Crypto: The Game Companion Podcast, Day 1: Purple Tribe Chaos, Anon Strategy, The Cabals are Blooming, "The New Wilbert" and more feat. special guest Dylan Abruscato

We're Boys Club, and you're listening to the official Crypto the Game companion podcast, brought to you by Lens.

For ten days only, we'll be hitting on the biggest moments, juiciest gossip, and hottest takes from season two Anon Island.

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Hello.

Hey.

Here we are.

What's your player number?

One oh eight. What's your player number?

Oh, one oh seven. That's cute. Are you safe? So cute. I am.

Safe as of— I mean, we have one more minute, but I have immunity tonight. So it's been, um, I gotta be honest with you, a pretty low-key night for me. And by low-key, I mean I've had a bottle and a half of wine with a friend. So getting used to an evening podcast, um, firing on no cylinders whatsoever because I knew I had immunity and I was like, what's the biggest thing that could happen tonight?

Totally, totally no risk. Super low, low stakes. Yeah, I will say it's, it's tough to fire up the ring light Post 8 PM. Okay, so welcome to the official Crypto the Game companion podcast. We're going to be doing this every night of Crypto the Game Season 2: Anon Island. We're going to be talking about the day's challenge. We're going to be sifting through the gossip. We're going to be sharing our favorite posts of the day. Just as a note, you can Telegram either one of us for tips if you want to speak into I've

never felt like more of a journalist than getting tips from people in my Telegram. Like, I'm like, oh, I'm a reporter now. I'm a journalist.

Yeah, totally. We're professional journalists.

Exactly.

We've already gotten some tips. So just know that your fellow player might be tipping us off on your behavior. They've already started to roll in.

I did have a thought today where I thought, Wow, some other person in some other world would be using this podcast as like 3D chess for their game strategy of like seeding information about other people or about their like psyops on what they would be doing. That's not us, unfortunately.

Oh, like we're shaping the game? No, we're not shaping the game. We don't have the mental capacity to do that, but someone might be shaping us. You never know. There could be a puppeteer,

like feeding lies through this channel.

Totally

not going to happen, but I aspire to that level of deceptiveness.

Before we get started, huge shout out to Lens. Huge, huge shout out to Lens. Big thank you. They have come in as our partner on this series. We love Lens. We post some unhinged stuff over there, so follow us and Crypto the Game on Lens. Our @s. Our voice club. And then I have Dina.

And then I have Natasha. And you can mint your Lens profile at lens.xyz. I'm not saying anything that I know for sure, but it might come in handy later. So might be something you wanna check out.

And then to get onto Lens and to like play around with Lens, there's something called Orb, which is great for mobile. And there's something called hey.xyz, which you can access from your browser. So get up on there, follow us, chat with us there. Thank you again to Lens.

I just want to give some level setting for what Crypto: The Game is for listeners to the Boys Club podcast who might be totally in the dark. So Crypto: The Game is a massive online survivor-style game that happens on the internet. This is season 2. Last season was a crypto viral sensation, I have to say. 400 players, everybody took up their entire life when they played it. It became my entire personality. I was out for number 1. I lost night 8. It was devastating. This is season 2. Season 2 is called Anon Island. There are 800 players, and how it works is that there is 80 ETH in the Pot that we are all playing for. So both Dina and I, in order for anybody to play the game, you have to put up 0.1 ETH, which at the time was about $330 to play. So over 800 people have done that. And then you basically get into this game that's very similar to Survivor, but online. You have challenges every day over the course of 10 days. You have tribes that you're assigned to. You have to play a social game as well as a— Survival game. cerebral game, and that's where we're at. That's just some level setting for everybody to understand what we're doing here.

Last season, the challenges ranged from puzzles, IRL puzzles. So there was like a word puzzle that we all had to solve, and that actually required someone to be in Brooklyn. I don't know if they're going to do that again this season. Very controversial.

