Inside Social Games

Armies by Frozenbear is a game that takes full advantage of the social networking context offered by Facebook. The game asks you to raise your armed forces from a trainee to a full fledged army. In order to get credits to upgrade your unit (more on this later) and purchase better units.

Players are offered a variety of options to accrue credits. The most obvious route is to get credits by going to war. You can compete against players with similar strengths in the World War tab (a smart move as this ensures the really strong players won’t bully the noobs). Or you can fight the Army Kid, a computer bot. After you click “fight,” the computer determines who wins based on your respective strength. Even if you have less overall strength, there is still a chance you can win so there is little incentive not to try. You can also challenge your friends.

By winning, you are given a certain number of credits that you can use to buy weapons upgrades (like knives, artillery pieces, and M-16s) or better units (like grunts, battalions, or fire squads). The big units cost thousands upon thousands of credits, so you either need to spend a lot of time fighting or use alternative means of procuring credits.

Inviting your friends (”drafting” them in the game’s language) helps, and the game does a good job of enticing you to invite your friends to build up your forces. But even without them, this game can be fun by simply challenging the bot, challenging random people in the World War, or playing the “Build Morale” mini-game which allows you to risk credits to gain credits - a pseudo-gambling feature.

The game also has several partnerships with other applications and outside companies. By giving their partners business, you get a lot of credits (some are worth a couple thousand). It’s a great business strategy - Frozenbear gets strong marks for pushing you to help further the game’s interests.

There is also a strong social component to the game. Aside from the friend invitations, there are a number of larger armies players can join (or you can start your own). People really get into their armies and try to take on opposing armies, so that opens up a group mentality and shared cause dynamic. You don’t need other people to enjoy the game, but having friends to challenge and join your ranks makes it a much richer experience.

On the gaming side, the lack of animation and strange slowdowns at points can be frustrating. None of the artwork to depict your armies is original, and the language is oddly colloquial, so it doesn’t maintain the “military” motif very well. The game is well developed, but still obviously very cheaply made. Hiring a staff artist to depict uniform pictures and inserting some flash animation for the battles wouldn’t take much time or resources these days.

The game also doesn’t require any skills - just time - which can be a deterrent for some gamers. And by time, I mean eons. Unless you plan on inviting everyone you know and taking a lot of the partner offers, getting the really big stuff is like trying to win a stuffed animal at a fair - it’s there for show but almost no one actually wins it.

Still, many people will be drawn to the social aspects and the openness of the experience. Even on a basic level, playing “soldier” is fun.

Developer’s Score: 9/10
Gameplay Score: 6/10
Days it will take you to amass credits to buy a bomber: 1,984

Three weeks ago, Mashable had the news that social game developer Bunchball has raised a $4 million Series B from Granite Ventures and Adobe Ventures on top of an earlier $10 $2 million A round.

Writing about the funding, Tenuki’s Bret Terrill said, “In many ways, Bunchball is much further down the path than either Zynga or SGN. Bunchball has an amazing product, a complete game platform and analytics suite, complete with avatars, currency, leaderboards, etc. Rather than focusing on attracting eyeballs with hopes to get acquired by EA, Bunchball has sold their services to large media brands like NBC.”

While Bunchball has yet to achieve the success that SGN and Zynga have in terms of growth or engagement on Facebook, the additional funding should give them the resources to make a significant go of it over the coming year.

Update: Bunchball CEO Rajat Paharia responds in comments below that the company is not planning on taking on SGN and Zynga directly on social networks, but is focusing on building its business around building game mechanics into websites.

Two weeks ago, Serious Business, Inc., makers of popular Facebook social game Friends For Sale, announced that it had raised a $4 million Series A venture round from Lightspeed Venture Partners at an undisclosed “healthy double-digit” valuation. The investment was disclosed by Lightspeed’s Jeremy Liew, who is becoming a board member, and Siqi Chen, co-founder of Serious Business, at last week’s Games 2.0 panel at Web 2.0 Expo.

Serious Business and Liew claim that their idea of baking virality into the game mechanic - instead of layering games on top of social networks and using them for distribution - is the special sauce that will allow them to build a business in social games.

Read the full interview with Serious Business co-founders Siqi Chen and Alex Le at Inside Facebook

Snowraft is a snowball fight action/strategy game by Matt Burton and Amir Amini. Employing adorable flash animation and an annoyingly catchy soundtrack, the game is simple: command your little army of red kids to throw snowballs at the blue kids. When you get hit with a snow ball, you freeze and can’t move. Too many hits and you’re dead. Last team standing wins.

In order to get bigger snowballs and better health, you need to invite your friends. Once it becomes obvious that you’re dead in this adolescent frozen arms race without proper armament, you decide to invite everyone you know.

Developers could learn a lot from this game because it incorporates simple flash animation, an easy-control system (click, drag, click), and an economy that is tied to perpetuating itself through invites.

Yet, this is also one of the more player-friendly games I’ve played. You don’t have to rely on your vast army of friend invites to move beyond stage one. The challenging AI makes it so the initial two stages are enticing enough to get players to want to keep playing. There’s a chance that players could quit before getting upgrades (and inviting friends), but it’s a worthy risk by the developers. If the game is any good (Snowraft is), players will invite their friends not only to keep playing it, but also because they want to share it. Once they’ve added the application, you can challenge your friends to earn more points and bragging rights.

While the gameplay isn’t difficult - you essentially move your characters as close to theirs as possible and then click repeatedly - it’s both fun and addictive enough to keep playing. There’s a certain element of strategy too in terms of how much you want to micromanage your team.

I found it really easy to keep dodging with one and then attacking the enemy while they reloaded. This often left my other two guys as sitting ducks, which meant the game was more strategy-intensive than I had initially thought. Still, even with the upgrades this game isn’t going to become an addiction that is going to get you fired at work and lead you to living a life in a box. So, it’s not the next Snood, but it is worth a chance for a couple hours.

It’s a solid little game that is simplistic in its formula but is unobtrusive in its requests to perpetuate. In other words, the game doesn’t sacrifice self-perpetuation for gameplay.

Developer’s Score: 7/10

Gameplay: 7/10

Odds soundtrack will get stuck in head: 8/10