Blockchain games are coming more popular with the chance to win NFT and sometimes crypto prizes. The use of NFTs and the ability to have collectables is transforming gaming.

Today I want to introduce one type of game called Town Star by Gala Games. It is a simulation game where you can build a working town and grow your town productivity by making decisions on where you invest your money. The more sophisticated your production process the more money you will make in the game.

Game basics

When you start the game you are presented with a map of the world where you can choose where you want to place your town. There are different types of territory available which have different benefits. For example, forests are good because they provide trees that are needed to build most other facilities. Plains provide lots of pasture lands which are a cheap way of raising and feeding cattle. Desserts will provide easy access to oil which is needed in all town to ship goods for sale. Being next to a mountain will allow you to mine iron. Whereas being next to water will help to irrigate your crops.

Finally, selling your produce requires fuel and the further you are away from a big city where you can sell your products, the more fuel you will need.

The idea of the game is to produce items on your farm, such as wheat. You can then buy facilities such as a mill to turn the wheat to flour and get a higher price for it. Ultimately you can bake baguettes by mixing different production processes and ingredients to produce baguettes which will make you a lot more money.

Game rewards and collectables

Gala games give prizes away each week in their weekly competition. So you have the chance to earn crypto by playing. There is also the chance to gain NFT collectables. For example, you can collect the parts for a Crane Bot which will then help you build your town for you. You can also gain Gala tokens which can then be used to purchase NFTs etc. The Gala token can be traded on Uniswap or Bitrue and at the time of writing is ranked 255 by CoinGecko in terms of market cap. Gala games have other games in development or planned in the future.

Basic game strategy

When you start the game you will receive a silo for wheat, a couple of wheat fields and you will have a farmer who can start harvesting the crops. You can sell the wheat to get dollars in the game that will then allow you to buy other farm items.

One of the most important things to realise is that you have limited gasoline - you start with 40 tanks. Selling goods will consume gasoline and the further away you are from a city, the more gasoline you will consume. Therefore, a good strategy for new players is to place your town next to a city so that the amount of gasoline used for each trade is 1 unit. This means you have 40 possible sales before you need to be self-sufficient to produce your own gasoline.

Producing gasoline takes a few ingredients. First, you need to pump crude oil (unless your town is in the desert and you have an oil seep to use). You will need a Work House to provide a Worker to collect the pumped crude oil and store it. You will also need an industrial water plant to create industrial water and some turbines to produce electricity. To store your industrial water drums and electricity you will need a warehouse.

To build all of these you will need wood. You only start with 10 wood so you will need to get more. To do that you need trees and a lumberjack. A lumberjack is easy as you just need to build his house. The trees really depend on your terrain. If you are in the desert you won't have any trees so get planting and irrigating. If you are in the forest, you will have plenty to get going so you will just need the lumberjack house.

All of the above is quite expensive so you need to make money. Selling the wheat the farmer sells is just too cheap so you will need to produce a higher value good. The obvious one to start with it flour which will require you buying a windmill. You will need wood and wheat to produce flour.

You need to pay wages and rents for the workers and the facilities you have. So all of the above you need to do at speed. The positioning of the items is very important. If things are too far away from each other, then the workers spend too much time walking from one item to another - time costs money. However, putting things too close can slow down the facilities. For example, putting a wind turbine next to another building means it will take longer to produce electricity.

Irrigation is another key factor for working at speed. You can make wells and water pumps to get access to water quickly. However, the easiest way to irrigate the crops is to build a canal through chaining together a number of ponds. The ponds are expensive though when you first start.

Different crops and livestock need different amounts of water, so the positioning of the ponds carefully can help you optimally produce crops without having to get use farmers going to get bucket filled with water all the time. For example, a plantation of trees requires 7 units of water whereas the wheat requires just 3 units. A well provides 2 units of water to the 9 squares surrounding it and 1 unit to the squares immediately around that. Position the wells carefully to feed just the right amount of units to the crops.

Playability

The game is fun because any decision you make is going to have consequences - sometimes not immediately obvious. For example, building too many windmills will consume a lot of wood and may mean you cannot build the things you want to because there is not enough supply of wood. Sometimes to rectify you will need to stop the windmills crafting for a while. The key is to find an equilibrium that is sustainable.

After a bit of practice (or more likely trial and error), you will be able to build a full sophisticated town and then you might want to try to earn some crypto from the weekly competitions. You probably need to be more dedicated than me for that!

Sign-up and have a go, then let me know what you think.

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Note: Images from Gala Games promotional images and my own gameplay.