Summary
Cross the Ages is a beautiful play2earn TCG game on L2 ETH Immutable X, with both mobile and PC versions. Launched in 2022, the game recently reached the #1 spot in the French App Store's strategy game category, as Immutable X blog reports.
It's #2 collection on IMX:
From immutascan.io
Also, there are books and physical cards behind the game.
Intriguing, isn't it?
Reviews for this game are good so I decided to give it a try. I especially liked the idea that, if necessary, I can transfer NFTs and cryptocurrencies between my accounts (I also play Gods Unchained on Immutable X.)
Yes, the game is beautiful, checks my gameplay out
Of course, I was interested if it's possible to raise some crypto by winning cards and selling them on tokentrove.com or other IMX marketplace. I did a research (tough! much info is in French) and found an answer, I would say rather a moderate one than optimistic.
Long story short, you win cards starting from the day 1 which is the good news. The bad news is that you need $CTA tokens to upgrade them to NFTs. You must be a top player to win some PRANA (with which you can buy $CTA) while the price of $CTA on the in-game shop and secondary market is significant (around 70$ for a pack of 100 tokens), and expenses for minting NFTs seem high.
Arkhante packs from crosstheages.com/packs
The good thing is that today cards belong to the very first card set of the game. They might become expensive one day (and liquid) so paying 70$ for minting NFTs out of them won't be a problem in future, maybe.
Now everything is in more detail.
Do You Need to Pay to Start?
You don't need to pay. Cross the Ages is a free-to-play game. Install the program from the official website crosstheages.com and start playing with training / rotation cards (available for free). You will begin winning cards daily from the day 1.
The Rules. How to Win
It's not a typical TCG where you kill creatures to eventually defeat the opponent's god. In CTA, your goal is to capture as many cards on the board as possible and create between them bonds (trinities). Each player has only 5 minutes for the whole game. If you don't make it on time, you lose.
An example of a CTA card. The image from cta-fansite.com - visit the link to read the explanations to each item.
I'll explain the rules with pictures I created for this post in Photoshop.
The Rules: The Basic Mechanics, Capturing Cards
Let's imagine your opponent (with red cards) plays a card with power 610:
To capture this card, you must place near it a card with a bigger power (on the left, right, below, or above): For example, you have a card with power 680 and you decided to place it on the left:
680 is bigger than 610 so you capture the opponent's card, they are both green now, means yours:
You get points for this.
The next turn, the opponent plays a card to capture as many cards as they can. If they have a card with the biggest power, they can capture both cards:
740 captures 680, 680 captures 610. So, all cards become red, means controlled by your opponent:
They get points for this.
But what if the opponent has only a card that as strong as 650? Then, they can play this:
As a result, they capture the card with power 610. But 610 can't beat 680 so the card with power 680 stays yours:
This is the basic idea of the game. But everything is more complex, of course.
The Rules: Elements Make Everything Complicated
Every card belongs to one of the seven elements. Elements are related to each other in the certain ways. These ways are explained by the Heptagram below. When you are playing, it always is before your eyes to help you to make a decision:
Heptagram
Advantages
Let's look at Nature, for example. It has +150 power bonus against Water and Earth (arrows coming from Nature to Water and Earth on the Heptagram). Nature has also - 150 power penalty against Air and Fire (arrows coming to Nature).
Boosts
Nature can create an affinity with Light or Darkness (dotted lines between Nature and Light/Darkness in Heptagram). It means when a Nature card is adjacent to a Light/Darkness card, both cards get a permanent power bonus +100.
Nature can create a trinity bond if it is part of a group "Light + Air + Nature" or "Air + Nature + Earth" or "Nature + Earth + Darkness". Every card in such a group gets +100 Power.
Creating trinities (along with capturing cards) is a way to get scores.
The Rules: The Leader and Its Ability
One of the cards in your deck is the leader. You can choose the leader by placing a card in the very beginning of your deck:
As you see, I had a Nature card with 690 power as the leader.
Usually, people choose a card with big power for that.
The leader has an ability which you can choose during deck building. Look at the screenshot above: a circle in the center indicates the ability chosen from the list below (Banner Command, Power Mirror, Field Influence, etc).
