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.
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
Relax into CGW’s beautiful 3D gameplay!
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.
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
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!
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.
The fight continues, survivors! The challenges of this apocalyptic world require that everyday people rise from the ashes. These new heroes can come from any background, boasting skills honed by the need to survive.
We’re continuing to build new systems and ways to survive in The Walking Dead: Empires. Before we talk about what’s in store for September, though, we still have one epic hero left in August…
Carol was an unlikely candidate for apocalyptic warrior, but she quickly proved herself to be infinitely adaptable, becoming fierce, reliable, and a major advantage to any group she supports. And soon, you could recruit her to help build your empire.
Carol Sale
This sale takes place on Friday, August 30th at 7am PT. Carol Hero Cards will follow a tiered pricing structure based on the remaining supply, with Common Hero Cards staying at one low price throughout the sale.
This sale is not time-limited; Carol will be available in The Walking Dead: Empires Store until the supply is exhausted or her remaining Hero Cards are taken down to make room for new heroes in the future.
Like our other direct Hero Card sales, any Carol purchased in this sale will fulfill directly to GalaChain, ready to play in the game!
September Updates
Just as your empire grows, The Walking Dead: Empires is hard at work to implement new ways of bringing the world of the apocalypse to life. Before we wrap up our August event cycle, we wanted to talk about what to expect in September.
We’ll be taking a break from the regular event cycle during September. We appreciate you participating in these events over the past months. We’ve learned a lot from them, and the insight you’ve contributed will help shape the game in the future!
The current event cycle will end after this weekend’s stockpile event closes on Monday, September 2nd. Good luck with this last leaderboard, survivors!
This last event begins tomorrow. Are you ready?
There will certainly be more events coming in the future, but for now our team is concentrating on some important features that we can’t wait to get out to you, including an all-new. dungeon system that players will hopefully be able to check out in October. These instanced areas will soon give you more ways to survive and new challenges to overcome.
The Fight to Survive
Tomorrow begins the last leaderboard event for a while. Are you going to show off a top score this weekend?
Whether or not you’re crafting up a storm to dominate the competition, starting tomorrow you can suit up as Carol to face the challenges ahead. Don’t just survive with your empire… grow your empire.
You squint in the glare from your giant stack of chips. The dealer slides cards across the table, but you’re not in a hurry to look. Instead, you’re staring intently at your opponent on the button.
They look at their cards, letting out a short but distinct sharp inhale. You see their pupils contract slightly as they glance at their hole cards, then they look straight to their chip stack before raising to 4x the blinds.. You glance at your cards – not good enough.
You fold your big blind. The player on the button has told you everything you need to know.
Poker is a game of incomplete information. You make the wisest decision you can with the information you have available to you. This means that being able to deduce hidden information from available information can lead to a huge advantage at the tables.
This leads us to one of the pillars of poker skill, but often the most misunderstood and misused concept in the game – reading opponents.
Poker Tells
In the heat of a game, reactions or behaviors taken by a player can potentially reveal information about their hand or mindset to other players. When a person’s subconscious behaviors give away the information they are trying to keep hidden, we refer to that as a tell.
Reading tells is about deducing hidden information from information that you already know. Very often it is also about deciding what assumptions about human behavior are likely versus possible. Nothing is ever a sure thing in an incomplete information game, but hints at someone’s likely attitude towards their cards can let you make a more informed decision when the action is on you.
Let’s say that your opponent has pushed a large bet into the pot and sits back from the table, letting out a deeply relieved sigh. This player has sent a clear signal – they aren’t engaged. The stressful time during the hand was making that bet, and now they don’t feel the need to watch intently as players decide whether to call, fold or raise.
This player’s behavior indicates that they think they have the best cards. The bet is placed, they don’t have anything to worry about. Don’t jump to conclusions too fast though! Is this typical behavior for that player? Are they feigning confidence in the hand to cover up that they don’t have absolute rags? Probably the latter. Players have a tendency to try and appear strong when they are really weak.
Tells that speak the truth are usually more subtle… like an attitude boiling over in slight, subconscious actions. It’s important to note, however, that tells are not an exact science – humans are individuals and will often react differently to the same stimuli.
Yes, brow sweat can be a sign of a sudden loss of confidence… but it can also mean that it’s just hot in that room. Or maybe that guy is particularly sweaty when he’s hungry and his tummy just rumbled. Everyone is different, and actually trusting a tell from any player requires some degree of baseline reference for their behavior. You have to watch and understand your opponent before their tells are valuable to you. If you haven’t noticed throughout life, people are quite complicated.
It’s also incredibly important to note that tells cannot change cards. Knowing a tell only changes the way that you perceive the action of the game and informs your decision based on your cards.
Recommended Reading: Mike Caro’s Book of Poker Tells
This poker classic is basically considered required reading for people who want to play live games. It predates online play, but there’s applications for the psychology of online players as well.
