Overview
The Cardano Gaming Directory is a one-page catalogue of blockchain games, sorted by genre so you can jump straight to the kind you want to play. It suits someone who wants to read up on what has been built on Cardano without chasing projects one at a time. Entries are not pruned when a project stops running, so it reads as an archive of what has been written up rather than a list of what is currently playable. Each listing opens onto a written profile of the game rather than a bare link out.
The page is the games section of Built on Cardano, a wider directory of Cardano projects, and sits alongside that site's other genre pages. It catalogues projects under genre headings: MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing games), Trading Cards, Game Ecosystem, RPG, Strategy, Gambling, Retro, Scrolling 2D, Racing, Organizations, and Board Game. MMORPG and Trading Cards are the deepest groups; Board Game holds a single entry. The directory grew out of an effort to map the Cardano ecosystem project by project1.
Key Features
- Genre-first browsing. The 11 headings split the catalogue by what kind of game each project is, so a reader after a card game never has to scroll through racing titles to find one.
- A written profile behind each card. Clicking a game leads to an original write-up covering gameplay, characters, in-game economies, and any token the project issues, with the project's own website and social links in a sidebar.
- Tags that connect related games. Profiles carry tags such as play-to-earn or build-to-earn, and each tag leads to other listed projects sharing it. The tagging system is hand-maintained across the wider directory2.
- A plain-language explainer on how these games pay out. Short paragraphs below the listings describe build-to-earn, play-to-earn, and play-to-learn, three ways Web3 games hand players something they can keep or sell.
- Open submissions. Anyone can put a project forward through the site's listing form, and paid placement is offered separately from the free route.
What to Expect
The Cardano Gaming Directory puts the whole catalogue on one page: you land on a long scrolling list of cards, each carrying a logo, a name, and one line describing the game. Browsing means scrolling to the genre heading you want and reading down the list, and the explainer at the foot of the page links out to sibling pages for build-to-earn, play-to-earn, and play-to-learn titles.
The depth sits in the profiles rather than the index. A profile reads like a short article, not a database record, which makes the site useful for working out whether a game is worth your time before you visit it. A hand-written catalogue moves at the pace of the people writing it, so a genre's coverage reflects the entries someone chose to add rather than the full set of games in that genre.
Built on Cardano was not built with Catalyst grant funding; its proposals in that programme were not approved3. Readers comparing game explorers will find the Cardano Gaming Directory trades breadth and freshness for editorial detail on each project, which is the distinction worth knowing before picking one to browse.