Some alpha I heard about that was the reason why they did that. Is because they weren't ready from a technical perspective to come out with the second challenge, which was Pac-Man. So they had to last minute make a change and do an in-person challenge. So I doubt they will do an in-person challenge again this season.

Interesting. So yeah, so as Natasha said, other challenges were more gaming focused. So we did a Pac-Man, we did a Flappy Bird, which is where I got eliminated last season. I had the most amount of attempts of Flappy Bird and the lowest score.

That was tough. I tried my best to support and help. I played, uh, Flappy Bird on your behalf and it just wasn't enough. It was too little, too late.

Too little, too late.

And it didn't come together.

So yeah, a real, a real mix. And then I would say at the end, the, the challenges got very hard. They involved Photoshop.

You had to find a seed phrase, you had to find a It was very intense and above my pay grade. I have to be— Totally. Quite honest. So puzzles, games, social game. It's intense. It's all in. So every day at noon, the challenge becomes available. Every day at 8 PM, we're talking Eastern Standard Time, the vote goes live. There's an hour vote. And then at 9 PM, you know if you made it or not. I'm just going to double check. That I have made it. I will because I have immunity, but just to double check here.

I'm also seeing if there's any high profile players that have been eliminated tonight.

Wow. A lot of people eliminated tonight.

I will say, if you are getting eliminated tonight, it kind of indicates you just didn't try at all because in order to get immunity for night 1, all you needed to do was tweet something. So it looks like, uh, a lot of people that got eliminated were anons. That is one thing that I want to talk to Dylan. About the strategy for playing anon. So we're going to be welcoming Dylan as our first guest of the show. Dylan is the founder, the daddy of Crypto: The Game.

The daddy of Crypto: The Game.

And he's going to be coming on each night. We are going to have a different guest, or that's our intention. And honored to have Dylan here tonight with us. And yeah, really want to figure out the anon thing because that seems to be a big strategy for this season that was different from the first season.

I just want to give people some context for what the experience of playing is. This is at least my experience. I'm curious if— and I know it's yours too— I'm curious if other people have this experience. Basically at noon on the dot, my Telegram exploded and many chats started blowing up. You got assigned your tribe today. I'm on the Purple Tribe. What tribe are you on?

Gold Tribe.

Fortunate for me, I have a great tribe. I have a few key players. I won't name them, but people that crushed the first season are on my tribe. as well as at least 5 to 6 Boys Club members who are also on the tribe with me. So I just want to highlight the cabal of Boys Club women that are on Tribe Purple. I won't say their names, of course not.

Don't say their names and don't put a mark on people's back is really not recommended. Never.

Okay. 100%. We're gonna get voted off so imminently, but I hope not. I just would love to win a quarter of a million dollars. Oh, that's the pot this season, if we didn't say. $80,000. ETH, about $250,000.

The energy for the season is next level. So the game sold out effectively for 800 people in 15 minutes. 80 ETH collected into the pot there. So folks think they're gonna win it every single— Win it.

As do I. As do I. Let's talk about what your experience was noon. Today, what happened for you?

Yeah, so I got assigned to Gold, then jumped into my Gold official Telegram chat, and then the cabals started, the side chats. And this isn't— I'm not doxxing anyone on my tribe, but I will just say there's a lot of side chats and everyone is trying to be a cabal boss. Everyone thinks they're Tony Soprano.

Everybody.

And I am in all of these side chats just mining for information for this podcast. So I am— this is my disclosure. I am going to join all the cabals. I'm going to join all the chats. But I am first and foremost a journalist, and I take that real seriously.