Caro walks you through the basic psychology of poker tells and assumptions about how behavior indicates attitude to their hand.
Knowing that a player thinks they have good or bad cards doesn’t inform you exactly what their cards are or make the result of the hand any different. It simply gives you more information so that you can make wise decisions regarding your own cards within the hand.
Online Poker Tells
It’s easy to assume that tells are only something that plays into live games, but that’s not exactly true. You may not be able to see your opponent’s body language playing online, but you can definitely still deduce information from their behavior.
Think about what information you do get from opponents in online games. Most obviously, you get betting amounts. At the speed online poker moves, this is actually incredibly useful information. In a lot of ways this kind of data can be more reliable than physical poker tells.
Say you have an opponent you’ve been at a table with for an hour. You’ve played dozens of hands against them and have noticed some patterns. They like to raise 3x the big blind in bad position and 4x the big blind in good position, and they very rarely limp in unless they are on the button. They tend to fold low draws pre-flop you’d guess, because you never see them get caught chasing.
One hand, you notice them uncharacteristically limp in from good position. Once there’s a 5x raise back to them they fold. A likely assumption to be made from this based on their typical behavior is that they had a high suited straight draw. J/10 suited maybe? Q/K suited? It’s unlikely they would have backed down so easily if they had the nut straight draw at A/K, so you can deduce 3-5 likely hands that they had from this behavior.
That didn’t give you much advantage at the time because they folded. You do, however, understand more about that player’s behavior. Maybe that will let you dodge a disaster when they limp in next time and catch a J/10/10 on the flop?
Minor Information, Major Advantage
In an incomplete information game like poker, little bits of information and likely assumptions can add up to a big edge at the table.
Let’s imagine that you have an opponent who you haven’t quite gotten a read on. They’ve been hanging on calling several times and haven’t yet raised or bet themselves. The flop comes 5/9/Q with suits scattered. They keep calling and playing very passively.
The turn comes a J. Suddenly, the player is much more engaged in the hand and responds to your bet with an instant raise – previously they had been considering each check carefully for several seconds. When you call their raise, the river comes a second Q. You check to the raiser, and they hammer a massive bet at you.
So what do they have? From their behavior, there’s one rather likely situation – they carried a 10/K into the flop. This explains why they wanted to hang around for as cheap as possible until their J dropped on the turn. They still had a live draw and an over card. Since the table draw is a gutshot, they know that they have drawn to the nut straight, and they’re hoping that they caught someone with the lower straight draw.
This is definitely not a sure thing. They could potentially have a busted gutshot draw with a 6/7 or something, and they’ve chosen to pretend that they have the nut straight to scare you off. Most people aren’t brilliant actors under pressure, however, so deciding whether they are trying to mislead you is a far simpler proposition than attempting to guess their random cards offhand.
One more thing about this example – they’ve been representing hitting the nut straight. You can put that hypothesis to the test! A second queen dropped on the river. If they have hit the nut straight, they’ll know that someone who had two pair going into the river – queens over X – will just have hit a full house on the river. That beats their straight.
If you come back over the top and they falter, that’s more evidence that they were on that straight draw. You may even be able to represent a late full house aggressively and scare them away altogether even.
Thinking Strategy
Like anything in poker, there’s a difference between understanding tells and applying tells. It takes practice to make the observations necessary to draw valuable information from tells, and even more practice to establish the discipline to know when and when not to act on likely assumptions about another player’s behavior.
Start to put your skills to the test. As you watch the behaviors of your opponents you’ll get better and better at it. You don’t need a poker club or casino to go to… you can start working on playing off of player behavior on Sweep It Poker today for free! See how your opponents react to different situations, and start to think about why when their behavior changes.
Stay tuned for more deep dives. Keep practicing your ability to read people as you’re out there thinking poker!
In the short time since the platform’s launch, Gala Film has already released some incredibly exciting content that addresses some of the most relevant topics in the Web3 world.
David Bianchi’s gritty sci-fi series, RZR, explored the possibilities and pitfalls of neurally implanted computers in a dystopian world of surveillance and black market tech intrigue. RZR actress Mena Suvari even received a Primetime EMMY® nomination for her performance, marking a first for web3 entertainment.
Following such an amazing platform debut series, we know you’re hungry for more cutting edge video content that gives you more. Now we have entered the “Ghosts of Ruin” era.
It’s finally out! Episode 1 of Ghosts of Ruin is live and free to watch!
The visually stunning and action-packed anime adventure explores the future of gaming, into the not-so-distant future where it’s all about neural reality gaming that letsplayers actually feel the action.
Follow the experience of Lee, a young classic gamer who wins a massively hyped contest to become the 100th player in the Tournament of Ruin, taking his place among a lineup of the most famous neural reality gamers in the world.
As you watch each full-length episode, you’ll find yourself asking the questions seething under the surface of the smooth and polished series:
Is this where we’re headed?
