We have been waiting a long time for this: Last Saturday, 16 different players from six nations visited the InnoGames office for an exclusive battle. During the Kartuga Alpha Challenge they fought for valuable prizes in an epic tournament of three rounds. At the end of an exciting fight, Hans was lucky enough to overtake Szymon in the very last minute and won an iPad.

We were already overwhelmed by your interest in this competition. When we announced it here on the blog to a yet small community, we were definitely not thinking that some hundreds of users would be interested in visiting us here in Germany. There were applications even from Chile and New Zealand. Staying in contact with the 16 people who won the lottery and discussing the details of their travel with them was already the first exciting thing about the event. Szymon from Częstochowa (Poland) came with his father in a caravan – a 1,600 km trip! Grega from Ljubljana (Slovenia) rode on night trains for 14 hours. And at the end, they all showed up in time. Thanks a lot for taking part!

For us it was especially interesting to see the players’ reactions to the game. So far, it has only been played internally and at some point, it is very hard to remain neutral and objective about your own game. One could say that there was a lot of positive tension in our office before the event. Thus, we were of course a bit relieved that our visitors agreed with our point of view. Every one of the 16 participants really liked the game; especially the beautiful 3D graphics of the game were praised a lot.

Still, players also gave very valuable feedback – there were some suggestions to improve scoring and balancing of the game, for example. Those areas were part of the reason we wanted to have this event in the alpha stage of the game. Now, we are able to implement valuable feedback into the development process of the game.

We would once again like to thank all participants for joining our Alpha Challenge. We hope to see you all in the game very soon!