In an unexpected turn, prominent Telegram crypto game X Empire—previously known as Musk Empire—has launched a new mini-season ahead of the airdrop, offering players another chance to rack up a share of tokens before the launch.

It’s unexpected because on Monday, X Empire shut down its game—described as ending its initial mining phase—ahead of the planned token launch and airdrop, which are now expected to come in the back half of October.

But with the new “Chill Phase,” X Empire players will be able to continue tapping their avatar—be it Elon Musk-inspired or otherwise—and unlock various upgrades. However, all character progression has been reset, which means it’s effectively like starting the game over again during this shortened play period.

The “Chill Phase” will let players compete to earn a slice of an additional 34.5 billion tokens, which were newly carved out for players from the total token supply. In a Telegram announcement, the developers said that rewards for the initial phase have been calculated, and that any progress made (or not made) during the Chill Phase will not affect those allocations.

As before, 70% of the planned total supply of 690 billion X tokens is still assigned to the initial mining phase. Now, an additional 5% of the supply will be allocated to “Chill Phase” players, coming from the 30% of tokens originally allocated to “new users and next phases.” 

The late shift comes ahead of the token generation event on The Open Network (TON), where the entire 75% of the supply will be offered to eligible players. This is expected to take place in “the second half of October,” with an exact date being announced in the coming days.

“This phase will be very short and will only last a couple of weeks,” X Empire posted on social media. “Whether to participate or not is entirely up to you. We love you either way.”

The Elon Musk themed tap-to-earn game ended its mining phase on Tuesday, claiming to have attracted almost 48 million players. Those players also minted 570,000 NFT vouchers that enabled pre-market trading for the X token before its official launch.

These NFTs that represent 69,000 X tokens apiece are currently trading for approximately 3.5 TON ($19). This figure has largely remained stable since the tokenomics were announced. Pre-market trading can be particularly risky, however, as traders speculate on the price of a soon-to-launch token despite a number of unknown factors.

September was a big month for Telegram games coming to the end of their tap-to-earn cycles, with Catizen, Rocky Rabbit, and Hamster Kombat all releasing tokens. As these games look to reinvent themselves to keep players interested, it appears that X Empire will continue to stay in the pre-airdrop phase for at least a while longer.

Edited by Andrew Hayward

Captain Tsubasa: Rivals is a hot new tap-to-earn game on Telegram, and with the license of a major soccer-themed anime brand behind it, a ton of players have signed up to play already. With some kind of TON-based airdrop coming in the future, the race is once again on to collect as much in-game currency as you can to boost any potential future payouts. 

Of course, you can tap to earn balls (aka coins or points in other tap games), but like most of these games, the real way to increase your ball count is to buy upgrades, take part in the daily challenges, and complete some bonus tasks.

If you want to maximize your time ahead of the eventual airdrop, these tips will help you get the most balls as quickly as possible in Captain Tsubasa: Rivals on Telegram.

Expand your team 

Captain Tsubasa Rivals is, effectively, a Hamster Kombat clone. But, the one thing it has going for it is that instead of buying random, crypto-related upgrades for your imaginary exchange, you can acquire and upgrade new players for your soccer team—a twist that’s quite fun.

It makes thematic sense, but what’s even better is that these players actually bring in a lot of passive income, even as you increase their levels. We’ve focused on getting as many players as possible, and now have a good amount of passive income coming in each day. Tapping barely seems worth it once you’ve juiced your passive income rate.

Do the daily combo—if you can 

Captain Tsubasa’s daily combo functions just like the Hamster Kombat one: Each day, three upgrades out of the entire selection are picked to make up the combo, and if you upgrade or buy them all on that day, then you’ll net a huge ball bonus. In other words, you’ll get a massive in-game payout just for improving your team… which also boosts your passive income going forward.

Looking for the daily combo? Captain Tsubasa: Rivals won’t tell you, but we will—we’ve launched a daily combo guide for the game that we will be updating daily for the foreseeable future.

The caveat here is that some upgrades are locked behind referral goals, so if you don’t have any friends, then you might not be able to complete every combo. So do the ones you can, and don’t sweat about the ones you can’t.

Change the player you tap on 

As far as we can tell, this is purely a cosmetic change and offers absolutely no gameplay advantage at all—so perhaps it’s debatable to call this a tip. However, you can change the player that you tap on by using the change button on the home page.

When you tap that button, you’ll be presented with a list of all the players you have unlocked so far, and can select one of them to become your player on the main screen instead of Tsubasa. It’s a purely cosmetic change, but I’ve found that changing it daily has kept things a little fresher than other games, where the home screen could look identical for months.

Ignore the tap increases 

Like a lot of tap games, tapping isn’t all that profitable compared to boosting your passive income—and in Captain Tsubasa, the numbers very quickly don’t add up. You could spend some balls to upgrade how many you get for each tap via the multitap boost, and how many times you can tap in one sitting… or you could invest the same amount in a player or team upgrade and earn way more balls passively over time. 

