How onchain games work already drew the line: the game is the loop, not the receipt. This page is the taxonomy. Five kinds show up again and again. Only two of them mean the chain runs the game.
The other three can be honest products. They should not inherit the verification story from the first two.
The two tests
You do not need a white paper. You need two answers.
Does the chain refuse an illegal move? If a forbidden action reverts in a public contract, the chain is enforcing the rules. If the chain will pay whatever an operator attests, it is a cashier.
Can a stranger reconstruct the last contested state without an API key? Explorer plus node. Not a screenshot from the Discord. If yes, you are in the two kinds that count. If no, you are looking at a client-server game with a public inventory.
Only those tests decide whether the chain runs the game. The art, the token, the land map, and the famous advisor are garnish.
1. NFT wrapper
The game is a normal game. An NFT is a cosmetic, a pass, or a tradable skin. Combat, matchmaking, spawning, the actual loop: studio machines.
If the studio turns the servers off, you still hold a picture. You do not hold a game. The chain kept a pointer. It never had the rules.
This kind absorbed most of what ranking pages called a blockchain game. It is a storefront. It is not an onchain game.
2. Hybrid
Ownership lives onchain: the sword, the land, the character. Logic lives offchain: combat, matchmaking, the real rules. This was the default web3 game of the last cycle.
You can trade the asset. You cannot reconstruct the match from the chain. Honest marketing would have said the inventory was onchain. It said the game was onchain.
Hybrids fail in the copy, not always in the code. "Partly onchain" is a precise phrase. Use it.
3. Offchain compute, onchain settlement
A heavy simulation runs elsewhere: a server, a rollup, a proving system. The chain records results, or checks a proof that the results followed published rules. The chain is a court, not the field.
This can be rigorous. A verifier contract that will not pay an illegal result is a real check. An operator signature is a cashier with a public receipt. An oracle is a messenger. Those are not equivalent.
It is not the game running onchain. It is settlement, sometimes with a proof. If the stake is a wager, this design is also the one that most often trips the games-versus-gambling line.
4. Fully onchain (FOCG)
Logic and state are in contracts. Moves are transactions. Illegal moves revert. Anyone with a node can rebuild the world.
This is the strict meaning of an onchain game, sometimes called a fully onchain game or FOCG. It is rare, because it is inconvenient. Fog of war fights the public mempool. Action games fight block time. Economies fight the fact that a bot can call the same functions you can, faster.
When it works, the prize is not a mood. It is a public disagreement procedure. Two players can point at the same state and the same bytecode and stop arguing about what the server did.
5. Autonomous worlds
A fully onchain game treated as a world rather than a product: client-agnostic, permissionless to build around, closer to a protocol than a store listing. The studio is a first client, not a landlord.
The loop is still in public contracts. The extra claim is that other people may build on it without an API key. A second map. A bot. A spectator tool. A mechanic the original team never shipped.
Dark Forest is history, not a download. Fully onchain space-conquest with zero-knowledge so a player could hide a fleet and still prove a legal move. Players built bots and alternative clients against the same contracts. Proof the architecture is possible, not a store listing.
FPS and MOBA are off the table
A public chain, even a fast rollup, is a slow, public computer. Every move is a transaction that has to be ordered, executed, and agreed on. That is a terrible fit for a twitch FPS or a MOBA. Those games need a hidden server that ticks many times a second. Putting that loop in a contract is not a 2026 product.
What does run: turn-based tactics, cards, slow strategy, persistent simulations measured in hours, not frames. If the pleasure is reaction time, keep the simulation offchain. If the pleasure is a rule set that outlives a studio, onchain is the point.
Only two mean the chain runs the game
Wrappers and hybrids put receipts on a chain. Fully onchain games and autonomous worlds put the game on a chain. Settlement-and-proofs sit in the middle, and honest writing should say so.
Randomness cuts across every kind. A fully onchain title still has to explain where a die roll comes from. A wrapper that claims "provably fair drops" is usually talking about a server seed, not a contract. Those are different proofs, and neither of them is kindness.
Next: vrf-vs-rng