// - There’s a lot to Cover - Issue #9

Welcome to Bored Ape Games on Chain.

I’m going to be focusing on the intersection of blockchain and gaming. I believe we’re going to see tremendous growth in this area over the coming years and I hope to document some of that here and share it with you, the community.

In this issue, we talk about // (if you don’t know what this means, read on)!

About Time

Those who recognize what // stands for will probably be thinking "Why the heck did it take so long for you to cover this? Are you even serious about web3 gaming?", and the answer to those questions is, there was A LOT to cover & yes I am. Also, I'm sorry. 😆 Better late than never though, and we're still early!

Parallel is a trading card game that has been in development for at least 2 years now. It's a trading card game (TCG) that had several pack drops to onboard early supporters and they're now getting close to releasing an early, playable version of the game to testers.

In this post, we'll talk about the backstory of the Parallel universe, all the cards released so far, what's the latest going in Parallel land, and more.

Let's dig in.

The Story

I'll include the story from parallel's website below, but here's the summary.

Earth is almost destroyed and man is in search for unlimited energy. Experiments began that ended in disaster and there was a mass exodus.

This course led to the inception of five parallel streams - // Here's the full story from the website.

Earth, once bountiful, was nearly depleted of its ability to sustain life. Humankind grew increasingly desperate to find an unlimited source of energy to rely upon. Brilliant minds around the world assembled for the sake of Earth's salvation. At a loss for alternatives, they began experimenting with fission augmented by anti-matter. In their haste, they unleashed catastrophe on an unprecedented scale. Fleeing certain death, the mass exodus of Earth began. This course led to the inception of five parallel streams.

The Earthen, a civilization of those left behind, remained and cultivated a thriving society through patience and perseverance.

The Kathari developed groundbreaking enhancements to the human genome deep below the frigid surface of Jupiter's moon, Europa.

The Marcolians, in pursuit of absolute supremacy, rose and promptly laid claim to the entire red planet of Mars.

Marcolians. F//tch will lie and say they’re the best, but we all know there is only the SHROUD.

The Augencore found refuge on their foundry ship Caine-1, augmenting themselves for deep space survival.

The Shroud, a mysterious presence in the universe - whereabouts currently unknown.

For 10,000 years each Parallel would advance their way of life far beyond the constraints of Earth. New homes that were once considered fiction, became reality. However, at last, the spark that humankind had kindled on Earth those millennia ago has ignited into the unlimited power source that was promised, calling each Parallel back home. This energy-rich invitation brings new conflict, as each Parallel believes Earth is theirs to claim.

Basics of the Game

The game is a TCG like so many others, with a lot of familiar concepts and some new features that give it strategic depth and uniqueness.

Decks are thematic. You can create a deck choosing one of the five parallels and any number of Universal cards. Decks must contain 40 cards in total and you can have up to 3 copies of a single card in the deck. Legendary cards can have a max of 1 copy per deck.

Then there's the concept of Paragons, similar to heroes in Hearthstone (kind of). The Paragon serves as the leader that provides passive and active abilities in the match. Passive abilities last the length of the match, whereas the active abilities kick in when you play the Paragon. The Paragon can only be played in a match and if it gets defeated, you must remove it from the field of play.

There's a concept of banking energy which allows you to gain more energy as the match progresses and play more powerful cards. This was something quite interesting to me, as I am using a reserve mana pool concept for a turn based strategy game that I'm working on. However, what's cool about banking as I understand it is the following:

You don't actually get to carry over any energy from one turn to the next
Banking is the act of placing a card in the Bank
For each card placed in the Bank, you will get more max energy per turn

I thought this was a neat way of doing it versus straight carrying mana from one turn to the next.

The goal of the game is once again a familiar one, reduce the enemy's health to zero and don't get the same done to you :) - simple enough, right? Wait till we start looking at the cards!

Cards

So this is where it can get somewhat overwhelming. There are lots of different classes of cards and the current card explorer: https://parallel.life/cards/ doesn't have the best way to see the number of unique cards. This can get very confusing because you have a total of 1558 cards that show up when you go looking at the complete collection.

However, as you see from the screenshot above, you're seeing 4 of the same cards with different rarities, art, etc. All in all I believe there are 258 unique cards at the moment, and this was confirmed on the // discord. We did this by counting the Masterpiece class cards.

There's a lot to unpack (hehe) with the cards. You don't see all the details for each card right now in this view, so the way to go about building your deck is by using this cheat sheet (available on Parallel) and I'm including it below. This should give you a rough idea.

Combined with the cheat sheet above, you can then use the deck building feature (beta) that is available here: https://www.parallel.life/deck - you'll select a parallel, a paragon, and then you'll end up on this screen where you can see all the card details!

Finally, here's a quick overview video from Parallel that shows a bit of the gameplay as well.

Barely Scratching the Surface

This is just the beginning. There's lots more to talk about as far as Parallel is concerned. Whether you want to jump into the lore, or the details of the cards, or the token $PRIME which you accumulate by 1. playing the game and 2. by caching (similar to staking) Parasets - combination of cards. You can check out more information about Parasets here.

Vaulting is done via the Echelon Prime Foundation, another part of the Parallel universe, and you can find the links to their twitter, discord and website below as well!

For those of you who might be interested in playing the game, I would suggest you do the following:

Sign up for early access
Build a deck via the deck builder on the Parallel site
Purchase those cards via Opensea or another NFT marketplace. If you don't worry about rarity etc. prices are very reasonable!
Hop into the discord and ask questions! Folks are super helpful and will go out of their way to help answer questions.

Here's a list of links that are good to have handy. Sometimes the website can be a little daunting to navigate.

The purpose of this thread/post was to provide a brief overview of the Parallel-verse to folks who might have seen // on their timelines, or have been looking for cool CCGs that are web3 native and high quality!

DISCLAIMER

I own some Parallel cards that you can view in my wallet: thechaingamer.eth - I will be getting more. I bought all these cards myself and have no affiliation with the team.