Even in the early game, the cost of one of those upgrades will easily pay for itself in little time, saving you the time and hassle of repetitively tapping your phone screen. Look, play however you please, but this move is all about efficiency.

Do the freebie tasks

A bit of a cheeky one here, but if you want a one-time influx of free balls, there’s a big list of social media-related tasks that give your rewards… but you don’t actually have to do a lot of them. 

All the tasks that ask you to do something on Twitter (aka X) don’t actually verify whether you’ve done it. That means that you can click on the button for the task, which opens the Twitter app, then simply head back to Telegram and claim the reward. It’s free balls for a little bit of app-switching hassle.

You’ll need friends 

While not as egregious as some other tap games, Captain Tsubasa: Rivals does lock some upgrade options behind referral totals, meaning if you don’t have some pals to invite to the game, then you won’t be able to unlock certain upgrades and players. 

It’s not a major issue, as there’s still a good amount of upgrades you can access—but if you want to maximize your ball count, then you’ll need to coax at least a few friends into the game to help you unlock some of the key pieces for your soccer dynasty.

Edited by Andrew Hayward

Space Nation, a budding transmedia franchise, has “soft launched” its massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) Space Nation Online as it eyes up the goal of becoming the next Star Wars. The developers believe that the newly released game, built on blockchain, will be the centerpiece to its expanding sci-fi IP.

Space Nation Online will spend 12 weeks in this soft-launched phase as the team limits player access and stabilizes the in-game economy. Once this is complete, the game—built on Ethereum scaling network Immutable zkEVM—will be set up for a global launch that will attempt to bring in a wider Web2 audience.

The MMO will serve as the core experience in the broader Space Nation franchise, which has a series of animated shorts, spinoff games, and a TV series in the works. While the sci-fi IP has its sights set on becoming the next Star Wars, the game looks to improve on the classic MMORPG World of Warcraft by implementing a web3 powered economy.

Space Nation co-founder and CEO Jerome Wu previously worked as a senior project manager at Blizzard Entertainment in charge of World of Warcraft’s operations in China. From this, he believes to have identified what makes games in this genre tick—and where to improve them.

During his time at Blizzard, he noticed that players would complain that World of Warcraft felt like a job as they performed monotonous tasks for hours to grind the ranks. Space Nation Online’s economy aims to improve on this by making these tasks have a high return on investment, while the more fun and compelling tasks have much lower returns.

This means that players can choose to play the game like any other MMORPG, albeit with more rewards for the monotonous resource gathering, or simply buy these resources off players in order to focus on the most fun parts of the game.

“[Some people] just want to become the guild leader, lead their team to success, and try to become the conqueror of the galaxy. Those people just play for fun,” Wu told Decrypt. “But there are lots of people wanting to do play-to-earn.”

For example, miners may spend hours gathering minerals that they can sell to other people who need them to create weapons and ships. In return, the miner will receive the in-game currency CHR that can be exchanged for fiat at any time—meaning users can engage in play-to-earn without directly interacting with Web3 tech.

“MMORPGs are a virtual society. There’s different types of players, different types of people,” Wu explained. “There’s a division of labor, and players will be free to choose what positions they want to be in.”

The team aims to create a virtual economy worth billions of dollars, similar to World of Warcraft and Fantasy Westward Journey, a Chinese MMORPG that helped inspire Space Nation Online’s economic model. But Wu believes that its crypto elements will make it more efficient. 

“There will be a Web3 MMORPG game that will achieve a virtual economy at this level or even bigger,” Wu told Decrypt. “I believe this is very important for future human society, for the future gaming industry. Because the metaverse will come eventually, and [building] a virtual economy inside a real virtual society will be super special.”

This will all accumulate into an intergalactic battle within the evolving Space Nation universe. Player-organized guilds will compete to occupy planets in the quest to become the dominant force in the galaxy. Wu explained that previous guild battles, during the game’s closed betas, have already seen 200 ships fighting each other—but he expects these battles to only get more epic with the soft launch.

Set in the Telikos Cluster, a distant galaxy, Space Nation tells the tale of humanity taking refuge after the solar system was obliterated by aliens. The MMORPG picks up from here as players battle one another, enemy factions, and countless aliens as they attempt to colonize the galaxy in the hopes of restarting civilization. 

While the team is “laser focused” on the MMORPG, the other experiences are on the back burner. But a number of animated shorts have already been released—starring Zoey, one of Decrypt’s favorite characters from our earlier playtest—and a screenplay for a prequel TV show is in the works by Roland Emmerich, who’s known for directing the films “Stargate,” “2012,” and “Independence Day.” This is the start of the quest to turn Space Nation into a household name.

“When the U.S. and the Soviet Union started [the Space Race during] the Cold War, there were a lot of sci-fi IPs appearing,” Wu said. “Now with Elon [Musk’s SpaceX] and Blue Origin, with all these rockets and satellites, there unfortunately hasn’t been a new [big sci-fi opera] IP. So I think this is a great opportunity for us.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward