| Website | challengegames.com |
| Category | Web |
| Employees | |
| Founded | 2006 |
| Total | $14.5M |
| Series A, 7/08 Sequoia Capital | $4.5M |
| Series B, 9/08 Sequoia Capital Globespan Capital Partners | $10M |
Challenge Games creates online, short-form asynchronous games that can be played in 3-10 minute time increments.
They launched their first game, Duels, in August 2007.
| Website | baseballboss.com |
| Stage | Live |
| Launch Date | July 2, 2008 |
Baseball Boss is a fantasy baseball game that uses the same gaming platform as the company’s first product, Duels.com. Users create teams using real MLB players and asychronously play against other teams. The game first launched in July 2008.
| Website | duels.com |
| Blog | duelsblog.com |
| Stage | Live |
| Tags | games |
Duels is an online role-playing game and social network that allows users to create characters, buy weapons and outfits, and duel with other members. The site allows members to play against each other asynchronously; users set up duels but do not control the actual outcome. Therefore, opponents can accept duels when you are offline, and the duel will still occur.
Its parent company, Challenge Games, is planning some upgrades, such as a tournament feature, a ranking system, and possible forays into sports gaming. In October 2007, they launched a Facebook application to allow users to battle each other within the Facebook social graph.
In June 2008 Duels held a tournament with $5,000 in cash and other prizes. Over 1,600 players participated.
Warstorm (www.warstorm.com) takes collectable card games (CCG) into the massively multiplayer online (MMO) world as a browser-driven game that can be played in short sessions, letting players compete with their friends in asynchronous combat.
In Warstorm, the player becomes a Warlord who obtains heroes, units, items and spells in the form of powerful collector cards. Warlords must then use these cards to create squads that will battle. The game’s challenge system is asynchronous so that competitors do not need to be online at the same time. A player can issue challenges to friends or a post a general challenge to the player community, battling only when the challenge is accepted. These battles are performed in Warstorm’s animated battle viewer that activates squads card-by-card similar to Magic the Gathering. Gamers who enjoy games like World of Warcraft or Lineage but do not have the enough time to dedicate multiple hours per game session benefit from this flexible format.
Warstorm can be played for free, but players can select to upgrade faster by buying cards through micro-transactions or by winning card packs in tournament play where up to sixteen players can compete at-once in a skirmish bracket competition.
