social

Thunderstone is the second most popular deck-building game after Dominion. Many people like one and not the other. If you like elegant Euro-style, streamed-lined game mechanics, you would prefer Dominion. If you enjoy more depth and a stronger American RPG style narrative, Thunderstone is your game.

You can test and refine your strategy with the Campaign mode of the Thunderstone Facebook app or with the upcoming iOS app.

I have a sort of love/hate relationship with Dragons of Atlantis. It's the first Facebook game I've played for more than a month, and the first I've really been tempted to spend money on (though I've resisted). And there are things about the design that I really admire, but also things I hate. I've even fantasized about going to work for Kabam, to teach them some basic truths about wargame design that they apparently lack.

It's a Travian-style game, but with better graphics, and, at least for me, a more interesting backdrop. You start with a single city, and build buildings that produce resources -- good, stone, wood, and metal -- that you use to build more buildings and troops -- as well as other buildings that improve your tech or increase your troop production capabilities. The basic algorithm is a triangular/doubling one; each upgrade of a building increases its production as a triangular number, but building time for the structure doubles. (Google triangular number if you don't know what I'm talking about here.) This is minimalist, interesting design, and a fundamentally sound approach.

Hero Generations is an indie social game that's an RPG of a sort. The graphics are SNES-ish, and you control a 'hero' who moves about the world, fighting monsters and having encounters to increase their "fame," which is your score. The world is an 8x8 grid, and each time you move one square you "age a year." The HUD reports how many years of life you have remaining, though each time you lose a battle you love 5 years of life (unless you have a shield).

The objective, really, is to maximize your fame in your limited lifespan; your high score is reported on a leaderboard at game load and compared to the high scores of your friends. I considerably outrank Frank Lantz, ahem.

Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of Neverwinter (HON) for Facebook is an adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) 4th edition rules in the Forgotten Realms setting, centering around the Neverwinter city-state. Liquid Entertainment simplified the D&D paper RPG by limiting details and choices and hiding dice rolls. There are numerous races and classes in the D&D paper RPG but in HON, you can create one character from a permutation of four races: Human, Eldrin (elf), Dragonborne, Halfling (hobbit) and four classic classes: Rogue, Fighter, Cleric and Wizard.

I ordered an organic mattress from the US for my daughter, paid half the price in customs fees, and the thing doesn't fit the crib. I went to the hardware store to buy wood planks to fill in the gap, realized by volume what the cost would be of just filling everything in, and had an idea. This flash of engineering brilliance probably game from playing a lot of the wagon repair game in the FB version of Oregon Trail.

You're Hempie, an animated pot leaf whose chiefest ambition is apparently to become a leading supplier of high-grade maryjane to the nation. Or so Hemp Tycoon would have you believe; actually, this is a highly conventional Zynga-style "tycoon lite" game, like Farmville and its ilk. You plant shit, it grows, you harvest it, this gives you resources to plant more shit. Plus you can place lawn gnomes and the like that have modest effects on nearby plants.

Thankfully, there's no need to spam your friends for piece of chocolate or leaves or whatever crappy idea they've come up with to induce you to spend actual bucks on tedious bullshit, because the game is genuinely free to play on Adult Swim, with no Facebook credits or internal currency involved.

What's astonishing is that you'd think the lack of social network virality, and the lack of an actual business model, might have a deleterious effect on the game's popularity; au contraire, Hemp Tycoon is Adult Swim's most successful game, with 9 million plus plays.

And sure, it's by This is Pop (who have done many excellent games), so as usual the implementation is smooth and intelligently thought through; but it's still remarkable that this game style, repetitive grind and slowly progressing though it is, still works without the fruity surrounding indicia we see on Facebook.

And, of course, the fact that you're growing reefer is mildly transgressive, and a good reason you'll never see this on the FB; but still, kinda dull, if worth a look because of its design implications.

So you're probably thinking "another Facebook game on 'Play This Thing!'?" with nested quotes and punctuation neatly laid out, because that's how you think - nested. However, here are some things you may not know that makes this particular FB game touchingly indie:

- it's made by the designers of Train and uh... this game you may have heard of: DOOM.

- its parent company is currently being taken the woodshed with hardcore mafia-style, Hostel 2-level grotesque punishment by Facebook. They've disabled all the distribution/retargeting channels on all the company's apps for six months, except this game, which is only suspended until Wednesday. The company is technically not owned by anyone, except its owners and maybe some VCs, but this kind of singling out gives it a shred of indie dignity, maybe?

- it makes numerous, canny references to the Millenial Fair in Chrono Trigger.

You take all the stuff that Brian Reynolds made work in Frontville but tweaked out, collections for example play like a slot machine reward every time you click a tree. You get one click every two minutes and you need some special items that pop-up to complete buildings. This alone will drive a significant percentage of the audience to pay less than a dollar into the game, just some extra Facebook credits and why not, but I think they'll be tapping into a higher monetization rate for that. They also have a more balanced economy, with the battle between nature and your energy bar brokered by Protectors which cost wood - in Frontville there was always a surplus of wood, here the snake gorges on its tail.

