Farm Town or FarmVille

Periodically, I have Facebook friends that tell me they received a gift or an invitation to play Farm Town or FarmVille.  They want to know if these games are any fun and whether they’re worth playing or not.   My answer is yes, they’re worth playing.

If you’re wondering what Farm Town or FarmVille are, you can visit the “Farm Addicts” website. I think this site does a pretty good job of describing both of these Facebook applications.

My experience

I have been playing Farm Town longer than FarmVille, mostly because I got the invitation to Farm Town first.  I have my opinions on which one is better, but I’ll present you with some of my observations to help you with that choice.  I have written a few blogs on Farm Town.  If you’d like to read these, do a search for “Farm Town” in the upper right hand corner of this blog.

Music:

• Farm Town, my preference is to disable it. It’s not cheerful enough for me.
• FarmVille, my preference is to enable it.  It’s a fun & happy little country feel tune.

Networking opportunities:

• Farm Town,  active networking real-time face to face conversations, you’re interacting and cooperating with others
• FarmVille,  passive networking using signs, you’re mostly playing by yourself

Clicks to accomplish farming tasks:

* = only 2 clicks if the farmer is already on your farm.  For instance, if a farmer is already helping you to harvest, you can hire them to plow for you with 2 clicks.

FarmVille machinery

FarmVille does have machinery that makes farming easier.  The machinery increases your productivity 4x.  Which means, you don’t necessarily need to have other people working your farm.  The only catch is it takes time to get to the unlock level for the machinery, plus the expense of purchasing and operating the machinery.  You have to purchase fuel for the machinery.  I think there’s a lesson in there for everybody.

• Tractor   available after level 12 + 30,000 coins
• Harvester available after level 13 + 30,000 coins
• Seeder    available after level 14 + 30,000 coins
• Fuel Refill = 3 FarmVille bucks

Other notes:

• Farm Town, will not let you harvest if you have plowing or planting queued up
• FarmVille, queues up all actions, so you can do this scenario
  • Queue up fields to harvest
  • Queue up fields to plow that have been harvested
  • Queue up fields to plant that have been plowed

So there you have it in a nutshell.  Two farming games on Facebook.  Each have their own kind of fun.  One is kind of isolated fun without interacting with other farmers and the other encourages networking and cooperation.  My advice is to try them both out.  The worst thing that can happen is the person who invites you to be a neighbor will get some points towards their next farm expansion.

Happy farming!