Devcon 8 opens Game Zone in Mumbai with 15-plus Ethereum game teams, Axie and Onchain Heroes among them

In Brief:

• Devcon 8 is running a four-day Game Zone in Mumbai, with 15-plus teams presenting games built on Ethereum and offering NFT rewards and prizes.
• The lineup graphic shows Axie Infinity (official site)’s Vibeathon, Bomber.world, Chaos Agents, Citadel, Frontier, Yield Fields (official site), Stomp, Voxlings and Onchain Heroes’ Maze of Gains.
• The program also has art and game hackathons, a Lunar Rover Arena and a chess tournament on Nov. 3.

Devcon 8 has given onchain games their own floor space. The Ethereum Foundation’s flagship conference is running a Game Zone for its full four days in Mumbai, with 15-plus teams presenting games built on Ethereum and handing out NFT rewards and prizes.

The Devcon team announced the zone on X on Nov. 2, the day before the conference opened. “Four days of onchain gaming, friendly competition, and hands-on experiences in Mumbai,” the @EFDevcon account said.

Devcon 8 runs Nov. 3-6 at Jio World Centre in Mumbai’s Bandra Kurla Complex.

Who’s on the floor

A “Gaming Zone” graphic attached to the post shows 15 logos. Ten carry readable names: Axie Infinity AXS $0.8529 ▼ -11.5%, under its Vibeathon branding, plus Bomber.world, Chaos Agents, Citadel, Frontier, Yield Fields, Stomp, Voxlings and Maze of Gains, the Onchain Heroes title. A tenth logo reads “Z3EVERSE.”

The Frontier logo includes a Realms mark. The other five entries appear only as icons with no names: a pirate skull, a red pixel-art dinosaur, a pink planet, a green pixel slime and a green pixel skull.

Onchain Heroes: World’s Eve said separately on X that Maze of Gains will be playable at the Game Zone this week. Yield Fields, which also appears on the graphic, is part of the same Onchain Heroes stable.

Hackathons, rovers and chess

The program goes past playable demos. Devcon listed art and game hackathons as part of the zone, though the post gave no details on themes, judging or prize pools.

And there’s a hardware piece. At the Lunar Rover Arena, attendees can control miniature rovers and compete on a mock lunar surface, according to the announcement.

A chess tournament is scheduled for Nov. 3, the conference’s opening day.

Where it fits

The Ethereum Foundation’s “Know Before You Go” guide for Devcon 8 describes the Gaming Zone as a place where attendees can “take a break between sessions, explore games, and connect with fellow attendees through some friendly competition.” The guide points attendees to the Devcon app for the zone’s full schedule.

Gaming also turned up in Devcon’s side-event calendar. BackersStage’s Onchain Dev City, held Nov. 2 during Devcon week, had a Quest District built as a live arcade of onchain quests and mini games, with NFT badges and leaderboard points awarded for each tap.

Devcon didn’t say how teams were picked for the Game Zone or what the NFT rewards and prizes are worth. It also didn’t say which chains or layer-2 networks the games run on, beyond describing them as built on Ethereum.

The post ended with a short sign-off: “See you there!”