My Tribe For Facebook

Grubby Games’ My Tribe has just been turned into a Facebook social game. I played the original My Tribe about a year ago (yeah, I know, I love desert island survival games). The goal in the new Facebook game, like in the original, is to build a flourishing island tribe, and to solve the mysterious objects on your island.

Island Paradise or the ever-popular FarmVille, require you to have friends help you. FarmVille, and other successful social games, turn guanxi into a game, creating a virtual exchange of mooncakes. In Island Paradise, the “quests” are all necessary items you can’t have unless you ask your social network for clickthrough help until you succeed. Or your friends unfriend you. Either way.

In My Tribe, you can play without help from any Facebook friends. You’ll progress faster with extra shells and stork feathers from friends, of course, and My Tribe is not all that subtle about suggesting you ask more friends to play too.  I’d love to see seed and recipe exchange in future upgrades, that would really make the social side worthwhile.  But you won’t hit a level cap if you don’t want to harass your friends into playing.

Anyway, I wrote up the solutions to the original MyTribe’s mysteries over on Thumb Gods, because the “hints” that your tribespeople give can be pretty annoying (Hmm! I bet this rusty-colored rock could sure be useful!). So, if you’re playing My Tribe, and you want to solve the mysteries on your own, stop reading here. Yes, here. This is your spoiler alert.

That cool tiki head looks ever better after you complete it. Whenever your tribe has a new baby (depending on your number of stork feathers, and therefore, on your number of friends, this might take some time), bring the baby over to play with the stone statue. This is a bit counter-intuitive because whenever players attempt to solve another mystery with children, babies or teens, a message appears that only adults can solve mysteries. Anyway, each baby plants a special new flower in one of the pots around the Easter Island face, and once the pots are all blooming, the tiki face is surrounded by a ring of flowers, and becomes a strength power-up for babies and children.

For the fountain, you’ll need a tribe member who is over 65 years old, with level 20 in science. You can just wait for a tribesmember to age — oh, wait, you’re reading the cheats for MyTribe, you probably don’t want to wait. You can use stardust on a child to increase their age by a few years. Don’t worry about aging your poor tribespeople, because once unlocked, this becomes a fountain of youth!
The red rock was an annoying puzzle to solve, because it was clear to me early on that it was iron, and my tribespeople’s silly hints about a rusty red color got annoying. You’ll need a tribesperson with a 15 or higher in both science and construction. Just like in the original MyTribe, solving this mystery will give you a bonus in work that involves tools.

To move the tree stump, you’ll need a tribe member with a physical strength of 70 or above to lift it. You can increase their strength with gems, becoming a tribal elder, or breeding. After you’ve done this, you’ll get an Ever Tree. I’m not entirely sure what this special tree does, though… Do you?

The fossil rock requires a tribesperson with level 15 in both rock gathering and science. Figuring out the fossil will give you a huge bonus in science point. It will also cause great tribal unrest, as some of your tribespeople will come up with theories of dinosaurs and evolution, while others insist that there was no life on the island before them and the fossil is just a trick put there to test their faith.

Solving the star rock is exactly the same as in the old version. Have a tribesperson who’s had an experience with stardust examine the rock, and they’ll have the brilliant idea to use stardust on the star rock. (And no, you can’t skip straight to the stardust-in-the-rock stage.) It’ll take either 3 or 4 stardusts, depending on how fast you move, and after you’ve unlocked it, it will attract more stardust to land on the island. The moon rock is exactly the same thing, but with moondust.

There’s also a sickly, leafless bush with a pink heart in the branches. I don’t know what to call it, but your tribe member with level 15 in both science and agriculture can probably tell you a good Latin name for it. I’ll call it Deciduous Roseus Cordius.  Have your skilled tribesperson examine the tree when it’s raining to solve the mystery and unlock new berry seeds. (I got Beanberry, Bossberry, Bumbleberry, Chuckberry, Niftberry, Polerberry, Riddleberry, Sketchberry, Smokeberry and Thistleberry from my new Cornucopia Bush. What did you get?)

Did I leave anything out? Let me know any other hints or tricks you’ve found.

Edit: Just added the solution to the new mysteries, Flotsam’s Call and the Jewel Vault.

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Colorado Or Bust

I have post-conference deflation. After a couple days filled with fascinating presentations and impromptu discussions on the nature of play and creativity, on using games to solve problems and change the world, it was deflating to be back at the restaurant. The food’s nice and my coworkers are nice, but there’s also a Sisyphean frustration in answering the same questions over and over, whether it’s a customer asking if this comes with bread (Pro tip: Read the menu.) or a prep cook asking if this comes with bread (Pro tip: When you asked last time, I said yes. When you asked the time before that, I said yes. And the time before the time before. Also, read the menu.)

