Townsmen 6 ($1.25 Amazon), by HandyGames, is this week's Free Friday App from Barnes & Noble.App DescriptionGet the free App from Barnes & Noble.
Townsmen 6 is a challenging building and strategy game that takes you to eighteenth-century France where you can play your part in the French Revolution. Aristocratic oppression, massive class inequalities, and beheadings by the thousands frame the scene…but before you can conquer the crown, you have a few things to do back in town.
Reign of Work
You'll need soldiers to defeat government corruption, and soldiers need a place to live. Sound simple? It means constructing buildings, catching fish, harvesting fields, fetching water, gathering various natural resources to establish a solid economic cycle and expand your influence, and a few other things. How will you get it all done? Wake up those sleeping Townies, of course, and put them to work.
Mobilize Your Townies
For Townies and Townettes, the division of labor is traditional; it is the eighteenth century, after all. Townies work hard to provide an economic structure and gather power to fight the king while Townettes devote their attention to the general welfare by getting water from the well and gathering food.
While the Townies and Townettes are on hand for employment, they also need a constant supply of food and water, which means more work. To make matters worse, as your town becomes more stable, the Townies get more picky and demanding about their eats. Townies do work for a healthy economy and the more satisfied they are, the faster they can gather and produce. So it's a good idea to keep them employed, well fed, and happy since you need them to be strong for your campaign against the king.
To see how many Townies and Townettes live in your town, click the Town Info screen. Townies will also help you out by displaying various icons above their heads: snoring zzz's if unemployed, fish or other resources they have gained, and a smiley if they're happy.
Build Your Town
After your Townies have collected and produced the necessary materials, you can start building. Whiz-kid Townies can perform university research to help with upgrading buildings and improving functionality. As you complete phases and sub-phases of research, you unlock new building opportunities.
Meanwhile, keep a lookout for surprise events. At any moment you might face a lack of housing, extreme weather conditions, or a merchant visiting the town for some friendly trading. Merchants stay only for a few days, so you'll want well-stocked supplies when they visit. If you don't, you can always put up a marketplace to trade without a merchant.
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Life-and-Death Battles, and Other Stuff
Think you're prepared to take on the crown? Start by finding the best way to knock at the gates of Paris and call for the king's head. If your mission succeeds, you'll win action points that can be spent after each level for troop movements, bonus resource changes, and more.
Train your soldiers at military buildings and gather propagandists at coffee houses. Assign soldiers and propagandists to besiege and conquer neutral or royal buildings. But beware the king's wrath: Royal troops will defend their buildings and even attack your institutions, leading to life-and-death battles.
Leave it to Fate
In the Overview Map Mode, you'll toss the coin of fate to see which advantages and disadvantages await you. Depending on how the coin lands, you'll either gain some bonus gold or your opponent gains an additional soldier in an occupied or neutral zone. After the coin toss, you can explore all the different map levels including royal, occupied with hostile soldiers, your own zones, and territories that can be conquered. When you solve a mission, you earn action points that you can spend on distributing soldiers throughout the map, a new fate coin toss, or changing a selected bonus resource.
Join the Revolution
Play Townsmen 6 and enjoy stunning graphics, upbeat music, entertaining sound effects, a map generator that offers infinite replay value, and the option to save your progress and resume play at any time. You can also set various factors such as use of rivers and coasts and the aggressiveness of your war enemy. An extensive tutorial and help functions are also included and Poopsy the pig provides helpful hints along the way. You know your revolutionary spirit wants to join the fray so why wait. The Revolution needs you.