The Rules: Deck Building
Go to in-game Cards page and choose 30 cards with the total power not more than 15.000. There are cards-creatures and there are cards that buff one of the elements.
Forge
You can merge cards to get rarer ones in Forge. For this, you don't need $CTA tokens, only TRISEL tokens you earn daily.
How to Win Packs
Complete daily and weekly missions. To get better monthly reward, get as high rank as possible in the ranking of CTA players.
I have played for around 10 days, and I've collected 43 simple Arkhante non-NFT cards.
Daily Packs
Go to Missions (left bottom area) and look what you must complete to get a daily pack.
Today, my daily missions are:
- Log in
- open one chest
- unlock 3 chests
- win 3 duels.
I have no 3 chests to unlock so I probably have no daily pack today. But usually tasks are simple, you only need to play 5-6 game to complete them. Sometimes, you even don't have to win a game (duel) to complete a mission or two from the list.
Weekly Pack
As you see, 2 days left and I already completed missions.
Monthly Reward
You must win oftener to get higher in the ranking for getting better rewards.
Click on your rating (numbers below your nickname):
Then, you'll see the ranking:
I have played for 10 days only so I know not much about monthly rewards, except the information the CTA team shared on Medium:
I guess these monthly packs for the best players have the most value.
Decay System
It's announced in the same Medium post that the Decay system will be implemented soon. People who don't play regularly will lose rating. But it will only work with those players who high in the ranking (1500 rating and higher). Details is here: https://medium.com/cross-the-ages/end-of-era-5-rewards-ab7319ea2999
Card Sets
As I know, there is only one set, the very first one called Arkhante. The CTA team said on Medium that, on October 4th, they initiate Season 2 known as Mantris. It means a new set of cards is coming. I have no idea if they will stop issuing Arkhante cards then or not...
How to Sell Cards
You can win cards of Cross the Ages as daily, weekly, and monthly rewards. But to sell them on an IMX marketplace, you must upgrade them from "digitals" to NFTs. To do so, you must pay 2 $CTA tokens:
This upgrade option has no connection to in-game Forge. To turn your card into NFT, go to the in-game page "Cards" and right-click to zoom in on the card.
You can buy $CTA tokens on the in-game shop. You can't buy several token, only a pack of 100 $CTA, and it'll cost around 70$. Investing this much money in a new game isn't what I personally dream about (especially when the crypto market is so low and 70$ investment in a good coin can bring 10x and much more soon).
You can purchase PRANA (purple gems) with a bank card and, then, you can buy $CTA Token with PRANA. You must pay around 70$ to get a 100-$CTA pack
All ways to get $CTA token, from cta-fansite.com
To upgrade a card to NFT you pay 2 $CTA (around 1.4$) while many cards costs only about 1$ on tokentrove.com.
There is one more way to get $CTA - earn another game token, PRANA (to buy $CTA) by getting a rank within top512 players. You'll need to repeat this up to several times, to get enough PRANA for buying a pack of 100 $CTA (you can't buy smaller amount).
There is an advantage
Nowadays, you win Arkhante cards, this is the first card set of Cross the Ages. It might be these cards will become expensive in future. Rare CTA cards are already pricey, a lot, but their liquidity raises questions. One day, they can become more liquid if the game becomes very popular.
Conclusion
The game is quite interesting, it's fun, that's my verdict.
When I play CTA, I am lost in thought like if I played checkers. And when I play Gods Unchained, I have a lot of emotions, which resembles backgammon if you know the game. CTA and GU are both TCG but they don't compete each other - I personally can play both of them without a feeling that one game universe trying to beat another.
From the point of earnings crypto, CTA seems questionable (although potentially profitable). Yes, you can use Forge to create a cool card that will cost hundreds of bucks (there are plenty of such on tokentrove), but will you be able to sell it?.. At least, this is what I learn after 10 days of research and playing. Thank you for reading, if you have something to add, please share your thoughts in the comment section.
Medium: https://medium.com/@crosstheages
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CrossTheAges
Website: https://www.crosstheages.com/
Tokentrove: https://tokentrove.com/collection/CrossTheAges
You have just read a review posted on Hive blockchain (I am saying this to guys from outside). On Hive's peakd.com and ecency.com, you can earn crypto by blogging. No monthly payments, no empty promises; it does work!