I am repeatedly asked by some of my readers why I don’t write about games.  Well, there are a couple of reasons why I choose not to.

First, I don’t have a lot of time for gaming.  Before kids I used to play a lot of games.  Now that my kids are grown, and on their own it seems that life has taken precedence over that excuse.  Next, I refuse to purchase the latest and greatest expensive game consoles.  Yes, you can also read into that making a living and paying bills.  The last PC game I purchased years ago was “Morrowind” which was and still is a very good game.  Finally, I have found that the large majority of free games are of poor quality – simple as that.

Now enter Josh, one of my friends and coworkers, who introduced me to “Evony” (evony.com).  This is an online game whose slogan is “Evony-Free forever” and the free part is just that, free which conquers one of my excuses.

You may have seen “Evony” advertised with scantily clad women as shown on the first page of the site.  I have to tell you that if you avoided it due to that there are no women displayed at all in the game; other than their sometimes, not so exquisite faces.  I figure that the developers use that moniker to attract the young game playing men who have the time to invest.

This very well designed game is an enjoyable way to use some of your online time.  Basically you start by building your own town in an extremely large ancient world.  Of course, in most games of this genre you have quests that you must perform to make your towns and your game lord more powerful.  These quests start with getting imaginary people to come to your town and dwell by building cottages they virtually inhabit.  You have to adjust your taxes (yes, like life) to make your towns attractive.  You must create farms, sawmills, quarries and iron mines to give your people jobs and then use the yielding food, lumber, stone and iron to build your towns.

It takes the previously mentioned building materials, in sometimes tremendous amounts, and time to build your little towns into major ones to be reckoned with.  And time it does take, from less than a minute to build your first level one cottage to slightly over an hour to build that same cottage to a level eight.  But there are plenty of other things to be working on in the intervening time.  You may also log off of the game and it continues to grow in real time.

You probably guessed it too but what other things do these ancient worlds hold in store for you?  There is the banding together as friends in alliances to thwart evil in the land.  As you play you will be scouted by other, sometimes not so friendly, players who want to take over your kingdom.  They may then attack your towns.  Sometimes you will wipe out the invading forces and other times…well, you know.

If you decide to become a member of this community look me up, Elyod (pretty original name huh?) in Upper Lorraine at http://39.evony.com.  Before you know it you can join an alliance like mine, (7Seas) and have your online friends give you tips and help you battle the evils of the age.

Tags: Double Click, internet, Ron Doyle

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 5:35 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.