Okay. So I had somebody DM me and say there was a character last season called Wilbert who Had a Telegram. He managed the game in the end. Nobody knows if he was really named Wilbert. Nobody knows if it was a group of people. And everybody's trying to be the Wilbert of this season. And essentially I got a DM from somebody, I won't say who, who said the new Wilbert is this other person and they have started a cabal and you should join. And I said, what? And then I didn't join because a huge thing that happened last season is people were screenshotting Telegram groups of different cabals and sniping people off based on what cabal you had joined. So I was being conservative, but then they said, rumor mill has it that Dina has joined this cabal. And then I thought, uh-oh, I have a job to do. If Dina's joined, I have to join. So I did join the cabal and it's been quite an active chat. I have a few cabals. I have a few side alliances. I'm not even going to pretend that that's not what's happening. That is what's happening for me. And we will see what happens for the rest of us.

May the best woman win.

May the best woman for sure, for sure. So should we bring Dylan on?

Let's bring Dylan on. There's the man of the hour. Hi, Dylan.

Hey, how's it going?

How's it going?

Natasha, Purple Tribe. What a performance! Oh my goodness!

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

I can't wait to hear how that all went down. I mean, we. We set it to 5 players per tribe and somehow with ties, uh, Purple Tribe sent home 26 folks.

Wow. 26?

26. Yes.

Wow. That's incredible. Okay. I wanna get into it, but before we get into it, Dylan is here. We're so excited to have him. He's the, uh, one of the co-founders of Crypto: The Game. We're talking all the hot goss. Before we get into it, I really wanna hear from you just how insane the energy has been around joining season 2. Yeah. What happened this season when joining began, how quickly that went? Give us some context.

Yeah. So, um, for season 1, um, if, you know, it's an idea I had for a really long time and was so excited to build, but kind of just tweeted it out. We didn't cap entries. We almost relied on our networks. I know Ty from the team worked on your site and I'm sure he told you both about season 1 and, and that's how you found out about it. But we ended up with 410 people. which is insane, but knew for season 2 that we almost needed to cap the entries. I think because it uniquely almost, you know, went viral after entries locked for season 1 and the game began, there was just so much FOMO for this thing. And I think the worst-case scenario from a player scenario would have been to completely open the floodgates and have, you know, tens of thousands of people sign up and have thousands of people within your tribe and almost remove that kind of like social intimacy and dynamic that everyone kind of came to know and love. And, and you would have almost had to feel like you were scrolling through just like thousands of endless PFPs to figure out who to vote for. So all this to say that we capped it at 800 people for season 2. Felt like, you know, doubling season over season was a nice goal. And we opened the mint up last week. We did a 24-hour essentially presale to those that played season 1 almost as a thank you. And we saw about half of the players come back for season 2. And then we opened up the rest via public sale 24 hours later and we sold out the 800 entries in 13 minutes, which is Insane.

Incredible.

Yeah. Completely blew my mind.

It was like $330-ish, like not an insignificant amount.

It's not nothing. Yeah. It's like, I, I know we spoke about this, uh, last time I was on, on the pod, but you know, I worked at HQ Trivia and that thing had millions of, of live concurrents. So when I, when I tell people it's hundreds of, of live players this time, it, you know, it doesn't sound like it has the same scale and impact and reach, but HQ was free to play and, and to your point, this thing costs hundreds of dollars to play. So, um, yeah, I mean, 800 people paying $300+ to play this thing in, in 13 minutes just like completely blew my mind.

Incredible.

Okay, so let's talk about some key differences from season 1 to season 2. The biggest I'd say is that people are now able to play anonymously.

Yeah.

Talk to us about the reasoning behind that decision. It's been controversial.

