E3 2015 - Deckbound Brings Ownership, Permanence, and Multi-Game Access to a New CCG System
Imagine a digital card game where you can purchase cards, level them up in a typical collectible card game (or CCG - think Hearthstone or Magic), and then keep the leveled-up cards as your own personal items.
Now imagine that you can take that same card from the collectible card game and use it as an asset in a dungeon crawler, leveling it up there, and then being able to take it back to the original game with the new level and experience points.
That holy-grail of digital card ownership and management is the whole concept behind Gareth Jenkins’ Deckbound digital card gaming system. He’s already created the digital card system (actually built upon the super-secure bitcoin blockchain) that allows him to create and assign ownership to card purchasers. Since every card is just a series of Bitcoin transactions, you can trade and exchange cards freely on the open market. That’s some hot stuff right there.
On the E3 expo floor, Jenkins showed me the card system - a web-based, platform-agnostic CCG called Deckbound Heroes coming out in late summer of this year, and another mobile game for iOS (and Android) called Deckbound Quest, which is the aforementioned dungeon crawler. In the former, you attack an opponent’s deck and try to whittle them down to zero health points, and in the latter you use the cards to power up your dungeon explorer.
If you’re a game developer yourself, things get even better - Jenkins has created an API that lets you access the Deckbound card system to use the cards in your own games, whether mobile, desktop, or web-based. It’s a brilliant new idea that no one else seems to be doing.
As a gamer, you can get in early and purchase your own Deckbound cards at a significant discount via its early access program, and they’ll eventually run around $1.50 for five to seven cards - a common price point for digital collectible cards according to Jenkins. Deckbound Heroes, the web-based CCG, is hitting an alpha build soon and should show up sometime in August or September, Jenkins hopes. The mobile dungeon crawler, Deckbound Quest, should be out soon thereafter.