Floating Kingdoms (M3, bubble-shooter, cooking, SIM, Mahjong, etc)

Floating Kingdoms

Available:
PC and Mac at Big Fish




Welcome to the world of Floating Kingdoms ™!
Serve the King as the newest member of the Royal Architect society.
Plan your village and gather resources to build a grand palace on each
of the various floating islands of the kingdom. Gather resources by
playing a wide variety of fun mini-games. Gold, water, stone, flour and
more will all be required to build your villages and construct the
palaces.

• Unique art styles
  
• Variety of fun mini-games
  
• Trade with the flying merchants!
  

Click images to enlarge

Floating Kingdoms

I'm actually surprised that I've never heard of this before! It reminds me of a combination between Royal Envoy and Settlement: Colossus, among others.

You are hired on as an assistant to help manage a series of floating islands, your goal being to build a palace on each.

You have to have enough wood, so at the sawmill, you collect wood by doing a mahjong game.

Workers need to eat, so you can upgrade their homes to a farm, where you pack crates with food by doing a Shapeshifter-esque mini-game.

A more efficient way to feed your workers is to have a tavern, where you make pizza (kind of a mixture of easy-TM and easy-Hidden Object). However, you will need flour to make the pizza, so you will need a:

Windmill! Here is a variation of the Shapeshifter-esque game, where you are adding different grains to the millstone by shape, which turns the stone to make it a little less easy.

Oh, no! The farms need water! Build a water mill and do a bubble-popper-type game to fill the canals with much-needed water.

We need stone to build a palace, so you may need a rock quarry. Here you play a brick-breaker game. This is a bit different than the norm - when you break the giant rocks, you need to catch as much as you can with your paddle. This can be really confusing, as the big rocks explode when you hit them, but not to worry! Your ball is safe, back on your paddle while you catch what you can :D

Alas! We need money to pay people with, so build a gold mine. Here you will do a match-3-type game, only you slide the boxes to match. Make matches of 3 or more, but they don't have to be in a straight line - "L"-shape works, too! This was the hardest of the bunch, for me, for the gold is all in the same color, but different shapes.

You can bop around doing different tasks as you please, and there's a trader that will come and sell/trade with you. There are also roving pirates, so watch out!

I think that the game is really geared more towards kids, as the strategy involved is nearly nil. Still, I finished 3 palaces in my demo time, enjoyed it, bought it, and played it through.