Gaming with the Girlfriend Part 6: Farmville with the Fianceé

As you might have guessed from the title, there have been a number of changes in the Beanz household since your last insight into our gaming lives. The most significant of these would be the fact that I have gone across to the dark side - I've been playing Farmville. What do you mean the proposal was a bigger deal? Admit it; you're not here for the romance, you're only after the hijinx!

It's not a decision that was entirely fueled by my own free will; this, as a twist on previous form, was primarily at the behest of my significant other. Having spent some time dabbling with Farmville and other Facebook games in the past, Miss Beanz found herself drawn back to her agricultural ways. Her farm was still in good shape, give or take a few weeds here and there, and many of her old friends were still active. Zynga - masters of originality - had something new to take her fancy; clothed in a new "3D" engine, with a fresh lick of paint, was the imaginatively named Farmville 2.

As is the norm for the current crop of "social" games, the key to making any decent progress relies on having friends on hand to click the inevitable avalanche of links that'll soon be filling up your Facebook feed; that or have a bulging wallet capable of paying to skip the objectives. A new farm is all well and good, but very few of her friends were playing the updated version, she was having trouble completing a number of the tasks that required assistance; this was where I was ultimately going to come in handy.

It started innocently enough - I clicked her links and sent her the occasional free item in game - but then I thought: how hard can it be? Could I catch up with her and even overtake? And so it was that I began a farm of my own. Crops were planted and animals fed; all was right in the world (or as right as they can be when you're playing a micro-transaction laden Facebook game).

It wasn't until I started doing the various tasks the game set to give you something to aim for that I noticed something amiss. If a task needed me to collect six planks of wood from friends, it would already register me as having five of them. And it wasn't just on the one task either; having used those "five" wood on one task, I would then apparently have seven of the required eight on the next one. Had I broken Farmville? Had I unlocked a special starter bonus? Or had I uncovered a secret easy mode as a result of only adding one friend in Farmville? The last theory could be tested by adding someone else as a friend, but by that stage I was in too deep to possibly risk giving up this advantage.

Whilst this was going on, Miss Beanz was continuing to be frustrated by friends not responding to requests in a timely manner, allowing me to close the gap in terms of experience and farm wealth; new structures would be built within a day or two on my farm, whilst it took a week or more of repeatedly unfulfilled requests for my other half to accumulate enough resources and friend assistance to complete hers. She began to grow suspicious about the fact that I was completing tasks she hadn't even encountered yet and the lack of requests being sent in her direction. My secret had been discovered!

We continued to play, complete with the requisite levels of bickering about how the other had an advantage; she complained about my reduced task requirements and the fact that I was at my computer more, allowing me to better time my crop rotations to better effect. Conversely I pointed out her vast superiority in terms of animals - new animals are bought (or occasionally earned) as babies, requiring a number of baby bottles until they become adults and start producing milk/eggs/etc. Unless you're prepared to put down cold hard cash to purchase some bottles, you're stuck with requesting one a day from friends; logic would suggest you could convert some of the milk obtained from existing cows into bottle format, but who needs logic when you've got a cash shop?!

With her large friend base to request bottles from, Miss Beanz's menagerie noticeably exceeded my own. The joke was on her though - more animals requires more space to be set aside on the farm (ok, so it isn't necessary to pen the livestock in, but that's OCD for you!), along with needing more precious crops to be converted to food.

I eventually hung up my farm gloves just before Christmas after growing weary following a long succession of timed, themed tasks (including Harvest Festival, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc.), whilst Miss Beanz continued for a little while longer, intermittently begging me to login and click through a backlog of requests. Thankfully, she was finally distracted by a shiny new Kindle that she received for Christmas, and hasn't looked back since.

Something inside me still wonders if I should secretly block some of Zynga's key servers in case it tempts her back again...