The Onchain Games You Couldn't Build Until Now

Gaming is one of the largest entertainment markets on earth. Estimates put global games revenue at roughly $197 billion in 2025, with about 3.6 billion people playing. Crypto has spent years trying to bring a piece of that onchain because it offers a clear advantage: settle winnings in seconds, remove the operator who controls the table, and let anyone verify that a game is provably fair instead of trusting a company's word for it.

But the mechanics that make games fun, or in many cases make them possible at all, depend on information staying private. In poker, players need to keep their hands to themselves; strategy games only work if you can't read opponents’ next move. Lootboxes are only worth it if you don’t know what’s inside. Public blockchains broadcast everything by default, so the moment you put these games fully onchain, the thing that made them work in the first place disappears.

This is the issue Inco Lightning solves. By enabling developers to build smart contracts with encrypted state, onchain randomness, and programmable access control, Inco makes it possible to build games with genuinely private state that are still fully onchain and verifiable.

Below is a builder's tour of what that unlocks, and the specific Inco Lightning features that make each game work.

The Inco Lightning Toolkit for Confidential Onchain Games

Onchain randomness. Inco Lightning generates random numbers directly onchain, inside a TEE (Trusted Execution Environment), with no offchain oracle and no trusted operator. Shuffle a deck, roll dice, seed a drop table, pair players in matchmaking. 

Confidential moves without breaking UX. Encrypted state lets players commit hands, moves, and positions that stay private until your game logic reveals them. It runs at the speed of the native chain with near-zero added latency, so there's no bridging to a separate privacy chain and no endless wallet popups. Players keep the wallet they already use.

Composability with the tools you already know. Inco Lightning is a library you import to power-up standard contracts. No new VM, no new language. Confidential contracts compose with each other and with public DeFi, so in-game assets, tokens, and winnings stay interoperable with the rest of the ecosystem instead of getting siloed.

The EList type. EList is a native encrypted list type for managing collections of encrypted values onchain: a deck of cards, a player's hand, an inventory, a set of sealed bids. You can shuffle, deal, and operate on the list while every element stays encrypted.

A near-zero learning curve. Encrypted types mirror the ones you already use. Add an e and you have euint256, ebool, and eaddress. Operations follow the same pattern. If you can write a standard smart contract, you can write a confidential one.

Here are just some examples of the onchain games you can build with Inco Lightning

Casino and Games of Chance

Poker, Blackjack…

The mechanic. Card games are information games. Poker depends on private hole cards and a shuffled deck no one can see. Blackjack depends on a shoe whose order is unknown to the player. Take away the secret, and there is no game.

Why it breaks onchain today. If cards live in plaintext contract state, every player can read every hand straight off the block explorer. That means no bluffing. The house edge in blackjack is meaningless when you can see the next card before you hit. 

What Inco unlocks. Deal cards as encrypted values and store the deck as an EList, then shuffle it with onchain randomness. Each player can decrypt only their own hand, and nothing else. State transitions like comparing two hands at showdown happen on the encrypted data without exposing it. Settlement and payouts run onchain in tokens, so no operator holds the float. 

The same pattern covers the rest of the casino floor: dice, roulette, lotteries, and any game whose integrity rests on a random draw nobody can predict or manipulate.

PVP and Strategy

Fog of War and Hidden-Information PVP

The mechanic. Strategy games run on concealed information. Troop positions, unit orders, the location of your base, the card you're about to play. The tension comes from not knowing what your opponent is planning, and from planning around what you can't see.

Why it breaks onchain today. Onchain, every move is a transaction. An opponent reads your deployment and counters it. Fog of war evaporates the instant the game is transparent, and competitive PVP collapses into whoever reads the chain fastest.

What Inco unlocks. Store unit positions, orders, and moves as encrypted state. Moves resolve through your game logic without revealing the underlying values to the other player, and access control governs exactly who can decrypt what, and when. A scout reveals a tile; a battle resolves an outcome; the rest stays private. The result is a competitive game with real hidden information that is still fully onchain. The same approach powers PVP card battlers with concealed decks and any head-to-head game.

Onchain Guessing and Puzzle Games

The mechanic. Sudoku, Geoguessr-style location games, Hangman, word games, trivia. Anything built around a secret answer the player is trying to find.

Why it breaks onchain today. The solution sits in contract state in plaintext. Players simply read the answer off the chain and submit it. Where’s the fun in that?

What Inco unlocks. Keep the target value encrypted, accept encrypted guesses, and let the contract score them without ever exposing the answer. Verifiable scoring means players trust the result without trusting an operator. Inco's own Hangman demo at experiences.inco.org or Wordle and Uno built by Melee Games show this working today.

Lootboxes, Mystery NFTs, and Reveal Mechanics

The mechanic. Lootboxes and trading-card packs depend on not knowing what's inside until you open it. Collectible items carry stats that should stay sealed until gameplay conditions are met. The surprise is the product.

Why it breaks onchain today. Standard NFT metadata is public at mint. Every attribute and rarity tier is visible immediately, which kills the reveal and lets players see the optimal pulls before they spend a cent. True lootbox mechanics are impossible when all the contents are already onchain in the clear.

What Inco unlocks. Store NFT metadata and attributes as encrypted state, revealed only when the owner chooses to open the box or when in-game conditions are met. Pair it with onchain randomness for provably fair drop rates that players can verify.

More Games You Can Build With Onchain Confidentiality

The same primitives go beyond the examples above:

• Blind auctions for rare items. Bidders submit encrypted, sealed bids. The contract determines the winner without exposing losing bids, removing last-second sniping and bid-watching from in-game marketplaces.
• Confidential in-game economies. Player balances, resource stockpiles, and trade amounts can stay private while remaining composable with onchain tokens and DeFi.
• Prediction and fantasy games. Encrypted positions and bet amounts keep players from copying or front-running each other while market resolution stays transparent and verifiable.

If a game depends on someone not knowing something, it's a candidate for Inco.

Start Building With Inco Lightning

Getting started is super easy. Drop the Inco Lightning library into your project, write confidential Solidity using encrypted types like euint256 and ebool, and keep the tools you already use: Solidity, Hardhat, Remix, MetaMask. No new VM, no new language, no cryptography to implement yourself.

Inco Lightning is live on Base Sepolia testnet and Solana Devnet, with Base mainnet launching soon, so you can build and test confidential game mechanics today.

• Read the docs and quickstart at docs.inco.org
• Try the live demos, including Hangman, at experiences.inco.org
• Bring your design to Builders Office Hours and we'll help you map it to the right primitives

We’re excited to see what you build.