Ravenwood Fair

The other day I applied for a position at Lolapps, which is a social network game company. In an effort to get to know the company and their games more, I started to play one of their facebook games, called "Ravenwood Fair". To tell you the truth I really liked the image that they had up on the Lolapps main site for the game, which is why I decided to try it out. Anything with floating islands only accessible by airship is awesome, in opinion.
Ravenwood Fair is about you living on this floating island that is covered by a dark (haunted) forest and you want to turn the land into a fair. So you cut down trees to make space for your fair and the more stuff you have the more people show up (by airship) to give you money (and experience) to enjoy your fair. These same people will also occasionally give you quests to complete, which is cool. Later you get a mole who shows up and helps you build a mine on the island as well, and you can go down there and mine to your hearts content. You can build mining machines which will bring in more moles to work the mine. These moles operate the same way as the visitors of the fair and you will gain experience and rocks (which you need like wood to build stuff in the mine). However, the mines and the forest are not safe so occasionally you will need to beat down the monsters that live there. Which gives you all kinds of fun experience points and other goodies. I think the best part about it is that you beat them up with a shovel. Anyway, to help protect your visitors and miners you place protectors in your fair/mine. These will comfort the visitor/miner when they are scared and attack monsters. Each protector is different and each has its own area of effect and its own amount of time that they can operate before needing recharged (which is you dancing for them).

I never play facebook games, I think they are addictive and that you end up spending a lot of time on them when you could be working on other stuff. So i try to stay away from them; the same goes for MMORPGs. So I tried the game for 3 days and I have to say that the game play is fun and enjoyable. It is a game that you could jump on to at least 3 times a day and play without ever having to go out of your way to buy anything with real cash. However, The two things I did notice is that 1) if you don't have other people you know who also play- it makes it difficult to build things because of a lack of certain resources, and 2) as far as i could tell there was no way of knowing what all the requirements for any one building/game/etc were before you started to build it (these requirements are ones needed besides cash and wood). You get almost done and be at the last step when you would be told that you needed 3 (or more) different resources other than wood and that you didn't have enough of it yet. Which hey, whatever, I'll just go looking for it, right? Well not all resources are equal. The resources that you get all the time are things like wood, money, and food. Easy to get. Other resources are a bit more hard to get - some maybe even a little to hard to get if you 1) don't have neighbors (friend who are playing) or 2) don't want to spend real money to buy it. I imagine you could just wait it out, but that will slow the game down a bit. However, I imagine most facebook games are setup like this, since they are 1) social network games and 2) free, so the companies who make them need to make money some how. So with all that in mind it is a worth while game to play and the Art work is great! Try it out if your the type to play Facebook games.