There’s no massive surplus of casino-themed sims on Facebook yet, though there’s certainly plenty of Texas Hold ‘Em games. This helps My Casino feel fresh even though, under the charming graphics and casino games, it’s pretty typical of Facebook business-buidling sims. In My Casino you can run your own casino, investing your funds earned into more elaborate decorations that let you customize your business.
There’s no massive surplus of casino-themed sims on Facebook yet, though there’s certainly plenty of Texas Hold ‘Em games. This helps My Casino feel fresh even though, under the charming graphics and casino games, it’s pretty typical of Facebook business-buidling sims. In My Casino you can run your own casino, investing your funds earned into more elaborate decorations that let you customize your business.
When you begin My Casino, a tutorial character called Sandi walks you through the basic process of buying casino games and setting them up in your own casino. At the game’s very beginnings you can buy a limited number of slots machines and dealer’s tables for card games like paigow, blackjack, and three-card poker. As you level up, you can start adding more elaborate slots cabinets, Texas hold ’em tables, and roulette. Games attract customers to your business, who spend money that you collect as earnings. You can upgrade your tables and cabinets to earn more money from them.
There’s only a handful ways to spend money in My Casino. You can invest it in functional upgrades for your casino, like more slots cabinets or card game tables. You can spend it on decorations for your casino, which have no practical effect but are actually a lot of fun to mess with. The game has launched with tons of decoration options, more the amount that I’d expect to see from a mature game like Cafe World than a game that’s just launched. There’s well over a hundred different kinds of tile you can put down and just as many wallpapers, random bits of furniture, and other fun stuff.
You can also spend your My Casino income in your friends’ casinos, playing whatever games they’ve set up in their own establishments. This is a great idea that adds a better social dimension to the game than you usually see in just-launched titles. You can’t play paigow or Texas hold ’em yet, but you can play Blackjack, Roulette, and Slots. The balance for these games is a little odd, with Roulette invariably acting as a money pit while slots and blackjack are much easier to dominate than their real-life counterparts.
There are no significant flaws in My Casino beyond the sorts of problems you usually get out of games that are trying to offer very sophisticated graphics. While the milling customer-avatars and all of the great little decorations you can buy in the game are great, the app itself eats up a lot of memory and runs poorly in the likes of Firefox and Safari. Even Chrome chokes a little on it from time to time, and Chrome usually runs Flash-based apps like a champ.
Issues like that are the sort of thing that will improve over time, though, and the rest of My Casino is extremely promising. While there’s no shortage of business sims and tycoon games on Facebook, My Casino implements the formula well and does a good job of elaborating on the casino theme.
