Duelist King Releases its Closed Alpha with Win2Earn Game Mechanics

In this slogging thread, we chat to Nicole Nguyen, the co-founder, and CMO of Duelist King, an NFT card game that has just recently released its closed alpha. The closed alpha was made available to 2000, lucky whitelisted. We had the pleasure of chatting to Nicole about Duelist King, its closed alpha, and the future of the NFT game.

You can sign up to be next in line for the closed alpha here: https://forms.gle/ZrWKTwGYY6wRv38L9

Also make sure to check out their playbook, which was released alongside the alpha: https://blog.duelistking.com/dk-playbook-a-guide-to-getting-started-with-the-demo-31430

This Slogging thread by Jack Boreham, Nicole Nguyen, Mónica Freitas, SuperSaiyanProgramming, Zaeem Shoaib, Sara Pinto and Limarc Ambalina occurred in slogging's official #amas channel, and has been edited for readability.

Hey @channel, please join me in welcoming our next AMA guest, Nicole Nguyen.

Nicole is the CMO and one of the co-founders of Duelist King, an NFT card game that has recently released its closed alpha. The game is shaking up the NFT gaming world.

She is also our first returning AMA guest, so please give her a warm returning welcome. Make sure to ask her Qs about the Duelist King alpha for a chance at winning $200 worth of NFTs.

Please feel free to ask Nicole anything about:

Hi Nicole Nguyen, a pleasure to have you with us. To refresh our audience, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your role at Duelist King?

Hi Jack Boreham and everyone thanks for having me. Great meeting you all and sharing about our NFT card game Duelist King with the closed alpha just fresh from oven B-)

We have an awesome team of 35 people in Vietnam, India, the US working on a multi-chain NFT card game that supports Win2Earn narrative with first-class gameplay and design.

Some of our recent milestones

Nicole Nguyen, thanks for the great intro! Let's start with some of those milestones you mentioned. Since you were last here, Duelist King has sold around 500,000 worth of NFTs. How did DK manage to do this? Why do you think the cards sold so well with your community?😄

Our previous card sales are officially endorsed by Polygon and Fantom, two of the prominent chains that we are partnering with to realize our vision of a multi-chain NFT card game. Moreover, lots of our members also love the designs of the cards. It's not just the cards that they are getting bullish about - I believe the community is also betting on our community-driven approach - not just as gamers, they can actively participate in shaping up the gameplay and operations once the DAO governing model kicks in next year. We've been fortunate to gather early adopters/NFT holders for Duelist King and gathered 23,000 registrants for our Closed Alpha version 😄

Nicole Nguyen Wow! We definitely see that. 23,000 is a fantastic number. You mentioned, the release of your closed alpha. Let's dive into this. What is your closed alpha, and what are players experiencing when they get their hands on it?

Jack Boreham our Closed Alpha is open for the first 2,000 most loyal and dedicated members out of 23,000 registrants. This is similar to a prototype of our game where you can dive in and trial the Player vs. Enemy combat style of the game. Players would be able to find out more about our gameplay and how to combine cards and dice to play in the game. You might need to check out our Playbook to get a head start and also sign up to stand next in line for our Closed Alpha followed by Public Alpha in April 😄
Playbook link https://blog.duelistking.com/dk-playbook-a-guide-to-getting-started-with-the-demo-31430
Closed Alpha registration link: https://forms.gle/ZrWKTwGYY6wRv38L9

Hi Nicole Nguyen. Great to have you here!
I'm still an NFT newbie. Could you explain how NFTs and Duelist Kingdom converge?

Mónica Freitas Cards aka the most important and valuable assets in our game are issued as NFTs with different rarity level and each card is issued as a unique item which are transferrable and tradable between players and across different marketplaces. You can also authenticate the cards by checking on blockchain if they are issued by us. Blockchain plays a pivotal role in assuring the authenticity, liquidity, tradability and subsequently the value of the NFT cards in our game.

Hey Nicole happy to have you join us

I have a question about the future plans and position of the game on the market. Blockchain games are getting more popular and thus more saturated. There are big nft card games already kind of solidified in the market like gods unchained. How do you differentiate your game from those other card games to attract an audience?

