Dear Bankless Nation,

Create an island, share it, play, and earn.

That’s the quick pitch of Nifty Island, an NFT gaming platform that just released its open beta last week.

With this launch, the project also just kicked off its Play-to-Airdrop (P2A) campaign for its upcoming $ISLAND token.

Want to have some fun while racking up your $ISLAND eligibility, then? I’ll show you how to get started in today’s post!

-WMP

How to Play and Earn in Nifty Island

What is Nifty Island?

Created by Nyft Studios, Nifty Island is a virtual world and gaming platform designed to facilitate player-created games for NFT communities, from battle royales to racing contests.

The Nyft team developed the platform for nearly three years before releasing the free open beta for anyone to try on January 17th, 2024.

The $ISLAND Play-to-Airdrop

Nifty Island's P2A campaign is an opportunity to engage with the platform to earn $ISLAND from the project’s upcoming token distribution. It's designed to be enjoyable rather than a grind, rewarding genuine play and social sharing.

The most essential elements you'll want to keep in mind here are as follows:

• 🌸 Earning Blooms — Play games and participate in daily in-game quests to earn Blooms, the offchain currency of Nifty Island. The more you earn, the more points you’ll rack up toward your $ISLAND eligibility.
• 🪙 Spending Blooms — Spend your Blooms on NFT rewards in the Nifty Island Marketplace. These game assets include decorations you can use to customize and improve the appeal of your islands. The more you spend, the more $ISLAND points you’ll earn.
• 🫂 Playing Socially — Invite your friends to play to score more points. You can share links to your islands on social media and gain points when other players engage in games you’re hosting.
• 🎴 Collecting NFTs — Nifty Island has seven different Collector Tiers, and your tier is decided by the NFTs you hold. The higher your tier, the more $ISLAND tokens your points will eventually fetch. Collecting Legendary Palms and NFTs from partner collections will help increase your tier.

Supported collections

Notably, Nifty Island allows users to upload their own 3D assets, from avatars to furniture, through the currently supported FBX Binary, glTF, and glb file types.

However, if it’s plug-and-go play you’re after, you’re in luck because the platform already offers support for avatars from more than 180 partner collections, including Azuki, Bored Apes, Cool Cats, Pudgy Penguins, and beyond.

You can find the full list of onboarded collections here.

Getting started in Nifty Island

If you’re a newcomer to Nifty Island, you’ll need to set up your account before you can start questing and customizing your island. The steps to begin are straightforward:

1. Go to niftyisland.com
2. Press “Log in” and sign in with your desired wallet or social account
3. Create an account by selecting a username and your region
4. Accept the platform’s Terms of Service by signing the prompted transaction
5. Once on the welcome page, you can add more wallets, follow other players, customize your profile, and beyond before diving in deeper

Once you’ve got everything prepped how you want it, you’ll be ready to start playing. At this point, you would:

1. Go to niftyisland.com/play
2. Press “Launch the game” — if the game client doesn’t automatically load, you’ll be given the option to download the launcher to your desktop (Windows and Mac supported)
3. With the launcher up, press “Sign in”
4. Press “Play” and complete the tutorial level to learn the controls and earn your first Blooms
5. Once you’ve finished the tutorial, you can pick your avatar, customize and explore your island, or traverse to other islands to try different match types — see this dashboard for the full list of community-created islands

Plenty of positives

There’s a lot to like about the Nifty Island beta. Some things that stood out to me in my initial playthrough:

• Being able to bring some of my favorite NFTs to life in a virtual world and easily play with other people doing the same across multiple game modes is downright fun.
• The onboarding and gameplay experiences felt smooth — I didn’t encounter any problems during the launcher download or my first island hops, and the game modes were straightforward to get the hang of.
• The Nifty Island Marketplace offers a great avenue for 3D artists to monetize their creations, and island customization is an awesome way for players to express themselves and attract more players for Bloom rewards.
• The P2A campaign and Blooms feel secondary and supportive to the gameplay rather than the other way around, which is good — the game is fun on its own, and the rewards just make the play that much stickier.
• People streaming their matches and quest sessions and getting deep into customizing their islands has been neat to watch. There’s genuine fun and excitement afoot, which you love to see.

Why it matters

Nifty Island’s beta is the latest high-profile demonstration of how NFTs can be activated for new kinds of experiences and don’t just have to exist as static imagery on the blockchain.

Also, sometimes airdrop hunting in other sectors like DeFi can feel like grinding work, but racking up Blooms and $ISLAND score in Nifty Island just feels like good ‘ol fun gameplay. People would enjoy Nifty Island even if there were no token incentives, so the fact that there are incentives grants you a chill way to earn an airdrop down the road.

In my opinion, then, the platform’s a no-brainer. Have fun, express yourself, and earn an airdrop — sounds good to me!

For now, there’s no official word on the P2A campaign’s duration or when $ISLAND will launch. In the meantime, consider questing around Nifty Island a little bit every day to have some fun and maximize your $ISLAND airdrop eligibility along the way. This one’s not an opp you have to think about too hard, just enjoy yourself and eventually the chips will fall where they may.