Sales for Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs and associated projects are surging this week as creator Yuga Labs revealed plans for Dookey Dash, a skill-based web game that requires an NFT to play and promises as-yet-unrevealed rewards for top scores.

Dookey Dash is an “endless runner” style game that can be played within a web browser, challenging players to progress as far as they can through a cartoonish sewer environment while picking up items—all without crashing and failing.

Only owners of Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFTs can receive a Sewer Pass NFT to play the upcoming game. Yuga Labs revealed full details for the experience late Wednesday, and sales for its Ethereum NFT projects have spiked in the hours since.

Mutant Ape NFTs—typically the more affordable of the two—are up 124% in sales volume over the past 24 hours to $4.2 million, per data from CryptoSlam, while Bored Ape NFT sales have jumped 171% in that span to nearly $3.5 million. Bored Ape Kennel Club NFTs, which will also have a role in Dookey Dash, have seen a 134% sales spike to over $3.3 million.

Bored Ape and Mutant Ape owners can claim a free Sewer Pass NFT from January 17 to February 8. It’s required to play Dookey Dash, but the NFTs can be resold, potentially fueling secondary market momentum ahead. There are multiple tier levels to the passes based on which Bored Ape NFTs a user owns, some of which add a bonus to their game score.

Dookey Dash—which indeed revels in toilet humor—will be playable between January 18 and February 8, and as long as a Sewer Pass is used to play the game at least once, Yuga Labs said that it will be “eligible to transform into something new.”

It’s a “skill-based mint,” however: a leaderboard will track the top scores from all players during the gameplay window. Further details on Dookey Dash are still to come, but the official website notes that “players will be rewarded based on their performance in the sewer.”

Ape resurgence?

The Bored Ape Yacht Club is one of the most successful NFT projects to date, with the main collection generating over $2.6 billion worth of trades since its April 2021 launch. Subsequent projects, including the Mutant Apes and virtual land plots for the upcoming Otherside metaverse game, have added more than $3.5 billion worth of further NFT trades to the tally.

Bored Ape owners have an extensive history of being rewarded for holding one of the 10,000 original Ethereum NFTs. They have received free airdrops or claims for the valuable Mutant Ape, Kennel Club, and Otherside NFT drops, along with an allotment of the ApeCoin Ethereum token that was worth tens of thousands of dollars at launch in March 2022.

The Bored Ape NFTs sold for about $200 worth of ETH during the initial mint, but prices surged in late 2021 and into early 2022. Some have sold for more than a million dollars, with the floor price—or price of the cheapest listed NFT on a marketplace—peaking at $429,000 worth of ETH in April 2022 ahead of the Otherside land rollout.

Prices have fallen sharply in the months since amid a broader NFT market drawdown, as the Bored Ape floor price dipped below $60,000 as recently as November amid the market fallout from the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX.

However, Bored Ape prices have ticked back up in recent weeks, currently sitting above $102,000 per data from NFT Price Floor. Over the last 30 days, Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT sales have totaled $82.5 million—up 26% over the previous period, according to CryptoSlam. It’s the top-selling project over that span.