SuperSaiyanProgramming Thanks for the question and I assume you might be a heavy card gamer 😄 I think blockchain gaming has just started - it's not just about bringing mainstream games onto the blockchain. There's a whole different world of web3 and metaverse where you can build parallel or different dimensions of business model, designs, and structure of the game. Blockchain is not just about tokenization or NFTs - it does offer multitudes of value such as asset verification, incentivization, community ownership, proven fairness, and randomization.

The first and foremost differentiator we are trying to make is to actually eradicate the barriers between blockchain games and mainstream games in terms of design and gameplay. We want to build a game of kickass design and intense gameplay to start with. Also, we have developed in-house infrastructure to make sure that the card distribution can be verified totally random on the blockchain, and eventually, the community will be the main owners of the game once the DAO model kicks in. Also, we do not follow the much-saturated path of Play2Earn - Duelist King aims to incentivize people through winnings and tournament prizes or Win2Earn i.e. a much more winding road yet a more sustainable direction for a game to survive and thrive on its own.

Hi Nicole, Great to have you here! I have 2 questions:

What is your take on the Metaverse as envisioned by Meta (formerly Facebook), The Sandbox, and Decentraland? and What do you think is the future for interactive experiences such as Duelist King?

There has been a lot of bad press in the mainstream media regarding NFTs in the gaming space and a lot of backlash from gamers. What is your perspective on that and what is Duelist King doing differently to endear itself to a primarily gaming audience?

Really great questions and I think they are like industry-scope challenges 😄

Hi Nicole Nguyen, glad to have you here with us! How did the idea of Duelist King come up? How is the Duelist King Alpha version different from the original version?

Sara Pinto thanks for the question and I assume you might have been able to see or lay your hands on our very first version of the game last year 🙂

Our co-founding team have got to know each other for 6 years before working on this project and we own complementary skill sets and networks in blockchain since 2016. I guess it's just about time when we convened last May and decided that we should do something about the thriving scene of NFT and gaming and of course have some fun working on games that we like.

The Closed Alpha is quite different from our previous version actually. It's a huge reiteration from the previous Yu-Gi-Oh/GWENT-inspired gameplay and this time we are offering dual fun of using cards and rolling dice to decide how you can play, summon and use your decks. The random distribution of the cards and the dice component underline the fairness in the game - regardless of how much money you have, how much experiences you've got, still you will need to pray for luck to be able to win in the game.

Sign up for our Closed Alpha and share with me how you feel about it 😄 https://forms.gle/ZrWKTwGYY6wRv38L9

Nicole Nguyen, that's a great playbook😂. So it seems the community is at the forefront of your game roadmap. How important would you say the community is for Duelist King? Also, how did you go about selecting members to partake? The most loyal ones, right?

Jack Boreham the playbook is actually a collaborative experience with our community as well 😄 We invite the community to leave comment feedback, ideas, and even designs for Duelist King through one of our art contests. As mentioned, the DAO or Decentralized Autonomous Organization will be the key governing model of Duelist King next year so we are having the community familiarize themselves with having a say in how our gameplay and design play out.

We are engaging with them on regular basis through Telegram, games, polls, and feedback loop for the Closed Alpha. The members whitelisted for the Closed Alpha version are the most loyal ones yes - since we actually keep score of their engagement with the community, the volume of constructive feedback contributes to the project. We also put aside a bounty pool as incentives for prospective contributors and also advocates/future owners of Duelist King as rewards for their contribution to the Duelist King community and project 😄

Very interesting and thanks for the thorough answer! What is the barrier to entry? God's unchained starts players off with a free deck (that isn't minted/owned NFTs) but as the player wins games they can then earn cards as NFTs.

In DK do you need to buy a deck to start playing or is there a free starter deck?

