Totally Addicted to the Cityville Hometown App Game for the iPhone

I told myself I'd never play Farmville. I never made the same promise about Cityville Hometown, but only because I didn't know it existed, until recently, that is.

I spend many nights awake with insomnia and I'm always looking for quiet things to do in bed so I don't disturb my sleeping husband. I'm also a sucker for fun games on the iPhone. I found a free game for my iPhone called Hospital Story-- also fun and free. Hospital Story is a time management game like Cake Mania or Diner Dash but in this case you're taking care of many patients as fast as you can. Much like Cityville, Farmville, and other games, Hospital Story is free but there's a small catch. You can only go so far. In order to upgrade some of my items in Hospital Story, I needed tokens. The tokens can be purchased for real life money or you can earn free ones just by watching short videos that advertise other free games. You get even more coins if you actually download and run one of the free games they advertise. One of those happened to be CityVille, and the rest is history.

I told myself I'd run it long enough to get my free coins for Hospital Story and then probably delete it. Addiction set in after about 5 minutes! I had been making fun of my friends for playing Farmville for years! I didn't know what I was missing. I LOVE simulation games like Simcity or the Sims, and this was right up my alley.

You start out with a small patch of land and the game progresses through a series of goals you must accomplish. For example, your help is needed for the school bake sale, so you need to grow and harvest the wheat, visit a certain number of houses, and collect money from the school (if you haven't built a school by this point, then you can add building a school to that list). I have a fun time building businesses and naming them after real-life businesses or fake ones from pop culture. I built a bicycle store and named it "Copenhagen Wheels" after Andy Botwin's bike invention in the TV series "Weeds." Similarly, you can also (re)name the people who live in your town after famous U.S Presidents or perhaps your real-life friends. The latter might be a little creepy. :)

Now what about those catches? Oh yes. Well each turn uses up energy, and you only have so much to use. One energy bolt takes about 5 minutes to accumulate, so I usually deplete my energy in one sitting doing various tasks and then come back to it later when it is refilled. You can also use real-life money to buy energy (as well as items that are otherwise not available to you) or you can ask your real-life friends to send you energy or items (as long as they play too). I'm sure you've seen the Facebook posts! You can also get energy for visiting your friends' towns.

Cityville Hometown is a cute game and I can finally understand why it has such a huge following. I play it on my iPhone, but you can also play it on Facebook as a browser-based game. Visit www.cityville.com for more info. Cityville is made by Zynga. I play Cityville daily and consider it one of my top 10 gaming apps for iPhone. I also enjoyed the Halloween update for Cityville. You can read about it here: Visit CityVille Hometown as it gets a Haunted House Halloween Makeover!