I’m not a gamer, but I play one on the iPhone.

I’ve never had owned a games console, never owned Nintendo, Wii, or anything. It isn’t that I didn’t want to play games, it’s just that I wasn’t very good at them once they evolved from the early 2d adventures to massive 3d shoot ‘em ups. But ever since I’ve had an iPhone and downloading games is quick and easy and cheap, I’ve been playing simple games on it. Mostly the object hunting kind. (Most of them made by a company called Big Fish). I’m no accomplished gamer, so I like ‘em easy.

Last week a friend asked me to join her and her friends on ‘Pet Society‘, a Tamagoshi-type game on Facebook. I didn’t want to, because I don’t like the noise of game-spam in my timeline, but she was very insistent. It would help her along in the game, even if I didn’t do anything. So I joined and before I knew it, I’d spent most of the day and night taking care of my – and other people’s – pets.

Then I was checking out other games on Facebook, like Tiki Farm, Social City and Farmville. I know, I’m late to the party. Farmville’s alright (the constant prompts to share things on your timeline are very annoying), but Facebook is so buggy, the game play experience isn’t the best… I wondered if there was an iPhone app for it. There isn’t. Too bad.

Last night my friend Walter asked around on Facebook if anybody was on ‘We Rule’, he said it was ‘Farmville for the iPhone’. So while I was cooking dinner, I downloaded it, joined the Plus network (which enables social play), made Walter my neighbour and found a former work associate on it too.

We Rule is set in medieval times – you start out with a plot of land and a castle. Then it’s up to you to build farms and grow crops, build cottages, businesses… and so on. Growing crops and raising buildings costs time (corn takes 45 seconds, strawberries and hour and a half, beans a full day), but you can speed things up with with ‘mojo’. You collect mojo in the course of the game, or you can buy more from the We Rule shop.

Once you level up you can order goods and services from your neighbours. At the moment I’m mining for Walter and my other friend is sewing dresses for me. The cool thing is that once you reach level 4, you can redesign your plot to your heart’s desire. Move around your farms and cottages, etc. This has bothered me in Facebook games, you’re always stuck with the mistakes you make when you first set up your plot. We Rule gives you the tools to fix them.

Now the reason for my post is to make you my neighbour. I’m a benevolent ruler and I’ll be happy to mine for you too. You can find me in the game under my real name, and my username is ‘macushla’.

Download We Rule from iTunes. (It’s free)
We Rule homepage at NGMOCO.