Common Ground World is a cornerstone of the Gala Games ecosystem, a truly remarkable and memorable game and always a great time to play.
With a constant flow of new features and updates, regular competitions to win $GALA, NFTs given to active players just for playing the game each month, and an amazing community of players from all over the world, it really pays to become part of the CGW community.
A Farm Sim to Remember
This game was created by some of the most experienced pioneering developers in the social gaming industry, some of the same brilliant minds behind famous titles like Farmville 2, Zynga Poker and Words with Friends.
Originally called Town Star (and renamed alongside a strategic partnership with award winning film project and generative agriculture project “Common Ground”), Common Ground World represents the intersection of one of the world’s most beloved gaming genres with web3 empowerment. In fact, the game was one of the earliest titles in the world to integrate web3 functions with features like real item ownership and crypto rewards for competitive gameplay.
Launching the Game
When you launch Common Ground World (directly in your browser with no need for an app download), you’ll be cheerfully greeted by the Farmer hero and presented with three different gameplay modes:
- Common Ground mode
- Casual mode
- Events
Common Ground
In Common Ground mode, your mission is to dig into a heavily damaged plot of land and create something that thrives and grows. Capturing the essence of regenerative agriculture and the Common Ground movement, this gameplay mode is not for the faint of heart.
When you first begin, reinvigorating the earth will be a daunting task. You’ll only find a small workable corner of land that can be teased into growing anything. The rest must be carefully worked one tile at a time, restoring the proper biomes that will make soil and vegetation thrive.
Think of Common Ground Mode as a long-term and advanced form of gameplay. If you can turn the situation around and unlock the true potential of the land, you may consider yourself a Common Ground World expert, no matter how long it takes to accomplish your goals.
Casual Mode
In Casual Mode, you’ll get a taste of core gameplay with a prebuilt town whose structure varies week to week. The starting formats of these towns are designed to give you well-rounded examples of CGW gameplay, giving you a chance to see what you’re in for as you construct a town from scratch in the game’s core Competition mode.
You’ll start off with a fresh town, which may already have Wind Turbines that produce Electricity, an industrial water supply ready for more advanced production, a Windmill capable of making Flour, Sugar and Salt, and much more.
You’ll first notice that the workers from each of their houses are already hard at it – The Lumberjack is heading out to harvest wood from natural trees on your land, and the Farmer is fetching water from the well to bring it to your Brine fields where a crucial ingredient for salt is grown. Once you have ingredients to mill, select your Windmill to choose a craft and the Miller will also get to work.
Events
The Events category is where you’ll find the weekly competition server, as well as any other competitions that might be happening.
A typical weekly competition takes place over the course of 72 hours, beginning at 10am PT on Tuesday and ending at 10am PT on Friday.
Starting from scratch with a new town, each competitor must build the most efficiently functioning town possible as quickly as they can. Leaderboard positions come down to stars – The more stars, the higher your position on the leaderboard. When the competition ends, the top places on the leaderboard win $GALA prizes, and sometimes additional rewards such as Blueprint NFTs.
The weekly competition event always observes a special meta that gives favor to a single craft or family of crafts, keeping players on their toes and exploring a more focused strategic aspect of the game. Additionally, each weekly competition comes with a new biome combination (type of land and surrounding land) that each player must work into their build.
To ensure you’re ready for the next weekly competition, watch the Common Ground channels of the Gala Discord community. There you’ll find all necessary details of the upcoming competition as early as the previous Wednesday.
COMING SOON – Daily Challenges for Greater Rewards
A new Daily Challenge feature is coming soon that will unlock additional reward opportunities for owners of specific NFTs. These challenges will offer rewards in $SOIL, the upcoming reward token of Common Ground World. Daily Challenges will update every 24 hours, creating a new dimension of strategy for NFT owners!
For the latest info on this exciting new feature as it gets closer to launch, be sure to watch the bi-weekly Common Ground World Town Halls on Youtube (every other Friday at 8am PT) and keep your eyes on the Common Ground World Discord channels!
Play and Win with Free Monthly NFTs
Each month, all Common Ground World players are rewarded with a free NFT in either Common or Rare rarity, depending on how much they played the game.
Check the Common Ground World announcements in Discord for the latest free monthly NFT up for grabs.
To receive the Common free NFT, play for 10 days within a calendar month, making at least one in-game trade each day and a minimum of 25 trades for the whole month.