Yeah, it seems like— I mean, it's day 1, but seems like that was not the right strategy based on the Purple Tribe nuking 26 anonymous players. But yeah, so, so for season 1, the extent of kind of like the on-chain mechanic was essentially sending 0.1 ETH to our multisig as your buy-in. And then we sent 90% of that to the one winner's address as the kind of like prize. But for season 2, we really were into this idea of an NFT-based entry. So you mint an NFT, which is your spot in the game. When you get voted out, that turns from a player NFT to a jury NFT. But similar to like a Deal or No Deal or hedging your parlay, you could hypothetically like take the cash or, you know, sell your NFT at any point throughout the game as you get closer to the finale. So just like an additional on-chain game mechanic that we all are really into. But because in season 1 specifically and in season 2, you are asked as part of onboarding to connect your Twitter account and play as yourself. If you hypothetically did that and played as yourself and then sold your NFT halfway through, we didn't— we really didn't want the new owner of that NFT to come in and play as you. So we really wanted to essentially, like, give you the option to play anonymously, whether it be out the gate or once you inherit or buy someone else's NFT. And yeah, a lot of folks chose to play anonymously, either because they're very loud crypto Twitter influencers that had a target on their back season 1, or because they have been— I don't know, it looks like accumulating as many as possible.

I reached out to a few of my anon friends today and asked them if they're playing and asked them why they are playing anonymously. And almost unanimously the feedback was, I have too much of a target on my back from season 1. And that it makes more sense for me to play anonymously. But I don't know. I think this is a huge social game. I think so much of it is your relationships and being able to form alliances, for, have trust with people. And so if you're playing anonymously, people, I don't know. I don't think that people are about it.

I personally speaking would 100% connect my Twitter account and play as myself. I. I don't know if either of you did. I'm assuming you both did if you're still here. We voted, yeah. But I can't imagine voting for player number 468 to win the whole thing. You kind of need to almost rally behind a character and personality and support them in their decision or the way they played this game. But at the same time, I'm trying to embrace the spirit of crypto as much as possible this season. And like, nothing would be more crypto than for a completely anonymous player to win and not just someone with an anon Twitter personality, but someone that literally didn't even connect that anonymous Twitter account to their anon Crypto the Game profile.

I gotta say, that's not gonna be the most interesting outcome, at least for this podcast. Selfishly, it's gonna be the best outcome. Um, okay, let's talk about day 1. We're just wrapping up day 1 here. We didn't have a challenge, uh, but we did have voting this evening.

Yeah.

How has it been for you? Any big Surprises? Uh, yeah. What's your day been like?

Yeah. Uh, honestly the day has mostly been, uh, prepping for tomorrow's challenge. Uh, but, and, and future challenges. But yeah, I think, uh, we did the same thing in season 1, uh, where essentially day 1 is just like, meet your tribemates, form your alliances, figure out who's in your tribe. Maybe you recognize someone from Twitter, maybe you worked with someone in the past, maybe it's just someone you recognize and kind of always wanted to play this thing with. And kind of just like lay the groundwork. The big difference for this time is that we upped it to 5 people per tribe that were going home as opposed to just 1, which we did last season. What's unique about the format and kind of just comes with the fact that you have to get from 800 players down to 1 over the course of, you know, 10 days is that if there's a tie, everyone goes home. So I think that's what happened with Purple is that 26 people basically were tied for the top 5 spots. Spots. But, uh, yeah, honestly, the biggest surprise was that that happened. And it's kind of like, I kind of had a feeling that anonymous players would be a target, but it seems like that is definitely the case.

Did you know that people are expensing their Crypto: The Game application as a BD expense?

No, I did not. That's amazing.

Yeah. I saw someone in my chat was like, yeah, my company bought all of our entries because it's like good networking.

Oh my God. That's amazing.

So from a player perspective, this is the experience. You get assigned to your tribe and then the feeling is, oh shit, here we are again. And your Telegram just begins to blow up. And I will say right now, there are 4 chats where people are typing in my Telegram right now. Like there's so much activity. I went and worked out. I came back. I had 125 Telegram messages. Like it's constant.

What were you thinking?

I was just like, this is too intense. Dean and I also have said earlier in this episode, we're part of all the Cabal chats, getting as much knowledge as possible. And I will say, last season I was in Blue Tribe. Great people, made a lot of great friends. A dud of a tribe. A tribe. They were terrible at the challenges. It was not a good tribe. And now I'm in a tribe that is very coordinated, very serious people. Dare I say, star players.

