Author: FaultProofBen

Gm!

As of today, there are four onchain games that I’d consider to be my favorites:

• Primodium

• Sky Strife

• Network States

• Words3

Today, I’m going to focus on the team behind both the latter two titles: Small Brain Games.

Don’t let the name fool you.

Behind the wojacks and (🤏, 🧠) emojis lies a collective that is pushing the onchain gaming envelope when it comes to designing innovative gameplay mechanics, and pioneering relationships between studios.

Today, we’re going to see why this is the case by exploring the burgeoning Small Brain Games ecosystem.

In doing so, we’ll discuss:

• The history of (🤏, 🧠)

• Games like Words3, Network States, Gaul and This Cursed Machine

• Why I’m bullish on (🤏, 🧠)

Also…WASD is going multichain, as this is our first-ever article that’s being released on Base!

So, if you like this piece (and want to make some WASD history in the process), be sure to collect it on 🔵 by annihilating the mint button above.

☝️☝️

Now…let’s get to it!

The History of (🤏, 🧠)

Before we dive into the some games, let’s get some context on the history and organizational structure of Small Brain Games itself.

Small Brain Games is a collective of onchain game builders that aims to release a new title every ~6 weeks.

It’s origins are a bit of a mystery, but the project first seemed to come to life in October 2022 with the creation of its GitHub.

Then, in November 2022, Small Brain Games launched its Discord (the home of its ecosystem and community) and announced its first game, Words3 (more on this later).

Since then, several other Small Brain games have launched on mainnet or held public playtests, including:

• Network States - A PVP strategy game with lore generated by GPT-4.

• Apes Gambit - A battle royale chess game.

• Dark Seas - A naval-themed action strategy game.

• Underverse - An imperial MMORTS.

Each of these games were built in MUD by different developers within the ecosystem including Small Brain Dev (the project's founder) and others like 0xHank, who is now a member of the Primodium team.

Of the five listed above, Words3 and Network States appear to be the only ones still in active development.

However, since August 2023, we’ve seen two new games join the Small Brain ecosystem to varying degrees.

These projects are:

• Gaul - A road-building game.

• This Cursed Machine - A sci-fi horror game.

The Actual (🤏, 🧠) Games

Now that we know what Small Brain Games is, let’s look at the games that are a part of its ecosystem which are actively being developed.

Words3

Game Mechanics:

Words3 is a cryptoeconomic word-building game.

Like Scrabble and Words With Friends, in Words3, players compete to form words on a board and score points.

However, unlike these offchain games, to play a word in Words3, you have to pay a certain amount of ETH for each letter you use.

The prices of individual letters vary, fluctuating throughout the game based on their usage via a Variable Rate Gradual Dutch Auction (VRGDA).

For all the small brains like myself, a VRGDA acts as a pricing function that increases the cost of a letter when there is high demand among players to use it, and vice versa.

Players can also earn points when others build on the words they previously placed, creating the opportunity for them to earn “passive point income” over the course of the round.

At the conclusion of a game, all the ETH that players spent is pooled together and distributed pro-rata to participants based on their profitability.

This means that the real objective of Words3 is to maximize pnl – The number of points that you earn relative to the amount of ETH that you spend.

History:

As mentioned above, Words3 is the OG Small Brain game, as it was the first title to come out of the project in November 2022 (This was only 11 months ago but feels like decades in crypto time).

Throughout 2023, the game held public playtests before launching on Base in August.

Whereas the playtests consisted of shorter, 15-minute games, the first mainnet round of Words3 lasted 4 days, saw 122 players participate, and accumulated a prize pool of more than $22K.

I played and, unsurprisingly, did not come in first.

In fact, I was deeply unprofitable - I finished 104th and lost over $54.

On an interesting note, the 1st-place finisher, Saucepoint, revealed that they had built a script to optimize their point efficiency (i.e. points scored per ETH spent) based on the public dictionary of eligible words.

My Impressions:

Although I’m not good at it, I’m a big fan of Words3.

I think the game’s mechanics are very innovative, as paying ETH for letters unlocks new dimensions of strategy that aren’t present (or even possible) with offchain word games.

Despite sharing some similarities with Scrabble, this makes Words3 an entirely different game, as your objective is to maximize profitability rather than points.

This dynamic also helps add balance, as because of their cost, it is not always sensible to just use letters with a high point value like Z or Q, forcing players to be more conscious of the words they create.

Furthermore, as a degen, I also love the idea of being able to win real money (ETH IS MONEY), and think that this adds to the intensity and fun of the game.

In the future, especially given the global nature of rounds, I can imagine a world where we have 7, 8, or in a bull-market, 9-figure games of Words3 - Which I think would be incredibly entertaining!

With all that said, I did have some gripes with the mainnet round.

For starters, I think it was too long, as its 4-day length meant that the game did not have the same fast-paced, chaotic fun as the ~15-minute testnet ones.

I also feel this length gave too great an edge to early players, as they could take advantage of cheap letter prices and extract what (in my view is) outsized rent from placing their words in an optimal location.

This is non-dev cope, but I also think making the dictionary public gave a large advantage to players like Saucepoint who could create scripts.

However, Small Brain Dev is addressing this by creating a botkit, which could help ameliorate this issue by making it easier for users to create bots.

Network States

Game Mechanics:

Network States is a PVP strategy game.

In Network States, your objective is to grow your fledgling nation by accumulating territory.

When players join a game of Network States, they are assigned a state (represented by a colored tile) and a capital.

The capital is the nexus of a state, as capturing it will eliminate a player from the game and transfer all of its territory to whoever conquered it.

Capitals are also where players can initially grow their troop counts. Troops are the arm that carries out this aforementioned conquest, as they can be strategically deployed throughout the map to gobble up territory and attack other players.

