Virtual Villagers

I've recently been tipped off about the game series Virtual Villagers while reading the Iron Man Mode site. The basic idea seems to be it's a 'god' sim where you direct the lives of a small village of cavemen. You teach them how to gather food, and build houses, and research stuff. People get old and die and you need to repopulate your village as time passes or go extinct. Random weird collections, puzzles to solve... Seems pretty interesting, right?

There's a twist added in. The game keeps playing while you're not playing. (Well, I imagine it just simulates time passing when you next log on.) So if you don't set your village up with a solid plan for survival you'll go away for the weekend and come back with everybody dead. I don't know just how long it takes for time to pass but I imagine if you don't have lots of babies you could come back with everyone just dead of natural causes!

The downside is when the game can easily handle 16 hour gaps it seems there isn't a lot of stuff to do in the game. I set up Spock in the research lab and Scotty to build things but if it's going to take them a day to do stuff... What is there for me to do? There are these little thingies that spawn randomly that I can send my children to collect but for the most part it seemed like I wanted to set some wheels in motion and then check back later.

One thing that is a little annoying is the tutorial made me get one of my female tribe members pregnant and now she spends all her time walking around taking care of a baby instead of building huts! I mean, I guess I need babies for the tribe to survive but I'm down to 3 functioning adults along with 2 mothers, 2 babies, and 2 children. The 3 year old girl (Janeway) found a cool robe which made her the chieftain of my tribe. Now instead of doing normal little child things like build a sandcastle she stands around and makes the adults better. Since she had nothing productive to do anyway that seemed great! Better her than one of my three functional adult males!