Lemonade Stand

I've been playing Mafia Wars lately, a click based browser game on Facebook. I like it, it has potential, and in terms of ways to waste five minutes at work it's ideal.

But it's far from perfect. Mafia Wars allows you to have a "Mafia" made up of all your Facebook friends who also play Mafia Wars. While this seems good in theory it has created an environment where groups have formed for the express purpose of getting 501 "friends" who all play Mafia Wars. This seriously unbalances the game and reduces the "fun" factor. This also leads to "farming" where a well equipped player will attack a smaller player over and over, winning each time, and decimating the other player.

So, I'm going to make my own game.

I'm thinking the old lemonade stand type game, with a twist.

I want to use the old click based interface, and the incremental gain of money and "energy" in line with Mafia Wars. However, your "block" in the game will be a 10x10 section of suburbia. Ten players per block. You can expand your lemonade empire into other sections of the neighborhood, build new stands, and sabotage other stands. However, unlike Mafia wars if you have a "bad apple" on your block you can vote, or buy, him/her off the block. This will provide a way to get abusive players gone, and hopefully mean I'll make a little side money.

Once players reach a certain size they can "graduate" to tougher blocks. This will keep the game interesting and mean that bigger players can't farm lower level starting players. I'm also looking to implement this so that groups of friends can be on the same block together.

I'm going to develop the idea bit farther and see what comes of it.