Yeah.

Stacked. It's a stacked tribe.

So Purple Tribe, I immediately was just like scrolling through all the mentions on Twitter of everyone sharing who their tribe was. And it was like all-star after all-star from season 1 is all of a sudden on Purple Tribe. And I was like, wow, this team is legit. But—

Is it randomly assigned?

100% random, all on-chain this season. Yeah, you could check the randomization of the NFTs. But I think—

I won't be able to do that, unfortunately.

But I trust. Yeah. Um, but, uh, it's just, I guess it's surprising that you would all eliminate so many people out of the gate because I, I would imagine the more the merrier for tribal immunity challenges. So you're going to have to accomplish more with fewer folks.

I actually believe that, like, in— this was true for season— for the first season, is that you actually have maybe 25% active people in your tribe,

meaning like 24/7 engagement.

24/7 engagement. Yeah, I'm sure people are signing in, I'm sure people are checking out and talking to people who are like, I'm in it to win it, is I would say a quarter of people like me where I started today and I was like, up until now I was like, I'm gonna get voted off so soon, it's okay, like I'll play a little bit, it'll be good for the game. But then as soon as the game starts, you're like, no, I'm gonna win, like I'm gonna win. And like those, those types of individuals who are like hypercompetitive, I would probably say is maybe a quarter, 30% who are willing to like do anything to win the challenge. So like, gotta cut the fat, gotta cut the fat early. And so I'm aligned with that strategy.

Yeah, I respect the strategy. Curious if, uh, if you're able to disclose, but like who's, who's behind the strategy on the tribe?

Uh, I'm not gonna say.

Dish it, dish it. I'm

not gonna say at this point. Until I'm voted off, but I will say I'm taking orders. I'm taking orders. I'm playing a low, like a backseat on this for now. I was told who to vote for and I executed as told. And here we are. So Dina, your tribe.

We're just hanging out at this point. There's some coordination, but we, I will say last season we had a spreadsheet. I think all the chats have a spreadsheet, but In the spreadsheet, we're also tracking who we were voting for, and that doesn't seem to be— we're a little bit more laid back.

Yes. One big update on the UI side was we weren't disclosing that you had cast your vote. We're not disclosing the number of votes received. Something that I think a lot of tribe leaders in season 1 were doing were requiring screenshots or screen sharing, which Yeah. Oh, I, I'm not about that.

I got stuck in a, in a touchy, touchy situation last season where I was supposed to be sharing my screen and I was like, oh no, I've made some votes. That's not exactly right. And so I'm glad for the update.

Yeah.

Um, are you gonna ever say who, are you gonna disclose the votes at the end?

The plan is to never disclose the votes.

Was the Farcaster, uh, frame from last season fake?

That was fake. Confirmed by the creator.

Okay. So last season there was rumored to be a Farcaster frame where if you interacted with it, it would show— it showed you who voted you off. Caused much drama.

Much drama.

The big red flag was that you had to retweet, recast, and follow the creator to, to interact with it. So it was a very clever growth hack to, to grow your following.

Never a good sign.

I respect the hustle. Really quick, can you just give us some high-level stats on How many people were voted off? Um, I know that the Purple Tribe crushed it in terms of how many people, but maybe top few, um, some alpha around the vote that happened just now.

For sure. So, uh, we started the season and the day with 800 players, uh, across the 10 tribes. 75 players were eliminated, so 725 players remain. Um, and tomorrow will be the first, uh, elimi— uh, sorry, the first immunity challenge. And that's going to be in partnership with Lens. So I know a lot of folks, um, were kind of like signing up for Lens profiles and trying to get ahead of the curve, but we will drop that at noon Eastern tomorrow. And the first tribe to complete the task will, will win immunity. Everyone else is, is on the chopping block tomorrow night.

