Travian review

What do you get if you cross "Age of Empires" with a Tamagotchi? A game not unlike Travian probably. Travian is a brower-based strategy game, which you can play for free, or get in a luxury version with added tools for a very modest fee. But unlike other games which hold your attention intensively for a short period of time, Travian belongs to a category of games you could call passive web gaming. It only needs your attention for a minute or two, but that once or twice per day, for a period of weeks or months.

In Travian, you are the chieftain of a small village in Roman times, with a choice of playing a Roman, a Gaul, or a Teuton. You control the village and a fixed number of spaces around the village. The spaces are used to gather resources: wood, clay, iron, and crops. With these resources you can either increase your resource production, or you can build buildings in the village. Just like in Age of Empires or similar RTS games, there is a building tree, containing both peaceful buildings like granaries, and buildings like barracks which allow you to build troops. Once you have troops, you can raid other villages and steal their resources, waging war against the thousands of other players on the same server.

Technically you could call Travian a real-time strategy MMO. Only that the "real time" is very, very slow. When you start any action, like increasing your resource production, it will tell you not only how many resources that action needs, but also how many minutes it will take. And during that time you can't build anything else, although you can do other game actions like sending messages to your neighbors. Then you build the next thing, and the next, and soon you will run out of resources. Looking on your map you will get an information of how many resources you gather *per hour*, and then you quickly realize that it will take a couple of hours before you have enough resources to continue.

That is where the "passive gaming" part comes into play. Most of the time Travian plays by itself. Once or several times per day you just log on, check what has happened, and use the accumulated resources to build the next thing. Now if you ever played play-by-mail games you will be familiar with that concept, and actually think of Travian as being fast. But in comparison with normal RTS games, Travian of course is extremely slow. Playing Travian is a bit like checking your e-mail, you do it regularly, but it only takes short bursts of activity.

A game of Travian takes a very long time. Your goal is to become big and powerful, maybe form an alliance with other players, and control a huge empire of many villages. The game ends when one alliance builds a level 100 Wonder of the World, but the average player will not "win" the game, just like you can't win WoW. Neither can you lose, your last village can't be taken away from you, and you will always have some minimal production. In your first 7 days in the game you can't be attacked at all, and during that time you can build a cranny, a place where you can store resources that other players can't steal from you, no matter how big the army is they raid you with.

Travian has over 100.000 registered players, with a few thousand online at any given time. Which isn't half bad for a game with simple non-animated 2D graphics. Although it doesn't take much of your time, it is strangely addictive. Check it out, it's free!