So you want to try your hand at Nova Rally now that the game has launched? At a minimum, to get started, you’ll need 2 drivers and a vehicle, which you can purchase on Atomic Hub. However, the more drivers and vehicles you own, the more SNAKOIL you earn each hour, which is the fuel burned when you enter races. You can view your snaking power using this tool.

It costs 10,000 oil to enter a race in the rookie league, and you can enter 10 races a day at that price, so a good goal might be to buy enough NFTs to earn that 100K oil per day. SNAKOIL can also be purchased on Alcor Exchange.

Once you have your NFTs and SNAKOIL, you can log into the game at https://play.novarally.io/. Once logged in, you’ll choose a vehicle and two racers to enter the race, then click on the Start Race button.

You’ll then see a popup saying you’ve joined the next available race, with a link to the race results. The race results will take a few minutes to appear.

Your goal, of course, is to come in first place, so you can earn shard packs, which can be opened and crafted into new drivers. If you win, you can click on the Claim Prize button at the top of the Race Results screen to claim your shard pack, which contains one random shard. It takes 5 shards of the same type to craft a driver NFT. Crafting can be found on Nefty Blocks. You can also buy and sell shards and shard packs on Atomic.

What causes you to win a race? No one knows, as there’s a secret algorithm in play here. One would think that the rarer your NFTs, the better they would be in the race though, but apparently common and uncommon NFTs can still win.

Once you’ve won 10 races with a car or driver, you can promote that driver or car NFT by burning it and 2 additional NFTs of the same driver or car in the Promote section of the game. The rarities don’t have to be the same, but you will receive a random promoted NFT based on the rarities you burn, so if you burn 2 commons and an uncommon, you have around a 33.3% change of getting an uncommon promoted NFT and a 66.6% chance of getting a common promoted NFT. The promoted NFTs can then be used in the next league tier of the game instead of the Rookie League.

The game complexity increases as you move up leagues, requiring additional fuel types and promoted NFTs, but I’m not going to get into that here. Just know that to get started, you need a vehicle NFT, 2 driver NFTs, and 10,000 SNAKOIL per race. As Wax NFT games go, this one is still fairly affordable to get into, so why not give it a try?

If you’re interested to see where the game is going in the future, check out the Medium article here.