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New Bitcoin role-playing game lets you tip cows for crypto cash

It's like a crypto-currency medieval casino.

 

Kevin Morris

Tech

Posted on Jul 8, 2013   Updated on Jun 1, 2021, 11:53 am CDT

There’s a new game that lets you prance around a polygon 3-D fantasy world and competitively tip cows for Bitcoins. Thank god for the Internet.

When we wrote about online gambling’s Bitcoin future in February, we never expected it would manifest in the form of Dragon’s Tale, a massively multiplayer online role-playing casino that eschews traditional gambling games for, yes, tipping cows—as well as 59 other mini games, from feeding ducks to gathering herbs.

“The first thing that stuck me about online gambling today is that it’s a pretty lonely experience, typically one player in a web browser, watching a 2D slot machine,” Andrew Tepper, the games lead designer, said in a statement. Tepper wanted to make something more social, where players can chat together online and learn skills. There are, for instance, 30 different techniques for cow tipping in Dragon’s Tale, and to learn them all you’ll have to chat up other gamers. That’s the “role-playing” side of things. It’s kind of underwhelming, like a FarmVille with bitcoins hiding in the bushes.

Tepper first floated the idea at a Bitcoin forum in 2010:

What if there were a truly different kind of casino that existed as a persistent world? A world where everything that you see, everything that you can touch, was in fact some sort of game. No traditional slot machines, card games, dice, but an RPG where your character advances by success at games of chance.

A beta test begins on Friday, but you might not want to leave too much of your digital cash in the game. Tepper warns that occasional server crashes are likely.

“If you lose Bitcoins due to a server crash, we’ll do everything we can to verify any lost jackpots, and reimburse you for them,” Tepper writes.

If you’re looking for a more secure place to gamble with your crypto cash, there are a lot of other options, though with less cows.

H/T The Guardian | Photo via Dragon Tale

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*First Published: Jul 8, 2013, 5:31 pm CDT