But wait! It doesn't sell out the level curve and adjust it so you get a Ding! at frequent, clean intervals, it instead has a meaty level curve, where each new Ding! marks new things to do, and where getting to level 20 puts you on par with Drizzt Do'Urden - albeit a Teddy Bear version.

There are monsters to fight, and gothic stuff mixed with Winnie The Pooh meets Redwall character designs.

My biggest criticism is they over-saturation of newsfeeds. Until recently, the way you promulgated a Facebook game and got people to re-engage was through prompting newsfeeds. Every conceivable thing you could post about is solicited for a feed, because maybe you'll click on one of those options, and it will shotgun some "virality" to people who browse your page. Well, Facebook nerfed the newsfeed, now only people who are already playing can see it - personally I think it's the best goddamned thing to ever happen to the platform. If they adapt this game to having just a few key feeds that relate to some actual social gameplay, a dimension where the title is currently weak, that would do wonders for the experience and probably the longer-term business.

My biggest praise is that this game has, more than any other title I've seen on the platform, pop-up book potential for new features to recombinantly deepenify it. I wish Brenda and John the courage, nay, the bravado - ok, that's just a synonym - to take this game in bold directions that challenge the conventional mass-market logics chaining the rest of the industry.

But I have a feeling the company politics surrounding the only revenue-generating property in the portfolio might complicate that. If that's the case: Brenda Brathwaite, John Romero, I am hiring.

Finally a Facebook game that makes you feel like you're on Kongregate! See those blood splatters in the header pic? That's monster blood, the result of killing via explosives and projectile launches. See that array of buildings? That's a non-decorative arrangement I used to express myself, with concerns for both architecture style and radius coverage of my peremeter, which has been optimized - optimized! - to cluster AI paths into areas of maximum overlap. In this game I was allowed to make decisions which affected my success relative to everyone else in a matter that was challenging. Surely italics are better than quotation marks for placing "sardonic" emphasis?

Finally a Facebook game that makes you feel like you're on Kongregate! See those blood splatters in the header pic? That's monster blood, the result of killing via explosives and projectile launches. See that array? That's a non-decorative arrangement I expressed myself through, with concerns for both architecture style and radius coverage of my peremeter, which has been optimize - optimized! - to cluster AI paths into areas of maximum overlap. In this game I was allowed to make decisions which affected my success relative to everyone else in a matter that was challenging. Surely italics are better than quotation marks for placing "sardonic" emphasis?

Yes, the folks at Casual Collective, makers of really neat multiple experiences like Buggle and featuring the maker of Kongregate breakout-hit Desktop Tower Defense, have applied their hybrid of depth and accessibility to that "space" where traditional designers have feared to tread but where angels tread quite freely (the investor variety): The Facebook. Now you can open that book of faces and proceed to start breaking said faces by spawing groups of home-brewed monsters at the door-step of other folks' tower defense arrays. If you succeed in overwhelming you can raid resources in order to grow your tower-defended base even faster. They take the chestnut of setting a timer and coming back for a reward and granulate it to a wide spectrum of time ranges, upgrade this building for 20 minutes, this one over two hours, research this monster for a day, harvest some putty in an hour and a half of the collector will be too full to continue - somehow this juggling act, in contrast to the optimal appointment that games like Farmville or Cafe World offer, appeals to the epic-compulsive drive of the active competitor or manager-type gamer. However according to their chart, people burn out on that and the resulting ratio of daily to monthly players is lower than you'd expect from a demanding strategy game.

The PvP is pretty fun as you raid someone multiple times and they start hitting back, so you reflexively get into these petty rivalries with folks you've never met - would like to see more with my actual friends, structured local leaderboards, short-term races to a goal milestone, alliances and wars and tournaments. But maybe they can roll that stuff out, at 200k DAU they're pulling prolly like 5k a day so they're probably holding onto positive operating-margins with this thing and you're going to see some new stuff roll out over time.

As far as the early game goes, I admire their boldness in not folding to the mainstays of Facebook game design. The interface is kind of a mess from a "casual" (or is that casual) point of view, but they just trust you to deal with it. Most notably, the focal mechanic of the game, attacking other players, doesn't become accessible until after a few days of active play, they even give you 14 days explicitedly when you start up. This kind of commitment, as fickel as it may seem to those who have losts years to MMORPGS, is staggering for a social game.

But hey man, at least we have a game where you can post a newsfeed that isn't totally hokey, and maybe even inspire some badass admiration as you start unlocking that hardcore, high-level monster and warn your friends. I Like that.

I'm going to start this review off with a comic that I think sums up the male existential dilemma more succinctly than anything I've ever seen, and then link you to the author's explanation of the game. Then I'm going to say, hey! Don't read that stuff yet! Play the game first! Some fraction of you may have follow the links sequentially and are now feeling cheated. Hey, at least you aren't stuck in a dead-end relationship!