Haven’t found your passion in life? How about have a go at building your empire at Travian, a web based MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game), where you build your village, and then through upgrading your resources output and attacking other villages, you get to upgrade your village into a City and slowly into an empire that controls the Travian world. Unlike many MMOG, the web based Travian is a relatively slow game, where upgrading resources, or researches could take up to hours to complete. The same goes to attacking villages that are far away too.

This makes the game perfect for busy people or for those who do not want to spend too much time on games. One could option to be active, and stay with the online PC all day long, waiting for the resources to be completed or play on other worlds within Travian, or just log in at interval times, and do all the necessary upgrades or attacks, and leave it till you get the chance to log in again.

The objective is to built the biggest empire and alliance, and this wins you bragging rights. There is no cash nor any kind of award, just the satisfaction of winning the game. The game is free to play, however, if you want additional features, such as faster resources production or attacking advantage, one could option to purchase gold’s coins called Travian Plus that can be used for those purposes.

The game have a total of 6 servers and each have it’s own uniqueness. For example, Server 3 is a speed server, and so everything in Server 3 works faster, so if you are the person who spend all day online, you might want to have a go on the game at server 3. The game comes in 17 languages, and some of the languages have only one server.

Me and May Lin spent a couple of weekends playing the game. It is like playing our life away. Building, attacking, got raided, buid more, etc.. This occupies the whole of our weekend. Of course we were at the server 3, where everything just works at superb speed. The game is very much like life, we build up to a level, and before you go to the next level, suddenly you lost all your army to another stronger player, and start to build the army from scratch again. We practically wasted some good times on Travian, and I do advice not to start on this game. Once you start, you can’t stop.

On this day..

• I have to work - 2008