But it doesn’t matter, because tomorrow we’re leaving for Denver! To see our much-missed friends, Hugo and Diana! We used to live across the parking lot from each other in Amherst, but the last time we saw them was when they came out to visit us in Beijing:

trident grappling
Diana and I recreate the heroic battle of Heracles and Apollo. (Oh, classicist humor!)
dragon battle
I’m not entirely sure what Hugo and Stick were doing here, but I think it involves dragons.

And here’s a celebratory dance in a Dunkin’ Donuts on our trip to the Met:

You can't see me doing the dance here because I'm taking the picture. But rest assured that I was also dancing.

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Impressive

I made it to the first day of the Triangle Game Conference this morning with a minimum of fuss and confusion, and picked up my very first media pass! It’s so awesome, I’m thinking I might start wearing it everywhere.

Chinese school:  I’m press, ok, kids? That’s practically the living embodiment of the AP Style Guide, so if I say there’s no hyphen there, then there’s no hyphen there!

The restaurant: You think all I do is recite the lunch specials and refill water glasses?  Just look at my press pass! I’m talented! Um… would you like to hear our lunch specials?

Around the house: Sorry, I can’t possibly do any laundry, I’m composing deathless prose over here.

Kind of disappointed that I missed the era of PRESS cards in hatbands.

The first rule of conferences, according to the ever-awesome Amanda d’Adesky,  is to write down the level and section where you parked your car. The second  is not to keep drinking more and more coffee because you find smalltalk easier when you have something to do with your hands. (I figured that second one out all by myself.)

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By Any Other Name

I have a great class at Chinese school this year. Some of it is just luck. I’ve been incredibly fortunate this year not to have a single parent corner me before or after class to tell me how I should completely restructure the class to best accommodate their precious snowflake’s unique learning style. I also don’t have a Charlie Gordon in the group, and I know both of these factors are just good luck.

But some of it is MY EXTREME AWESOMENESS, that is, my teaching experience has manifested in an ability to anticipate school disasters, and not let a last-minute room reassignment or a broken photocopier become a cause of panic.

This is a class of anxious honors students, who aren’t entirely sure what happens if you get a B but it probably involves hellfire and damnation. I remember being challenged by the uniquely Chinese classroom mix of students who’d memorized the dictionary definitions word-perfectly, and the students who wouldn’t tell me the time in case they got it wrong.

But now? I’m conducting an English-class orchestra, nudging each part of the class along until they reach the conclusion they wouldn’t have accepted from me.

Last week I gave the kids Frost’s The Road Not Taken. I did want them to reach the conclusion that Frost was onto something, and to think seriously about personal priorities and when to follow the herd, but I knew that the kids who answered that right off were just spitting out what they thought I thought they should think.

Like so many Chinese things, the direct path doesn’t get there. (I should admit that I found the copied groupthink responses on independence and personal priorities very amusing.) When I chose the reading, I figured that at least a few students would have done it in another English class and they would want to know whyyyyy they have do this poem that’s so boooooooooring. (And they say English isn’t a tonal language!) Also, poems are haaaard.

I asked them to respond, and asked why they thought they had to read this poem so many times. One of my students announced that the only reason we read this poem is because it’s by Robert Frost, and he’s considered such a great poet. (I docked myself two points, I’d expected his seatmate to be the one raising this objection.) And that he wants to choose his own path by NOT liking the poet that everyone else does!

I copied “Education doesn’t change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher plane of regard.” from my index card onto the board. I asked then to respond to this quote, too. There was a discussion that involved some kids trying to guess if I wanted them to agree with it because I’d written it, or disagree because it seemed anti-school, and there was also a faint popping noise as a few heads exploded.

As if by an occult hand, one of my students announced he’d much rather read what this guy has to say than read the old yellow woods poem.

Then I asked my students to whip out their usually-forbidden phones and have a race to find the source of my quote. Robert Frost.

Finale.

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Prizewinning

Once when I was a little girl, my dad told me about working at a paper — I think it was the Sun? I’m not entirely sure — and waiting for the news of the Pulitzer Prize. The story, at least to little Meg, focused on nervously waiting for the results and then the celebration of  getting the news.

I won’t tell you how old I was when I figured out that Pullet’s Surprise and the Pulitzer Prize were the same thing.

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Passionfruit Hutong

New development studio Passionfruit Games contacted me the other day about beta testing their new puzzle/adventure game Tiger Eye Curse Of The Riddle Box. Passionfruit is made up of many HER Interactive veterans — the team who worked on Nancy Drew Dossier: Lights, Camera, Curses! and NDD: Resorting To Danger.

