A couple of weeks back, I made a post looking into Thundr Games to see how they were as both games and as a stacking method (#451194).

I figured I'd do the same thing with Bling Games, since I keep seeing them promise Bitcoin, too.

With the Thundr games, I took a weekend and played the games casually, but with some effort. That wasn't really viable here, as I'll discuss, so I played for about a week (but probably put in about as much time, including watching ads, as I did on that weekend with Thundr games)

Word Breeze: This is your standard "get five letters, make words out of them to fill in a grid" game. It's not bad, per se, except the dictionary is incredibly lacking, often not accepting common words (though it does except most greek letters -- weird to see it take "rho" but not words used in everyday speech).

Bitcoin Blast/Etherium Blast: These are variants of Bejeweled, implemented well enough if you like that gameplay.

Bitcoin Pop: Your standard bubble-popper.

Bitcoin Food Fight: This is the game I've seen done a few times where there's a spinning wheel, and you have to throw forks into it as it spins and not hit the other forks. One of the spinning items is a peach and I honestly don't know if the devs knew what they were doing with that one or not.

Bitcoin Solitaire/Bitcoin Sudoku: Exactly what it says on the tin.

Sweet Bitcoin: Basically Candy Crush Saga.

The monetization: Notice how much shorter my game reviews are this time? This is the reason. Any of those games could be fine -- it's not like Thundr's Solitaire or Snake games are deep or long -- but the ads are overwhelming here. Word Breeze, for example, makes you watch an ad after every level. Some levels take only twenty seconds, but the ads can run to 90 seconds each. And unlike in the Thundr games, where ads are also ways to get you something extra (a continue or extra tickets for more sats), these are solely to delay your next game or level.

Basically, the monetization makes these games almost unplayable, which is why I spent a week on them, instead of a dedicated weekend.

The payout process: Okay, but if you get sats, that could be worthwhile, right?

Well, I finally decided to cash out, and had enough for 102 sats:

You'll notice right away that I can't get my sats in Lightning. Or even a regular BTC wallet. The only option here is Coinbase. Before Lightning became ubiquitous, I guess that kind of made sense. Coinbase-to-Coinbase can be done without fees, so when sending tiny amounts, it's an option to keep costs down. Obviously, it's not my preference, but I do have a CB account¹, so I went ahead and did that.

And got this response in my email shortly:

I checked, and yes, I had the correct verified email, and Coinbase had BTC at a price where 100 sats was closer to 6 cents.

I tried again and got the same result. I can only assume that either Bling charges some sort of "fee" that reduces those sats drastically, or that Coinbase doesn't trust them, or that they're actually out of BTC.

The other crypto option was Eth, but I don't want even a scrap of Eth, and since it was via Coinbase, I've got no reason to believe that would work.

They did offer a fiat option to my Paypal, and to their credit, this one worked. And netted me $.07:

I'm rich!

Or, well, not. Even if fiat was my goal.

Conclusion: I deleted these apps. You probably shouldn't bother downloading them. There are more fun versions of every one of these apps that are less crippled by the amount of ad time they require, and the reward isn't enough to justify the time. Literally any other form of stacking you can do is more enjoyable and more rewarding. You could download the Bitcoin Magazine app to a bunch of spare devices and scroll through the stories on those for extra sats, and that would still be more rewarding in terms of both sats and fun.

Note: The obvious third group of apps to check out would be the ZBD ones. But ZBD made a choice to stop operating in my state, and with that they also rugged all the sats I had in my wallet. So I can't review the games since I can't play them, and I can't recommend in good conscience that anyone even leave a single sat in that wallet.