
In each round, players are randomly dealt the cards that their Axies possess.

Here’s an example of an Axie along with its four card skills At its core, it’s a cross between Pokémon and card games like, well, the Pokemon trading card game or Magic: The Gathering.

The players’ three Axies have four skills each, represented by cards. When this point is reached, players can opt to stop leveling their Axie, and use their energy points in PVP mode instead where they can potentially earn more SLPs. Higher levels generally provide more SLPs, but there’s a point of diminishing returns. Players want the experience points to reach the levels that allow them to reach 50 SLPs (the Adventure mode SLP earnings cap) in the least amount of time. You will still earn the SLP – referring to Smooth Love Potion – the in-game currency that can be converted into traditional fiat money. But if you do, you don’t earn experience points anymore in Adventure mode. When you’ve run out of energy, you can actually still play. In its current form, the player has 20 energy points to use on either the Adventure mode or the player-versus player mode (PVP), which pits a real person against another person, and which we’ll get to later. Like many mobile games as well, the player is given limited energy points per day. It’s a basic setup that has the design DNA of a mobile game. Players need to replay earlier levels to gain enough experience points to progress through a tougher level. With every win, the player’s Axies gain experience points. The player goes through the levels one by one like Candy Crush. Adventure mode pits the player against computer-controlled enemies. I’ve played for two weeks now, with help from Yield Guild Games, a Filipino co-owned organization, whose goal is to bring in more players to Axie (as well as other blockchain games) by lending teams of the titular monster Axies to players on a profit-sharing model.

And this will help you to start to understand how the ambitious Axie economy (or as the community says, “Axienomics”) and blockchain games work. Playing it will give you an understanding of its value as a game. If you wanted to understand Axie Infinity, start with the game itself.

Let’s start with the actual game: Pokémon-style fights with card-based mechanics. With so many facets, we have to break it down slowly. It could be a little overwhelming to understand. Axie Infinity is a lot of things: a “play-to-earn” game, a blockchain-enabled game, an NFT-utilizing game.