TE: CotRB is based on the paranormal romance novel Tiger Eye by Marjorie M. Liu. Look, I’m not the world’s biggest fan of paranormal romance, despite the best efforts of a certain college roommate who really loves Laurel K. Hamilton, too (you know who you are), but two things drew me in to Tiger Eye anyway. First, the game should avoid a lot of the usual spinoff pitfalls by staying pretty faithful to the book. Liu wrote the game’s script, and everyone on the dev team read the novel.

And second, a lot of the story is set in Beijing! It’s not breaking my NDA to point out that Passionfruit uses real Chinese characters in the background in environments in China. I love seeing actual Mandarin in places where pretty red and gold squiggles would have been just fine.

Plus, one environment has my favorite hutong-and-skyscrapers composition:

Source: Passionfruitgames.com

I’m excited to help out with the beta, of course, and I’m really interested in seeing what Passionfruit does with a romantic premise. Romantic games and dating sims are pretty popular in Asia, but in the US, they’re hard to find and usually pretty second-rate games. It’s dangerous territory because poorly done romance can easily turn laughable or creepy. (Kind of like dating.)  But at the same time, a good game with an engaging, romantic storyline can really stand out between find-six-hearts HO games and save-the-world epics.

I’ll have more to share when the game comes out next month.

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Full of Win

My high-school students had the word fiasco on their vocab list today.  I asked if anyone already knew the meaning, and they defined it as epic fail.

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Shutter Island

Shutter Island credits

When I was back in New Jersey a few weeks ago, I mentioned to my parents that I’d helped a little bit with the spinoff game for Shutter Island. (I didn’t add that my particular brand of helping had a lot to do with asking the producer about a thousand times to please please warn me if was going to be gross. Sorry about that, Harold!) They seemed pleased, perhaps because I’ve worn them down by telling them over and over that I’ve written about a game they haven’t heard about in a publication they haven’t heard about. Besides,  if you can’t tell your parents about minor successes and have them be impressed, really, what are parents for?

“Does that mean you’re in the credits with Martin Scorsese?” my dad asked.

“I’m not entirely sure who that is.” (Every day with me is like an adventure in pop culture.)

“The director of The Godfather!” my dad said. “Perhaps you’ve heard of it?”

“I saw that!” I said, “It was kind of gross.”

Edit: My old roommate Chris just pointed out that Scorsese is not actually the director of The Godfather, which just proves that nobody reads the credits anyway.

PS: If you would like to play the game, you can download the free trial or buy the game here.

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Eufloria Reviewed

My Eufloria review is up on Bytten. Despite really enjoying Eufloria, this was a hard review to write. I loved the organic-art graphics so much, but as I read and reread my attempts at a review, I started to feel awkward about being a female reviewer squeeing over the pretty. I also loved the streamlined, elegantly basic RTS mechanics, but, again, I didn’t want to sound like the girl player who likes the simplified strategy game.

Not since I first discovered Civ2 has a game made me late for so many things. Eufloria offers two of the same addictive qualities as the Civilization series, both the empire-spreading and the need to play just a few more minutes until the next mini-milestone. Eufloria simplifies the unit selection and improvement add-ons of the real-time strategy genre, presenting mystical space lifeforms in a surprisingly vibrant universe. You play not as a general or political leader, but as a collection of seedlings, and your goal is to grow, and spread, take over neighboring asteroids, and make the growers proud.

Read the rest on Bytten.com

So, yes. I like a game with flowers. Deathray flowers.

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Orchid Insurance

Orchid I’ve never made it to the top of the Gardening skill track in the Sims, but I’m pretty sure that the top proficiency is “Meg’s Granny” skill level. At this proficiency level, you use a stick to stake an amaryllis, and the stick grows. True story.

Unfortunately, I didn’t exactly inherit that. I still love picking out plants, I love the heavy moist air in greenhouses, the smell of potting soil and mulch, and all the trays of pale-green seedlings. After careful consideration of all the potted flowers, I settled on an orchid, beautiful and delicate, with the added benefit that they crack me up, in a etymology kind of way.

“These are guaranteed easy orchids!” the checkout girl said. Picture someone who gives 115% effort, and who wears extra pieces of flair.

“Well, easy for some people.” I said.

“No, I mean, there’s a store guarantee. For a year! Just bring back the dead plant and the receipt!”

“Are you absolutely sure?  Hardy plants turn into withered brown stalks around me. I buy plants as a symbol of boundless optimism in the face of insurmountable odds.”

“For a replacement if we have another in stock, or a giftcard for the full value so you can buy a new flower!”

I have high hopes for my pretty new flower, but I also have the receipt in an envelope marked orchid insurance.

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