unique abilities and play styles.
For a game still in Closed Beta, Parallel already looks and feels pretty polished. I love the ambient music, the artwork is great (albeit a little dark), and the games are fast paced. Even at this early state, I way prefer the game to Gods Unchained which never seems to have gotten its pacing right. Obviously there are still a lot of balancing problems and minor bugs, but the devs are actively working on them, doing maintenance and releasing updates almost every week.
So the game is fun and entertaining, but in web 3, that's only half of the story, right? Well, that depends on how you look at things. One thing that really sets Parallel apart from its web 3 competitors is how free2play is handled. If you don't care for the NFT and earning side of things, you can play the game just like you would play Hearthstone or the like. Constantly earning reward packs with ghost cards (so called apparitions) that allow you to progress in the game and over time earning all the cards there are. This is a really interesting concept and should help the game quite a bit with mass adoption as anybody can just pick it up and start enjoying the complete experience without having to spend any money or know anything about blockchain.
Obviously, I do care for the NFT side of things, so while the free2play experience is nice, I wanted to have the whole thing. Parallel uses Echelon Prime as its reward token and so far, earnings are quite interesting:
A win nets you something between 0.02 and 0.03 Prime and you can earn from a total of 5 wins per day. With current token prizes of ~$3.5 that's about $0.4 to $0.5 a day. In order to earn you do have to play with NFTs, though, and every non-NFT card you have in your deck will reduce your earnings. I obviously wanted to have the full earning, so I went ahead and got myself a complete NFT deck to play with.
Right now there are two collections available for Parallel. One on Ethereum and one on Base. The latter has way lower fees but also only features a sub-collection of all the available cards. After playing around a bit, I went with a Shroud deck only using the cards available on base and so far, I'm doing pretty good with it:
The deck cost me about $150 total, so if the price of Prime stays about the same, I would have made that back within a year. Fun enough, shortly after I joined there was a special event called the avatar challenge in which I won an avatar that I could sell for about $550 right now, so I'm already way in the green.
Overall, the game is looking really promising and there are a lot of moving parts in the ecosystem right now. As stated initially, I'm in the ecosystem for maybe 3 weeks now and I'm still learning something new every other day. I don't know how long the game will be in Closed Beta, but if you want in early, just send a tweet at @ParallelTCG and they will set you up - at least that's how I got into the game.
So all things considered, I absolutely think that Parallel is worth your time, in fact it just might be the first web 3 game that I would still play even if it was strictly a web 2 game. I might take a closer look at the economical part soon and would also like to point out some ideas that Splinterlands could borrow from them moving forward, but that's for another time.
If you made it to the end - thank you very much for stopping by and see you next time!