HaHa!! Take that you fiends!!
Oh wait? what am I talking about? My latest little fun obsession online. Evony is one of the bazillion little addictive online games in the world today. If your not sure what it is, I’ll give a brief explanation. Evony is a Real time strategy game. The mechanics of the game follow real world time, so when it says it takes 1 hour to upgrade a building it will take one hour (unless you have items, but we will get to that in a few). You start out as just a guy in a random plot of land. They give you a small town hall and a whole lot of space and in a very omnipotent way say “Go forth! Be a king and rule over this land! And don’t forget to make friends in the process.”
Being a browser based game, the mechanics are simple. You get your land, and you get to build in 2 areas, your city, and your town. Your town is your direct structures within your walls. Things like your cottages to house your people, your barracks for training an army, your marketplace for trading resources, etc etc. Then you have your city, which is like the meat and potatoes of your land, literally. Out here you can build Farms for food, Sawmills for wood, Quarry’s for stone, and Ironmines for, you guessed it, iron.
All of these give you a set amount per hour, in which you then use them to upgrade your basics resource facilities (like your farm) to higher levels for more per hour resources, or you use them in your town to build and upgrade the buildings and walls within.
I began playing about 5 days ago on a whim, and let me tell you, this game is addictive. You get 7 days from when you setup your account wherein you have Beginner Protection, and no one can attack you, but then after that, your out int he wild, like everyone else, fending for yourself and hoping your city can take a beating, because oh yes, it will come. One of the greatest aspects of the game, so far from a beginners standpoint, is their Quest List. What this does is when you create an account, it gives you a list of “Quests” they think you should complete. As you complete the quests you get rewards (usually a nice amount of resources) and the theory is, by the time your done with the quests they have given you, you should be about 7 days into the game and have a good enough starting point that you’re not just going to be swallowed up immediately, although it can happen. What’s a good way for it to not happen? Join an alliance! There are plenty of alliances in Evony, and don;t just join the first one who asks your or the one that spams the small world chat the most, do a bit of research, see if they have a website and some established goals, and go from there. On my server (65) i joined up with a great group of guys and they have been super helpful in the small nuances of the game i am slowly coming to understand.
So far this game has a great balance between you as the overall king needing to manage time and resources, but also gives you the ability to send out 5 or 6 or more armies at a time to run around and crush your foes in a smiting manner. The gameplay is very simplistic, but in it’s simplicity is the fact of why it is s o much fun. This is a browser game that even the uninitiated can sink their teeth into and have just as good a chance as anyone else.
As always there are little quirks with this game that i personally would wish would change. For instance, it is not unheard of for buildings to take 20 minutes to upgrade. Now while this is a browser game and accessible for anywhere, not everyone has the ability to check in with that level of frequency. What i would like to see is a queuing system. Allow each player to queue their next two buildings up, so they don;t have to constantly check in, and make that queue expandable to say, 5 or 6, with time or research in your academy. In all honesty, that is my biggest gripe about the game, there are small User Interface things that can be annoying or seem like they were put in without much thought, but overall, the game is quite phenomenal. You can tell that the development phase up to this point has really listened to the community for input and ideas and really took them to heart, which can only speak well for the future of this game.
All in all, if your bored, and would like something to try, at the price-tag of free, you really can’t beat this game. You will be addicted, i can almost guarantee it, and if you want to fight me, just find me, I’m always up for a little armies at noon showdown 
So go and join Server 65, look for Garaxiel, and good luck, i think i have a few more buildings to go upgrade now