**Tell us about yourself, what you are building, and why you chose to work on it.** (feel free to include a loom video)

I am [Ronan Sandford](https://ronan.eth.limo), founder of Etherplay, a games studio founded in 2016 set to explore the unique possibilities that blockchain can provide for games. We released several games in the past 8 years, including [Tug of War](https://etherplay.io/blog/our-first-unstoppable-game-tug-of-war/), our first fully onchain game in 2017, Ethernal, our first attempt at creating Autonomous Worlds in 2019, an onchain infinite dungeon-crawler whose rooms are generated by players as they roam and battle monsters and [Conquest.eth](https://conquest.game), a fully permissionless and persistent game of diplomacy that we started to work on in 2020 and is now running for eternity on Gnosis chain.

In a nutshell we are building autonomous worlds, we are fascinated by the possibility of launching worlds that evolve on their own, permissionless and persistent, made possible thanks to smart contracts. Our latest is Stratagems and this is what we have been building as part of the 3 Backdrop build cohorts.

Stratagems takes a lot of inspiration from our previous game "Conquest.eth" but takes a different route and attempts to solve some of the issues encountered around player engagement and gas use.

Stratagems also explore a new way of building autonomous world. In some way Stratagems is just the **seed of an autonomous world**. it is designed from the get go to be extended. The basic rules make players create a world map while they fight for the value they stake. And this onchain world map serves as the foundation for new game rules to be built by anyone: **Permissionless Composability**.

We are excited to see how this will play out and how players and builders are going to expand the initial rule-set with new fascinating ones.

**How has the last month been? What did you learn? How has your idea evolved?**

We have been in all 3 Backdrop build cohorts so far and the 2 previous cohorts was each an opportunity to build the missing pieces and make overall progress. But it is in the last cohort / month that we could finally put the whole thing together and launch a first alpha. There is of course still a lot to improve but the game is finally playable, live on Base mainnet: <https://alpha1.stratagems.world/>. This mark a huge milestone for us.

We are already learning a lot as we interact with our players and discover what excite them about our game. There is nothing that beats launching on a real network, especially on blockchains as game that thrive in this environment are not the fast pace game that you can easily play among a small set of friends in a living room, they are the game that play in the social interaction among player from over the world (we are building on a world computer for a reason). Launching a game like that also allows us to test our assumptions and discover things we did not know player would enjoy. This is still early to make conclusion but we hope in the next month to have a better idea to what comes next for Stratagems

The idea for Stratagems has evolved already over its initial conception. it started as an abstract game (we won the Arbitrum hackathon in Bogota in 2022 for it) with no much thoughts about its composability (though we started to think about it already with Conquest.eth). Then we added a theme. This was actually done to help visualize the state of the game. Keeping the game abstract made it more difficult to explain the rules by visuals alone. It was also at that time, that we realized the potential for composability in Stratagems, especially thanks to Stratagems simple rules. After that and especially in the last month, it was just a matter of putting all pieces together and ensure to provide a fun experience to players.

**What does the product/idea look like today? Share videos, images, demos, and anything else that helps people see what you are working on.**

Here is our website

Here is a map example, created by player while attacking each other\


here it is with the UI:

And here some screenshots from the alpha live on Base mainnet

Here is our Backdrop build demo video (which includes a trailer at the end)

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMlWMjLzeTk>

And here the earlier trailer pre-announcing our launch

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_DuVPTJkPQ>

This should give you an overview of what the game is about.

For builders, the best places to get a sense of what is possible to build on top of Stratagems is

* our github repo: <https://github.com/wighawag/stratagems>

* and our website <https://stratagems.world/>

**Tell us about any traction / adoption you've had over the last month.**

We just launched few days ago so in term of traction it is hard to tell , but we got more than 100 new members in our Discord and around 50 players who joined in with tokens to play since the launch last week. The alpha will last 2 months and we designed it in a way that players can join any time in the first month without much disadvantages. So we hope for more players to join in.

It is also worth pointing that even though the gas fee have spiked on base, players have continued playing and paid more than 30$ each for it. This is great news for us as the game will require real stake (in the alpha, the staked token is fake) and knowing that player are happy to pay such high gas fee just for player is a great sign.

