Nicole Nguyen is the CMO of Duelist King, an upcoming NFT card game powered by transparency, fairness and democracy. Nicole is also the co-founder of Kryptovietnam and has leadership positions at other firms such as Global Impact Fintech. Nicole is the mastermind behind several Blockchain orientated events such as Vietnam Blockchain Week and has featured in over twenty international conferences. I had the pleasure of interviewing Nicole about her experiences and the past, present and future of her upcoming NFT game Duelist King.
Hi Nicole, can you tell us about yourself and what you do at Duelist King?
I am the co-founder and CMO at Duelist King. My day to day job is to make sure our community is well informed and inspired by the project. I have been in the blockchain space since 2016, building communities for Infinity Blockchain Labs – one of the first and largest blockchain startups in Vietnam and leading a blockchain media called Asia Blockchain Review. My most recent job before Duelist King was head of International Marketing at Tokocrypto – the largest exchange in Indonesia launched via Binance Launchpad.
What is Duelist King?
We aim to be the leading multi-chain NFT card game powered by fairness, transparency and democracy. Many of these values are underlined by our in-house infrastructure with super exciting applications of the blockchain-like decentralized oracle, Random Number Generator and Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).
What made you create your game?
Our founding team have known each other for six years before convening as Duelist King avengers. In addition to our passion for Blockchain and gaming, we believe this is the right time to start up something on our own and leverage the network and expertise acquired in the last six years.
Including Nicole, Duelist King has a great pedigree with its co-founders having distinguished expertise in the blockchain space:
- Dzung Tran (CEO & Founder): Former solution engineer at Hextrust and R&D engineer at Infinity Blockchain Labs. Dzung Tran has been involved in many world-class blockchain projects.
- Nam Nguyen (Product Designer & Co-founder): Nam has over seven years of experience in UI/UX and product development design. He has worked for multinational companies like Binance.
What sets Duelist King out from the rest of the competition?
Duelist King is not just another blockchain game – it starts as a game with world-class designs and gameplay powered by exciting applications of Blockchain. We believe that it doesn’t matter if you build a blockchain game or a mainstream game – at the end of the day, it should centre around gamers’ experiences; hence everything we are doing is to elevate this experience through the look, the feel and the technology behind it.
People can enjoy Duelist King as a cool card game that offers intensive, hard-core gaming experiences coupled with a different level of strategization while enjoying the transparency, fairness and stakeholder-centric values powered by Blockchain. Such technology is reflected in our product offerings – the distribution of the cards is randomized and verifiable on Blockchain, the unique combination of cards and luck-based dice eradicates the absolute unfair advantages of better off and more experienced gamers since you still have to compete against luck no matter how much money or experiences you’ve got.
Additionally, the DAO-governing model to be implemented next year will eventually transform Duelist King into a community-owned and community-driven game. All decisions on the card design, gameplay and tournaments will rest with the community.
At the end of the day, it’s all about Gamers’ Experiences, and we want to empower this trio of Enjoy – Engage – Earn features for gamers to get indulged incentivized while gaining more ownership in the game.
Duelist King uses DAO. What does this mean for your game?
The centralized models of game distributors governing a gaming ecosystem present quite a few challenges for newbies and indie game developers. Plus, the gamers do not have any say in how the game presents itself. The DAO would change this drastically by facilitating a fairness-based organization that operates based on the interest of the majority. This would bring about much more creativity, collective resources and vested interests for the community. A community-owned and community-driven game would not be far-fetched with the current level of innovation in the blockchain gaming space.
What excites you most about Duelist King?
Fairness is our starting point and the core values of Duelist King that we strive for every day. People say that no game is fair, but blockchain games are different. I believe gamers would be much more motivated once they have access to a verifiable, transparent, and democratic operating model in the game, not just as gamers but also as contributors, designers, creators, and investors. In this sense, Blockchain brings so much more value in empowering people of different walks of life to contribute and make decisions towards interests and benefits for the masses.
How will Duelist King fit and converge with the wider Metaverse?
We are speaking with a couple of game projects and guilds and starting some game interoperability for our NFT cards and in-game items. I think it will be super exciting to have this borderless and interoperable Metaverse that mirrors reality and extends beyond the aggregate physical worlds we live in.
Think about how awesome it would be when our Verdict of God, one of our legendary character cards – can use an authentic katana sword like the one owned by Dr Wright. This whole new spectrum of time-stamped, inter-operable, authentic and verifiable virtual assets seems feasible. Duelist King won’t miss the opportunity to be part of this evolving space to offer more benefits for our stakeholders.
In a broader context, how do you think your game will shape gaming?
We offer our infrastructure like the DAO, Oracle and Random Number Generator for indie game studios and publishers to offer them more resources, power and leverage to build their blockchain game. The future world of blockchain gaming, as we see it, should be more decentralized and interoperable.
Your game launch is near. What can players expect when the game is released?
Our Alpha version will launch this March, followed by the beta version in June. We are now open for registration for our closed alpha version here. We will keep the communication line open with the community and guild partners to collect feedback and fine-tune our upcoming versions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6xiTUiAdWs
What do you want Duelist King to achieve over the next six months?
More genuine gaming enthusiasts and gamers! We want to build an authentic and supportive community that will provide constant feedback and inputs to make this a community-owned game.
What does the next year look like for Duelist King?
Next year will mark our most important milestones of multiplay features, which will help us facilitate esports-typed tournaments and DAO implementation to transform Duelist King into a community-governed game. We will be getting closer to a decentralized ecosystem of Duelist King where stakeholders, either gamers or creators or investors, or designers, will participate in the decision making of Duelist King.
Anything else you want our readers to know? Anything they should sign up for?
Still not too late to sign up for our Alpha here
We welcome you all to familiarize yourself with the gameplay, playbook, and teaser before the official launch of the alpha version. Duelist King is the first Gamify project to be launched on the world’s largest decentralized exchange, Pancake Swap, after six months with 640 million USD committed and among the few gamify projects invested by Fantom Foundation – the one behind the break-neck 3000% growing Fantom ecosystem. I believe you have every reason to be bullish about us.
How can people get involved with Duelist King?
Join our weekend games, chat with our team at our weekly AMAs or join us on Telegram and Discord. We are all here for fun and joy! Duelist King social media channels: Twitter, Discord Telegram
