Ancient Rome Play-to-Earn Game ‘vEmpire’ Launches

While the GameFi space has been pumped plump with institutional investment in recent months, the landscape of playable games in the ecosystem remains limited.

Most titles thus far have tried to emulate the format of Axie Infinity, where success is directly correlated to the hours spent played. Launched Thursday, vEmpire takes a different approach, modeling itself after the many strategy-based card games that have found their place in gaming communities for decades.

The game is a head-to-head battle between two players who can choose to be either Romulus or Remus, the sons of the god Mars and grandsons of king of Alba Longa, in the game (and a nod to the foundational myth of the city of Rome).

Players agree before the start of the game how much VEMP, which is the platform’s in-game digital currency, to wager in a winner-take-all format. Each player is then given a “legion” of 25 cards in their hand, each with different troops of varying abilities.

Both players take turns laying down a different card to earn points, and whoever earns the most points in two of the three rounds is declared the champion. Players can purchase non-fungible tokens (NFT) of specific cards to use to gain a competitive advantage.

vEmpire launched in July as a staking project for metaverse tokens such as MANA and SAND, with a pro-decentralization pitch of “invading” Decentraland. The buildout of the vEmpire world serves as a gaming interface for VEMP holders.

“We have been working to get this game out for the past few months whilst expanding all of our reaches across the metaverse,” Dom Ryder, founder of vEmpire, said via Telegram. “This game is called ‘vEmpire: The Beginning’ for a reason, we have lots more to come and this will be played across all metaverses available on our staking platform.”

UPDATE: (Dec. 16 18:57 UTC): Corrects the background of Romulus and Remus.