My Experience with DeFi Kingdoms (DFK)

I started writing about a new game and looked at what I wanted to play next. The first step to this process is to go to DappRadar and see the popular games. At the time of writing this, the top games were Axie Infinity, DeFi Kingdoms and Pegaxy. Since there has been a lot written about Axie, I chose to look at a new game. Pegaxy and DeFi seemed to be two good options.

Pegaxy: Entering into this game seemed either very difficult or very expensive. There were 2 options, either I rent or I buy. The lowest bid on a Pegaxy horse was $1000 while the lowest rent value was about $40 but for that, I could use the horse only for 1 day. I immediately compared it to the value offered to me by a AAA game and thought it was not worth it. I understand that here I can actually earn as opposed to a AAA game on steam but the high cost was definitely a reason for me not to enter.

Defi Kingdoms: This seemed easy to enter into. Here are all my steps before starting to actually play.

1. For first step was to have the Harmony ONE token in my wallet. I initially chose Sushi Swap for converting some ETH to ONE.
2. I added the Harmony Mainnet to my Metamask wallet (guide).
3. But the address of the Harmony Mainnet was similar to that of my Ethereum Mainnet. It was weird but I went along and entered my Metamask address as the receiving address for ONE.
4. The whole exercise cost me like $30 dollars and initially I couldn't see my ONE tokens.
5. After tinkering around a little bit, I added ONE token as a custom token on the Ethereum Mainnet. It felt strange and I assumed that I could easily transfer the ONE tokens from the Ethereum Mainnet to the Harmony Mainnet.
6. I searched for week, wrote to Metamask and realized that it was not possible.
7. After realizing this mistake, I was irritated with myself for not researching enough. I was careful enough to ensure that I did the minimum possible transaction. However, since I wanted to play the game, I soldiered on and this time selected Simpleswap.
8. I also realized that Harmony had an ETH address format that was used by Metakask but it also had a ONE address format that you can find out from https://explorer.harmony.one/. This time, I used the ONE format of the address and it worked like a charm.
9. Whew … the “learning” cost me $30 but I can now finally start to play the game.

Even now, I feel that the steps I went through were not optimal. Was there a better currency that I could buy so that the gas fees would be limited ? Am I 100% sure that the ONE trapped on my Ethereum Mainnet cannot be moved to the Harmony Mainnet ? Are there some other things that I should have considered that I don't even know about ? Ill let these questions plague my subconsciousness but right now I just wanted to play the damn game. I switched to the Harmony Mainnet and was greeted with the pop up to enter my name.

Creation of my profile cost me 0.00666125 ONE or $0.001. Is this game going to charge me for every damn step ??!! I was then treated to the home screen.

To be honest, till this point, I don't know what the actual game is. I now need to look at some tutorials to figure that out. This is the tutorial that I referred to.

The main objective of this game is to earn JEWEL. Currently, you can stake it in the bank, put it in a liquidity pool or go to the gardens. But first we need jewels. You can get them from the Trader in the Marketplace.

In order to add to the liquidity pool, you need to get a seed from the Druid in the marketplace. This is a combination of two currencies of your choice that you put into the seed. I chose JEWEL-ONE for my liquidity pool. I had started with 128 ONE ($24)and currently after all these actions, my Metamask looks like this.

I then took these to the Garden and deposited this seed. It promised a pretty awesome APY.

Claiming is free but you cant claim all your rewards. It depends on the epoch unlocking schedule. This is basically done to ensure the long term interests of the game economy.

I also staked some Jewel in the bank.

I am checking back after 1 month and since then, both Jewel and ONE have lost 40%-50% of their value. In spite of that, I am up by 12%.

The other main engagement loop for the game is getting Heroes and sending them on Quests. Currently the cheapest one costs $150. This is definitely a game where you need to spend some money if you have to earn. However, $150 was way above my budget. I could somehow rationalize the $24 I spent in buying ONE but I decided not to engage with the Hero loop.

The objective of this exercise was to go through the process of engaging with a Blockchain Game. Even though there was money involved and I made some profits, I did not feel like a game. I would imagine that this would be a fun experience for a stock broker but definitely not for a gamer.

My search is on for a game that is easy and cheap to get into and fun to play.