Can they show Lee the ropes in time to win?
What are the creators of “Ruin” trying to hide?
What happened to Lee’s predecessor?
Beyond Watching
Mystery Boxes and Expansions
When you watch new episodes of Ghosts of Ruin, you’ll also receive special Mystery Box rewards with chances to win! Piece together Shards to unlock access to Expansions, exclusive additional content that will take you deeper into the world of the show.
Dying to unlock all the content? You can purchase additional premium Mystery Boxes for only $3.99 each (special 50% off launch pricing) in the Gala Film store.
When you’re ready to truly own part of the action, collect NFT Moments to unlock regular $FILM rewards based on the success and viewership of the content.
Each Moment Pack contains a single NFT Moment (Bronze, Silver or Golden) from the show. Simply own a Moment to start collecting daily POPCORN! Rewards. Following the official launch of $FILM, POPCORN! will be convertible to $FILM, which will be tradable in the GalaChain ecosystem and beyond.
If you’re looking to fully maximize your reward potential while powering the decentralized world of film, running a Theater Node is for you. Once you’ve purchased a license, your node will run in the background of your computer through the Gala Node software, putting your excess computing power to work and delivering Gala Film content directly to viewers in exchange for your $FILM rewards.
Get a Theater Node license here Watch the first two episodes of Ghosts of Ruin now and be prepared for a new episode each Friday!
When you’re living in an endless time loop, trying to save the world from a destruction that already happened at the hands of the now ruthless superheroes that used to look out for you, picking the right weapons is always important.
In an ironic twist of justice, the chief weapons used by the Resistance against the power-crazed super villains are their own powers turned against them. With the help of the robot Bartender and a complicated Juice extraction/injection system, each mission gives you a chance to power up with certain powers collected from the dead bodies of previously slain superheroes. The whole process is pretty unpredictable, but what have you got to lose?
“It’s better than the old method. That one used a suppository.”
-The Bartender
Every vial of Juice results in a single new superpower for the round when you visit the Juice Injector in the bar. You’ll get your pick–One of three powers, unless you use a Reroll, then you’ll get three new random choices.
Powers 101
Skill will only get you so far when the baddies start swarming. That’s why it’s crucial to select powers that will continually enhance your ability to smash and bash greater numbers of enemies.
The most important powers are those that enhance your primary abilities of Jump, Dash and Attack.
You can hold one power per round within each of those primary abilities. For example, Xeno Cycle is a Dash power that transforms you into a motorcycle form that speeds through enemies to cause immense damage as you run them down. Fire Jump is of course a Jump power that shoots flames from your feet, allowing you to jetpack around and burn enemies on the ground. Ghost Jump lets you teleport upward and hover for a time.
You’ll notice that each of the powers listed above are part of a different family. You’ll almost always get more from your combined powers by stacking new powers from the same families, but as you play more, you’ll also start to notice interesting ways in which different power families can work together in deadly combos.
Power Families
Fire
Ice
Shock
Xeno
Ghost
Force
At the bar’s Upgrade Station, you’ll often find upgrades that enhance various stats based on which power families you’re running in that round. You can buy those upgrades for Credits, which you’ll collect during the round.
Once you’ve injected a primary power from a particular family, you’ll start to see more specialized power upgrades that will work together with the powers you’ve already collected. In the example above, Feast is a Xeno ability that lets you permanently gain health when you kill 7 enemies within 5 seconds. WIth Xeno abilities, such massacres are simpler than they seem.
You’ll also have opportunities to grab powers that enhance your proficiency with certain types of weapons by attaching super powers to them. For example, Burning Shot will inflict Burn on targets of your Precision Weapons like pistols and certain rifles.
Experiment and Find Your Power Groove
There are ideal strategies for every one of the endless power combos you’ll come across in the game. If you’re having a hard time in a round, always ask yourself if it’s due to a poor combination of powers or simply falling short on finding the right style of play for those powers. And when you have an easy time, always remember the combination of power upgrades that got you there, as well as the way you played.
Playing Alone?
Keep in mind that you’ll need to rely on different strategic choices when you’re playing alone or with other players. When you’ve got a full team of 3 hunters, do your best to complement the upgrade choices of your teammates. When it’s you alone versus all the bad guys, just go for the combination that will help you kill the most bad guys as fast as possible!
The bottom line when it comes to Superior powers is that there’s always something unique and exciting to play around with every round. You’ll continually find unique new ways to maximize your score and kill more enemies, especially as you grind up your Skill tree and increase your Infamy level!
Play Superior in Early Access
There are two ways to get into Early Access gameplay now on Gala Games:
Pick up an Early Access Pass – Holding one of these handy tokens in your GalaChain Inventory will allow you to play with any of the 5 characters currently available in Early Access, including 2 characters that aren’t yet available as Primes (Renegade and Specialist). NOTE: Bridge your Early Access Pass to GalaChain to unlock access to the characters.
