PILL: A card/boardgame that uses MEV mechanics

title could be something like ā€œFAULT TOLERANTā€ or ā€œCONSENSUSā€ or something

Concept:

  • A fast-paced card game (style of exploding kittens or love letter)
  • Players are power brokers trying to extract the most value from the system
  • Mechanics based on real-world concepts like MEV and consensus protocols

Gameplay:

  • Revolves around a series of ā€œblocksā€ with a rotating Leader
  • Players take turns making ā€œmovesā€ (transactions) these turns are not ā€œorderedā€ i.e. they dont interact with each other
  • Users can flashloan resources (like money)
  • After a round, the leader strategically orders transactions, but players can reject the order if they come to consensus - nullifying the round
  • Special cards for MEV tactics like frontrunning and backrunning, interacting with other people moves
  • The leader then has to convince 50% or more of the group of his ordering (maximize gains for both)

Protocolic Twist:

  • PEP (Protocol Enhancement Proposal) cards let players propose rule changes
  • Achieved consensus alters the gameā€™s mechanics, creating an evolving metagame
  • Since this could be chaotic could have them be bounded

curious if anyone to hear your thoughts. I know there was a card game in season one but I couldnā€™t find too much info about it - would love to be pointed a link to it.

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It gives me the insights that deep experience of the practice of the protocol and the consensus-reaching process can be just as crucial, if not more so, than popularising a specific protocol. :star2:

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What does MEV mean?

I assume youā€™ll develop this pitch more with sentences summarizing what the card game does. What precisely is its purpose for existing, in terms of what kinds of protocol-related lessons it teaches people? The exact rules of the game might not matter as much in the pitch stage as its relevance and potential benefits for the protocol community. I also would assume the rules might potentially evolve through playtesting, to the extent that the game is being developed to be played vs. just being a conceptual exercise to illustrate an idea. Do you have plans for playtesting, and/or ideas about your potential audience of who might read about or play the game?

It might be interesting to think about tie-in opportunities to introduce people to the game, ie. like arranging for it to be played at events related to SoP or maybe the broader Ethereum community.

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thanks for the feedback! yes exactly - practice creates an intuition around the protocol and protocol making

this is great feedback - thank you!

my bad i really should have explained what MEV is (and what I mean when I use it).
Basically MEV in the blockchain community stands for maximal extracted value (originally coined as miner extracted value) and traditionally is the practice of using the ordering of transactions and blocks to create some sort of profit. For example, a classic MEV tactic is to monitor pending transactions and sandwich your own buy and your own sell between a victimā€™s buy order and take the price difference in profit.

The interesting thing to me, with regards to MEV and protocols, is that the people doing MEV were using the Ethereum protocol in an new way, which the creators of ethereum didnā€™t expect, and taking advantage of the protocol to create profit opportunities. This sort of adversarial profit-seeking approach - or ā€œhackerā€™s mindsetā€ - to using/taking advantage of the protocol is what originally sparked the idea for the card game. I think we best see things as they are when we try to exploit them.

The second thing iā€™d like to explore with this idea is the protocol changing/standardizing process, like the RFCs. If everyone agrees that one party is too successful in exploiting the protocol then we can change the protocol, and new rules to the protocol, or hardfork, like ethereum did. Then its up to everyone to see if the changes work, if they can be exploited, etc.

Like you said, I definitely think the rules will change through playtesting, maybe the RFC process is too slow, or maybe itā€™s too complicated and it should only try to do one thing.

On thinking about where to introduce people to the game - good point! Iā€™ll give it some thought.

Thanks again for your input!

also to quickly tack onto my first reply, in terms of outreach, i think if the mechanics are not too crazy i could create a web version of the game for people to play together online (and if weā€™re being super optimistic it could be ON-CHAIN! imagine a ethereum card game about pretending to be a protocol, on top of another protocol. Lol. This I admit is almost certainly not going to happen but interesting to think about)