My Empire

If you’ve ever played the Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh or Magic: the Gathering card games, you’re already pretty familiar with the game behind Zynga’s Warstorm: collectible card battle games where you build a deck and then draw monsters from it with which to attack your opponent’s health. First to lose all their health (called ‘morale’ in this game) or run out of cards, wins. You obtain cards in the now-familiar metaphor of the booster pack, bought for in-game silver or real world cash. Each card – all of which are beautifully illustrated – represents a unit. Units have a draw time – the number of turns a card must wait after it is drawn before it can be played. This can be as much as ten turns for the most powerful cards, or as little as one for cheap, expendable infantry. Cards also have an attack power, health, and an optional special ability. ...

I quit Frontierville tonight. No big deal. I ended up playing it a lot longer than I thought I would, actually. I got to a point in FV where I’d just log in once in the morning and once again at night, harvest stuff, visit neighbors, see what folks were up to. Some people arranged their homesteads so that they just had mass herds of animals that they’d tend to; otherwise made gigantic farms; some folks just tried to make their homestead a pleasant looking place. There clearly could be a lot of creativity in the way the farms were laid out, and Zynga holds frequent contests to find the most innovative designs. ...

“Facebook Games” as a genre have gotten a bad rep from core gamers, and it’s not hard to see why. Take any Flash game, figure out how to add a cash shop to it and add in plenty of spam for those unfortunate enough to be your friends, et voila, you have now contributed to the glut of hundreds or perhaps thousands of time-hungry games clamoring for your clicks. ...