SuperSaiyanProgramming we will offer the Free2Play alongside the Standard version. The F2P is for experimenting with the gameplay and comes with no rewards. The Standard version requires 22 cards at the minimum to start playing and that costs 22 USD if you buy directly from us. In our last 2 batches, we sold 500K NFTs at a flat price of 1 USD per card or 5 USD per 5 cards in one mystery box. The cool thing is you can get anywhere from a Common to a Legendary card with just 1 USD since we run on-chain random distribution of the cards and the community can verify the whole process on blockchain 😉

Nicole Nguyen, what has Duelist King learned from the closed alpha that you guys would take to new iterations of your game 😄

Jack Boreham we have gathered a number of feedbacks from the community - like 100 per day regarding anything from gameplay to game design. We will reflect this feedback in our upcoming Public Alpha version to be released in April. There will be few reiterations in terms of card feature, in-game effects and gameplay so make sure you've signed up for our closed alpha and stay tuned for our public alpha B-)

Nicole Nguyen that's awesome! What's next for the Duelist Kingdom? What is the next milestone you want to achieve?

Mónica Freitas the next milestone is definitely the Player vs. Enemy version coming in June. We are gathering momentum by engaging as much as we can with 23K closed alpha registrants, launching an incentive pool for feedback and contributions from the community, listing on centralized exchanges, and expanding our partnership with more AMAs, games, and engagements to gather around 50K registrants to Public Alpha which will turn to around 5-10K gamers to Duelist King. This is an intense genre of the game so we hope to start small yet bold with genuine enthusiasts and build a strong loyal team of Duelist King early adopters.

Nicole Nguyen, that's fantastic. What are you most proud about over the last six months since you were here that DK has accomplished? And what excites you most about the future of Duelist King over the next six?

Jack Boreham There are too many things to pick from but let's say growing the team to 35 motivated and diverse people have been one of our biggest achievements so far in the last 8 months. Having a strong core team is a great foundation for us to achieve the following milestones of 500K NFTs sold out and the closed alpha launch. Over the next 6 months, the PvE beta version would be our main target so that we can convert DK enthusiasts and advocates into genuine gamers.

Hey Nicole Nguyen as someone who is working with a blockchain game atm (Ethermore) I'm interested to hear your thoughts on how to keep communities engaged and what resources/outlets have worked best for you in terms of drumming up enthusiasm and growing the community?

Secondly, when the game was being developed where did the team draw inspiration for the theme/art style? Also happy to have you here again!

Limarc Ambalina thanks again for having us and I can't express how grateful we are for the support from you and Hackernoon team.

To answer your first question, I think consistency and constant communication, and feedback loop are key to getting the community engaged. For Duelist King, we make sure that the community is well aware and informed of all information about the project and our regular engagement schemes. Also, the feedback and communication loop between us are encouraged and also incentivized so that the community can absorb the milestones and vision of Duelist King becoming a community-owned and driven project.

Additionally, we were inspired by Yu-Gi-Oh and GWENT at the start of game development although we did have a number of reiterations with the game to make sure it's unique, fun, and just intense and hardcore enough for both newbies and crypto gamers. The art is inspired by a number of folklores and myths that you can observe across different cultures like vampires, werewolves, shamans, etc.

Everyone can see a piece of their childhood heroes or characters in Duelist King and eventually we will allow the community to come up with the card design and also gameplay. Those who followed Duelist King might have already observed this through our art contest with Ludena Protocol back in November last year and we want to make sure this will take place more in the future so you can start to familiarize yourself as a decision-maker to Duelist King 🙂

Thanks a lot for having me here Jack Boreham and Limarc Ambalina, we hope to see more Duelist King supporters and advocates from Hackernoon and we welcome the HN community to partake in our activities and discussions to fine-tune Duelist King gameplay and design in the near future!

Nicole Nguyen A pleasure to have you with us. To wrap up, how can people get involved with Duelist King and its future game releases?

Jack Boreham Drop us a line, follow our Twitter and join our Telegram group to stay updated with our upcoming milestones 🙂 We hope to hear from you about anything like your favorite card, how you feel about our closed alpha, or how we can tweak our gameplay better for upcoming versions, also we have prizes to offer to constructive and/or lucky members so don't miss this out!
✅Website: https://duelistking.com/
✅Twitter: https://twitter.com/duelistkingnft
✅Telegram group: https://t.me/DuelistKingNFT