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“This is an adaptation, this is not a direct translation of Minecraft,” explains Torfi Olafsson, game director of Minecraft Earth. While the regular version of Minecraft lets players play in modes like creative (with unlimited blocks and items) or survival (if you die you lose your items), Microsoft is blending these traditional modes into a new way to play Minecraft. It’s fair to say the game I played was basic, occasionally buggy, but very impressive.

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The game will be available in beta on iOS and Android this summer, and I got to try various forms of it at Microsoft’s campus a couple of weeks ago. This hugely ambitious project starts with some basics in the form of Minecraft Earth. Microsoft is being hugely ambitious with ‘Minecraft Earth’

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Minecraft has 91 million active players, and now Microsoft wants to take the Pokémon Go concept a big step further by letting Minecraft players create and share whatever they’ve made in the game with friends in the real world, away from TV screens and monitors. Pokémon Go saw 20 million people searching for pokémon in streets worldwide back in 2016, thanks to augmented reality. We’ve already seen holograms through Microsoft’s HoloLens headset, but the company now wants to bring this technology to a much broader scale with the help of Minecraft Earth. Minecraft Earth is a new free-to-play game for iOS and Android that’s surprisingly ambitious for Microsoft. In the same building where Microsoft is creating the next Halo game, a team of engineers and game designers have been dreaming up the future of Minecraft on mobile phones with the help of the HoloLens team. Minecraft employees use Lego blocks to build miniature buildings during meetings, but over the past 12 months, they’ve been adventuring outside to secretly test a new way to play Minecraft. For a decade, it’s been a game that millions use to build their own creations out of virtual blocks of materials. Lego is the perfect analogy for Minecraft. As he stands in front of me inside a Minecraft-themed conference room on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington, I’m immediately drawn to the stacks of Lego blocks on the table beside him. Here’s a list of all the countries you can play the game in right now.Alex Kipman, Microsoft’s HoloLens and Kinect creator, is always enthusiastic about the future of computing. But I suppose that’s why it’s an early access app. The app seems to be a little buggy, though - I had a few crashes, sometimes the app wouldn’t register touches, and once, while filming that GIF, the plot of land hilariously slid away from the camera as if it were on ice skates. But I can see how it could be really fun, especially if you can get a group of friends together to build a shared Minecraft plot.

And I will fully admit that I don’t quite understand all of the mechanics in the game. There’s a lot more to the game that I didn’t have a chance to dig into - including adventures, which are limited-time, procedurally generated Minecraft worlds placed over the real world, collaborative building, daily challenges, and a character creation system.

I was also able to test the AR-based building by dropping a little plot of blocks right in the center of my apartment and adding materials I had collected to it: I was able to see a map of my neighborhood, but Minecraft-ified, where I could tap around on points of interest to mine them for materials.

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Once I was through those hoops, though, I had free rein to check out the world and play around with the app.