Travian is a popular in-browser asynchronous massively multiplayer game; you build a village in “Roman” times and set off to expand your empire, raid others and form alliances. It has many of the games 2.0 characteristics that I’ve been blogging about and has been growing nicely, as Alexa shows:

As a passive web game:

it’s persistent. it’s massively multiplayer. it’s competitive. it’s social. it’s portable. it’s passive.

passive web games are setup to permeate your life. they become habitual. they are inherently attractive to gamers with little time — whether that time is taken up with work or other games. they fit unobtrusively into the corners of your life, taking as much or as little time as you want to invest.

… it’s a game you’ve never heard of, but, it gets 225 million page views a day

Most game reviews are glowing, noting the appeal to both casual gamers and obsessive gamers. One review though notes that at heart this game is about negotiation and diplomacy:

Politics is the name of the game, as while there’s room for intelligence to make a difference in combat, in the end, if someone has enough troops (and the resources required to build them) they can crush anyone. So friends are important, or at least fellow wolves

The reviewer complains that the scale of the player base ultimately becomes a problem for a diplomacy based (ie social) game. With 20,000 or more players, it far exceeds Dunbar’s number.

I can’t help but think whether building such a social game on top of an existing social map might improve gameplay even further.