To receive the Rare free NFT, play for 25 days within the month, making at least 1 trade per day and no less than 75 trades for the whole month.
Free monthly NFTs are a great way to start a Gala digital item collection for nothing more than playing an awesome game each day!
Getting Started Strategies
Common Ground World is most enjoyable as you discover tactics for yourself. Strategically speaking, it’s a deceptively complex game, especially for its simple and charming farm town appeal. For a skilled player, a CGW town is a robust ecosystem of timing, resource and workforce management and competitive strategy.
The Gasoline Challenge
The first (and many would say the most important) challenge of Common Ground World is producing a supply of Gasoline that can keep up with the Gasoline expenses of delivering your chosen crafts to neighboring towns. In normal gameplay, you’ll always start a fresh town with 40 units of Gasoline. At first it may seem like a lot, but sooner or later it will dwindle, so start right away working on a way to create Gasoline within your town.
Wages
Your town’s workers won’t get out of bed for free. Literally, they’ll return to their homes and go to sleep if you don’t have any work for them (or worse) if you don’t have anything to pay them! This is why as more workers and more specialized workers enter your town and start earning a living, you’ll need to continue elevating your production tiers to bring in more money with new deliveries.
Selling for More
It takes 10 units of any crop or craft to sell, and with each successful sale delivery, you’ll receive cash and stars based on the difficulty and resources required for the production. For example, Wheat is a low-tier crop – It can be grown simply by watering a field and carrying the harvested wheat to a Silo. So you can expect Wheat to earn a significantly lower haul of cash and stars than a load of Flour, which is a next-tier product crafted from Wheat.
Basically, the more generations of refinement that your raw resources go through, the more money and stars you’ll get for them in the end when it’s time to deliver. And that’s the name of the game.
Build Balanced
The key to Common Ground World is building a balanced town where the various workers and buildings work perfectly together in carefully orchestrated detail.
If you’re producing a certain resource too quickly and don’t have anywhere to store it, then some of the energy spent producing that resource will be wasted.
Layout Matters
IRL towns employ city planners for a reason. Functional towns and cities don’t just build themselves or fall together from a bunch of coincidences. Early on, you’ll want to imagine the expanded vision of your town in the future. Think in long term goals, even when you may be several steps away from their completion.
Because of proximity effects given off by certain types of structures, you’ll want to create designated areas for different types of operation in your town. For example, you don’t want the pollution of a Gasoline operation interfering with your ability to grow crops, nor would you like your Warehouses to cast shade and negatively affect your fields’ access to the sun’s rays.
Most buildings require adjacent Roads, and the placement of Roads is not to be taken lightly. Your workforce will move much faster on Roads
Learn Your Passives
Passive production is one of the keys to becoming a successful builder in Common Ground World. Basically, passive production means creating a situation where resources are automatically provided to a unit or structure that needs them. The simplest example is placing a Wheat Field next to a pond, where it will receive the passive water it needs to grow. If placed where it can get water naturally from the ground, the Farmer will not need to bring buckets of water, effectively eliminating the need for a well in that instance.
Playing with NFTs
Common Ground World is a web3 game with real player ownership of certain in-game items. Items owned as NFTs carry several advantages compared to their in-game counterparts, and some NFT items provide benefits that cannot be found through any standard in-game item.
- NFTs can be transferred and traded
- NFTs can be instantly placed and removed for no additional cost
- NFT abilities vary based on rarity
To browse available Common Ground World NFTs (and those that have previously sold out) visit the Common Ground World store on Gala Games.
Playing with a Guild
Earlier in 2024, Guilds were first introduced to Common Ground World gameplay, bringing a new level of cooperative strategy and team competition. Spend some time in the Common Ground World Discord community and you may get invited to join a Guild, unlocking greater potential rewards and access to new types of competition.
Guilds are led by owners of Common Ground World Nodes. Each Guild comes with a unique feature called the Guild Library, which allows Guild members to check out NFTs from the Guild Leader’s collection for use in the latest competitive events.
Guild membership is controlled entirely by the Guild Leader (invite only), but there’s a good chance that you’ll find actively recruiting Guild Leaders in Common Ground World’s Discord community!
Learn more about Common Ground World Guilds
Time to Start Growing!🌱
We’re excited to introduce you to this charming farm sim game. Hopefully you’ve found some helpful information in this getting started blog. We look forward to playing with you and seeing you rise up the leaderboard in the weekly competition.
Now get out there and see what you can build! 🧑🌾
