Overview
The Cardano Games Showcase is a short, curated list of games that are live and playable on Cardano1. It is built for people who want to see what has actually shipped rather than what has been announced, so concepts, pre-sales, and waiting lists are left off. Each entry opens a page on cardano.org, and that page carries the link out to the game's own site.
The Cardano Games Showcase is the game slice of the app directory on cardano.org, which the Cardano Foundation rebuilt as an app-store-style shelf covering sending, swapping, voting, building, and playing2. The filtering happens in your browser, so the games sit one click away from the wider directory rather than on a separate site.
Key Features
- A working-product bar. A listing has to be a functional product running on Cardano mainnet, the live network, with a stable web address of its own. Announcements, test domains, and app-store links are turned away3.
- Dead entries get pruned. A quarterly review pulls games whose site has stopped responding, that announced a shutdown, that moved off Cardano, or that went quiet across their code repository, social accounts, and community channels4.
- One click from the directory. The Cardano Games Showcase is where the Play option on the cardano.org apps page sends you, with the game filter already applied and the results sorted alphabetically1.
- A starting point, marked with a star. Maintainers flag one or two entries per category as a good first stop for newcomers and publish the reasoning as a public proposal on GitHub. The star is their own pick, not an institutional endorsement5.
- Readable by machines, correctable through GitHub. The catalog is published as a plain-text file that scripts and AI tools can read6, and the site behind it is open source, so a fix can be proposed on GitHub7.
What to Expect
You land on a filtered page with a search box, a sort control, and the list of games beneath a heading that counts them. Each row shows an icon, the game's name, and a single line describing it1.
Clicking a game opens a page on cardano.org rather than the game itself. That page carries a longer description, badges for the category and for properties such as open-source code, a link out to the game's own website, and a rail pointing at the rest of the list8.
A game shows an activity figure only once its transactions are attributed to it; otherwise the space stays blank. Attribution happens when a project's transactions are matched to it, either through registered script hashes or a transaction metadata label, so a blank space means nobody wired up tracking, not that nobody is playing9.
The surrounding interface is translated into Vietnamese, German, Japanese, and Spanish, though the game descriptions themselves stay in English10.
