Lately, I have been running my own restaurant on Facebook. Café World is another game by Zynga. You are the chef. Your friends/neighbors can be your waiters. As you advance in the game, you will be able to add stoves, service counters and preparing more recipes.

Organizing your room (kitchen and tables) is part of your success as the game determined the maximum resources (number of waiters, stoves and counters) that you can have. You can expand your restaurant at will, if you accumulated enough coins.

You can play at Café World the way you like but here are things that you should know:

• Quicker to make recipe spoils more quickly. (1) Plus, look at the clock and your agenda before deciding what to cook. You do not wish to wake up at 3 am to serve the cheesecake that took 12 hours before being ready to serve.
• Customers that were served in a timely fashion will add .1 to your buzz factor. Customers who cannot be served due to lack of available seats (3) or that are not served fast enough will reduce your buzz factor by .1
• The buzz factor (thumb up) determines how many customers you will get. Keeping a window (from your browser) opens with the game playing speeds up the buzz factor. But make you have enough food on the counters because you will lose pretty quickly your advantage when the food ran out. (2)
• You can close your restaurant to not run out of food while you are not in front of your computer. I close mine at night. Simply remove the door(s), that is put the door back in your inventory.
• One server can serve 8 tables easily. Better to have more tables than risk that waiting customers leave unhappy.
• Each table is for one person. No need to put two chairs. (4)
• Visit your neighbors every day to earn extra cash and leave them a tip

Give me versatile decor elements

Unfortunately Café World is weak on the decor options. A part of the fun is to infuse your own style into your restaurant. There are many choices but nothing that will enable to create a restaurant style that you can brag about. For that reason, I will probably get bored of Café World quicker than usual. If I can not decorate my space to my satisfaction with the extra coins I accumulated, what is the point?

Why can game developers are too cheap (no excuse here, since Zynga makes lots of money) to hire a  with interior design consultant to help them create amazing and versatile decor elements. Zynga assumes that you will go for a kit; so boring and passé! Clearly, the video game industry did not evolve on that topic since the first video games in 1980s. Maybe, we need more girls as lead game developers to change that.

+ Café World by Zynga on Facebook

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Farm Town is a fun social game where you design and manage a farm. It takes advantage of the social element of Facebook. Having neighbors helps you make more money and gain experience more quickly.

How to Make Money and Build Experience on Farm Town

Visit your neighbor’s farms daily to rake or water their farm. Doing this simple task delivers 6 points of experience and between 10 and 20 coins. Farm Town rewards collaboration between neighbors. You can send free gifts (trees or animals) to your friends.

When you hire a friend or a hand to harvest your mature crops, they earn a small wage and you will be able to sell your crops at the market for more (more than if you harvest it and store it). You can also hire hands at the market to harvest your crops. Being hired as a temporary farmer enables you to make more money. For that reason, there is never a shortage of hands at the market.

Facebook games are meant to be quick sessions compared to video games where you can play for hours in a row. Playing 5 to 10 minutes one or twice a day is enough at first. As you increase your growing area, the game will demand more of your time. When you feel short in space, stop by the real estate office and buy more land to expand your farm. You can also spend time redesigning your farm or chatting with other players.

You gain experience by planting your farm. Initially, plant seeds that take 1 day to mature. I am partial to strawberries and potatoes. Grapes are ready in 4 hours. If you do not wish to play daily, grow longer maturing seeds. My favorite seeds are: tomatoes and rice maturing in 2 days, coffee and onions growing in 3 days, and pumpkins ready in 4 days). You can coordinate everything to play once every 2 or 3 days if you like. In any events, we could meet at the farmer’s market or cheer with water at the Inn (still not operational), since they are still waiting for their liquor permit.

JUNE 9th, 2009 1:45 AM ET – IMPORTANT MESSAGE:  To all Farm Town players, the maker are working on bringing back the game as soon as possible. Read my complete status here.
I also slightly edited my review of the game to share more tricks that I learned while playing.

September 28th, 2009 Update: This blog is NOT produced by the maker of Farm Town, and I do NOT work for Farm Town. Therefore, it is not the right place to ask about support. To contact the maker of Farm Town, use their Facebook application page.

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The game play is simple. You make points by catching any insects except the bees. The bees will kill you. You jump to catch and eat the bug. You cannot catch more than one insect per jump.

The interface is easy to maneuver. Gently hit the screen to trigger a jump. Move your iPhone horizontally in the desired directions to direct your frog in the air and on the ground.

A lovable element of the game are the frog expressions. If it failed to catch an insect, it looks disappointed. The frog smiles after eating an insect. The frog shouts in pain when it gets stunned by a bee. I often shout with it.

Lima Sky has already created 26 iPhone applications. Crazy Frog is a fun and addictive game. At 99 cents, it is money well spent.

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