Players will continuously accumulate troops (denoted by numbers) on a per-block basis, with the growth rate determined by a state’s size and pre-existing troop count.

Along with your capital, you can also increase your troop size by capturing cities, which are the former capitals of states that have been eliminated from the game.

Although it’s currently hardcoded, on mainnet Network States will utilize GPT-4 to generate in-game lore for each state based on a player’s actions.

For instance, if you take over someone else’s state, the LLM will document the battle by creating a record of this event.

In the future, Network States may also utilize text-to-voice or text-to-image AI as further sources of lore for the game world.

History:

Network States was first announced in May 2023 and began holding public playtests in September.

These playtests have consisted of games that last roughly 30-60 minutes, with players hopping in the voice channel in the Small Brain Games Discord to provide feedback for the team.

Despite the limited number of playtests, there have already been some interesting moments.

One such example came after the conclusion of the second playtest, when ClassicJ took over every other player’s state, declaring themselves “The New Plague” of Network States.

My Impressions:

I’ve had a ton of fun with Network States.

As of now, I would even say it’s my favorite Small Brain game.

In particular, I really enjoy the strategy elements of the game.

Despite its barebones graphics, quite a bit of strategic thinking is needed when playing, as you’ll have to determine how to position your troops and what fronts to fight on.

Furthermore, when your state grows to a certain size, you’ll begin to be attacked from all angles, forcing you to make tradeoffs between conquering territory and defending your own.

This makes gameplay fast-paced and intense, especially when your troop count nears that of another player whose city or capital you are trying to take over.

I think Network States is also much easier to pick up than Words3, as you just have to use the WASD movement keys (nice) to control your troops.

In addition, as a writer and history buff, I LOVE the lore aspect of Network States.

I think when fully implemented, the use of GPT-4 to create in-game lore will go a long way towards enriching the game world and helping to bring Network States to life.

I’ve already begun to do this myself, as I used Midjourney to visualize Harrison Finch, the President of the Cryptocratic Republic in the last playtest, giving a speech to his soldiers.

I also used it to visualize the aftermath of ClassicJ’s attack.

With all that said, Network States is certainly still a WIP.

There are numerous gameplay and UI bugs, such as being unable to attack certain players at times. I also think some gameplay mechanics, like the rate of troop growth and spawn mechanics for new players, can be tweaked to improve the experience.

Gaul

Game Overview:

Gaul is a Roman-empire-themed road-building game.

Yes, I think it’s safe to say that Neilseooon, the game’s dev, does think a lot about the Roman Empire.

Anyways, Gaul is set in a grayscale, 3D-world where players' primary objective is to move, construct, and demolish different structures to pave roads and make their way toward the game’s namesake city.

We don’t have a ton of specifics on Gaul’s gameplay, but the team has posted several clips on X teasing snippets of it.

These include videos of the construction process, in-game objects, and some greenery like trees and bushes.

History:

Gaul is the second project from the Engine Study team after their namesake website, where players can roam a 2D world, connect their wallet to visualize it conents, and empty them onto the ground.

As mentioned above, Gaul has its own section in the Small Brain Discord, where it’ll be holding its upcoming public playtests.

However, the alignment between Gaul and Small Brain Games goes beyond sharing a and hyping each other up on Twitter. Per GitHub, Neilsooon has also contributed to Network States.

My Impressions:

I of course have not been able to try it, but I’m very excited to get my hands on Gaul.

I think the game looks like a lot of fun. I especially love the art design, and think the game world looks gorgeous. I’m also very curious to see how the relationship between Engine Study and Small Brain Games evolves in the future.

This Cursed Machine

Game Overview:

This Cursed Machine is an in-development horror game from Moving Castles.

Like Gaul, details surrounding the specifics of its gameplay are scant.

However, based on teasers posted to X, we can see that the game appears to be set in a dystopian world where humanity is enslaved and has its organs harvested by machines.

History:

As discussed above, This Cursed Machine dropped its first teaser a few weeks ago, and is set to begin public playtesting in November.

However, the connections to Small Brain Games began before then.

In September 2023 a bot was created to connect the Small Brain Games server to that of Moving Castles via the Network States channel.

My Impressions:

Although we haven’t seen any glimpses of gameplay, I’m still very excited to playtest Moving Castles.

The game’s teasers and premise are incredibly graphic, to the point where I couldn’t even visualize the text from a clip posted to X on Midjourney.

Honestly, this Midjourney censorship just makes me want to play the game more.

Anyways, we have not seen many (if any) onchain horror games, so I’m especially keen to see how this genre translates over.

[Redacted] New Small Brain Game

Per a recent xeet and Discord post, it appears as though Small Brain Dev is working on yet another game.

In typical Small Brain fashion, you have a better chance of being given the nuclear codes than getting any information about it - So we don’t have any details about this new game.

Nonetheless, I’d watch X and Discord for any crumbs of alpha.

Small Brain, Big Potential

As we can see, there is a ton of cool activity coming out of (🤏, 🧠).

With fun games that have innovative mechanics, unique partnerships, and an awesome build in public ethos (which I greatly appreciate as a player), I’m very bullish on Small Brain Games.

I certainly plan to continue playing Network States and Words3, as well as Gaul and This Cursed Machine when they launch.

In addition, I’ll also be playing close attention to how the relationships between Small Brain Games, Engine Study, and Moving Castles evolve.

All of the four games we covered today are built in MUD.

In theory, this makes it far easier for them to compose with one another. Perhaps given their alignment, we’ll see some of the highly touted (yet rarely seen) cross-game composability.

They may say their craniums are little.

But I think Small Brain Games has big potential.

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