**Is your product Optimism/Superchain native and will it continue to be?**

We are a fan of Optimism approach in building its community and ecosystem. While Stratagems has no allegiance to any network. It is after all fully open-source, we aimed to focus on this community and leverage its unique features. We are currently live on Base but would like to also launch it on Optimism itself. Stratagems is designed to have a fixed gas cost per stake, which make it possible to launch on any network by just scaling the staking amount. We could technically even launch on Ethereum mainnet but the demographics will be quite restricted due to the high stake required.

We are also considering other network in the OP-Stack world, including Ancient8 a OP-stack chain focused on gaming with data availability provided by Celestia or Red Stone, a new take on Plasma chain using OP-Stack. In some way, with all these choices we do not see any reason to leave that community

**How will your product/idea move the Optimism ecosystem forward?**

Stratagems is unique in the space, even in the autonomous world space, because it takes permissionlessness seriously. It is not just vapour words. Stratagems is designed to be played in the most harshest environment with bots and sybil. It does achieve this feat like our previous game (conquest.eth) did: by requiring player to stake and to always give power as along as there is an equivalent risk taken. In some ways Stratagems and Conquest, before hand, are like game protocols. They are uncensorable, persistent and permissionless and we believe this is the only way forward for games that make use of blockchain technology. After all, what would be the point of launching a game that can run on a centralised server in the first place. As such Stratagems set an example for fully onchain game and we believe this will have a huge impact on the communities that support these initiative before others.

Furthermore Stratagems is fully open-source. This include the smart contract of course, but also the frontend, the tooling and libraries. Everything is available on github as a mono-repo. You can even play from the code directly if you want. We hope this will inspire other to build games like ours.

In term of tooling and libraries, we have build few innovative technology that can be used by anyone. We are working in particular on hardhat-deploy v2 (Optimism network was deployed with hardhat-deploy), FUZD (a commit+reveal system ideal for hidden information mechanics) and ethereum-indexer, a indexer that run entirely in the browser, removing the need for backends. We believe these tools will be a huge asset for any game dev that want to push the boundary of the possible. Our list of tooling do not stop there. We have helper services like messaging system and cross-device sync. All of this can be used by anyone and we are happy to help.

**What's the big vision of your product/idea beyond what it is today?"**

So right now we have the base rules, that set players against each other in a fun game of strategy. And we are thrilled to see it in action today with players coming each day to make new actions.

At the same time, while players focus on their strategies, they are also creating a world map, composed of 5/6 different factions and a set of attributes. This form the foundation for new games to be build!

Indeed out big vision is to create new experiences on top of Stratagems world map and explore the crazy intereactions among all of them. We call this "Natural Composability" (see <https://etherplay.io/blog/natural-composability/>) and we believe this is the killer feature of crypto networks. We see this in Defi with the like of vampire attacks but games will explore this in far more complex and interesting ways. We can't wait to see worlds evolving through the community.

**If you win, how will you use the funding?**

The funding will be used to continue building Stratagems and this can be broken down in several components:

* polishing existing tech (FUZD, ethereum-indexer, mentioned above) to make them more reliable. They are all individual projects, each a public good on its own.\
* Polishing Stratagems experience and look. While this is mostly focus on Stratagems, we expect many of the implementation to be\
* streamlining the experience of building on top of Stratagems. We expect here that most of this work will be extremely useful for any game that want to be composed. We want to break down the component behind Stratagems so other can build new experience top with minimum extra requirement and as such many of the architectural design around this will be shareable across other games

And to make these a reality we would like to fund other helping us. We want this to be a community driven initiative. This is the main reason we are building open-source. This is public good and something we expect other to want to participate. We would love to use the funding to help devs join us in this adventure.

**If you win, what are you focused on over the next three months? What do you want to accomplish?**

In the next 3 months, we will do 3 things:

* continue to refine the experience\
* Work on an example of game running atop the Stratagems world map.\
* Improve the developer experience to build such extended game

**Share links to any updates, forum posts, tweets, etc. that document your active work over the last month.**

Most of the work has happened on our github repo : <https://github.com/wighawag/stratagems/commits/main/>

We have few tweets too :

<https://twitter.com/wighawag/status/1767524311009575405>

<https://twitter.com/stratagems_eth/status/1767522402165002494>

<https://twitter.com/wighawag/status/1765834314837528750>

<https://twitter.com/stratagems_eth/status/1763567918304895100>

**Share any links to your website, socials, etc.**

Discord: <https://community.etherplay.io>

Website: https://stratagems.world

Twitter: <https://twitter.com/stratagems_eth>

**Anything else we should know? Share it here.**

If anyone want to help build Stratagems or new games on top of it, let us know!