Exciting. Huge stuff. A quarter of a million dollars online. Dylan, wow. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you both so much for playing, for doing this. I, I think it's gonna be a great way to expand the CTG universe and hopefully give folks some inside info. And selfishly, I'm like very excited to listen to it because, you know, I can share stats from what we're seeing on our end, but I have no visibility or access to the, you know, Telegrams and side chats and, you know, backstabbing and chaos behind the scenes. The cabals. Yeah, exactly. Apparently Gary is the new Wilbert. I saw that online, but—

Oh, he definitely wants to be. He definitely wants to be.

Cool. Well, can't wait to listen. Have a good one.

Thanks, Dylan.

Um, okay, I'm getting some intel. Someone said Silver Tribe is utter chaos. They don't know the votes this season, so you can't coordinate to save people so easily. Someone we really like, Fonz from Token Proof, on the block. And of course, someone has randomly voted for one of the few Non-anon women. And then we went back and forth a little bit and I said, why do you think Fonz is a target? And they said Fonz was talking a lot and I guess high profile. And last season, either of those things chopped a vote pretty easily. And I said brutal. And then he sent a screenshot of the chat with Fonz and Fonz is saying, guys, please, please try to save me. Have some mercy. Vote for 633 or 402. In the image of Uncle Sam pointing to you, I need your vote for 633 or 402. And this person said, begging never looked good though. Red team got 23 votes on one player, super coordinated with a couple of snipes. Purple team knocked 21 Anons out with a single vote, savage and coordinated too. I'm curious if Fonz got voted out, but if he did, he didn't tweet. He did.

So he did. I saw his name on the rolling ticker and I thought. Rest in peace.

Rest in power. Rest in power, Fonz. So that's one insider who has been reaching out to me about what's happening on a particular team. What's anything you've gotten from a particular team?

No hot, uh, insight like yours. I will say that there's a lot of discussion about whether to consolidate votes onto Anons or to, to try and get rid of the Anons because I guess the feeling is that they're not accountable to their behavior and actions. You either consolidate your vote onto the Anons and try and get them out because we can't trust them, or you go with like an inactive player strategy.

Really quick, what an inactive player strategy means is essentially you get assigned a team and then, or tribe, and then everybody goes into a Telegram chat. Essentially, it doesn't happen really anywhere else. In my opinion, and if you're not active in that chat, you have a X on your back.

Okay, let's talk about our post of the day. So again, shout out to Lens for being our partner for the podcast. So grateful for them. So our first post of the day is a Lens post. It is by someone called Memester, and I'm reading it on on orb.club. Memester says, Team Silver, who else is playing Crypt of the Game and which tribe? And it's. The meme that's like it's like a little man and he's like reaching for a ball, and then he's reaching for a ball and someone else is coming to.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he goes, "Me this week reaching for the ball that says sport, sleep, and other usual activities," and then the person behind them it says crypto game. So that is really a universal sentiment. I think

truly it's truly what the experience is. That's very funny.

Okay, second post of the day from Jay Hins, and it's the meme that's. Like something tonight, something tonight, queen, something tonight. And it says Crypto of the Game tonight. Crypto of the Game tonight, queen. Crypto of the Game tonight. That's really good. Honestly, just a classic meme format. It really works. Beautiful. And then final one here from @noof.eth, Noah Newfield. I think he works at Uniswap. In the Crypto of the Game chat, like, and it's, what's his name? He's like a stoner guy. Actor.

Oh my gosh, yeah. Um,

anyway, he has a noose around his neck and he's looking to his left and he's saying, first time, which is honestly how I feel. I'm like, I, I feel like a veteran. I'm like looking at all these, all these people in the chat and I'm like, you guys are making mistakes. You're making first-timer mistakes.

People are coming to me and they're saying, hey, hey, hey, hey, like, what are some veteran moves? And I'm like, I've Played once, one time, one time, but there's double the amount of people and they're looking for the veterans to really give them some guidance.

Yeah. Okay, that's it for tonight. Thank you so much for joining us and we will see you tomorrow. Bye.