Treasure Quest is sometimes described as a game portal rather than a social game, which isn’t too far off. In theory you start a “game” of Treasure Quest by creating an avatar. You can level up and unlock more outfits for your avatar, which you pay for with virtual currency you earn by playing particular games. The games are fairly typical single-player casual fare and form the meat of Treasure Quest‘s experience.
Treasure Quest is sometimes described as a game portal rather than a social game, which isn’t too far off. In theory you start a “game” of Treasure Quest by creating an avatar. You can level up and unlock more outfits for your avatar, which you pay for with virtual currency you earn by playing particular games. The games are fairly typical single-player casual fare and form the meat of Treasure Quest’s experience.
You can also spend virtual currency to unlock more game content. If you just want to play the games for free, then it’s exactly like hanging around a casual games portal. Treasure Quest is simply a bit on the small side by portal standards, for now, and conveniently accessible from Facebook. Right now there are eight games in Treasure Quest, with six “featured” games getting most of the attention. Most of them are good; a handful of them are masterful time-wasters.
Treasure Quest has two games designed to be played once a day, Daily Detective and Riddle O’ Day. Daily Detective is essentially a hidden object game where finding objects gives you clues, which you then use to answer a question and solve a mystery. Riddle O’ Day gives you a daily riddle that tends to be about wordplay and lets you hunt for hidden fairies. Unwell Mel and Fairway Solitaire are takes on very traditional casual games. Mel is a match-3 game with a medical theme, while Fairway Solitaire is an extremely clever solitaire variant with a golf theme and interesting power-ups.
L.O.B.E. and Plunder are more logic-based sorts of puzzle games. L.O.B.E. is a Brain Age-inspired affair where players solve tangrams and other spatial puzzles. Plunder involves trying to destroy mines such that you plunder enemy ships but navigate your own pirate ships through safely, with a wide variety of power-ups to make things more interesting. The two non-featured games are Thunderbolt 21, a solitaire variant of Blackjack that’s extremely addicting, and a dissatisfying single-player slot machine game called Snow Globe Slots.
Treasure Quest updates with two new daily quests every day, essentially challenges asking you to achieve a certain goal in two of the mini-games. Some are easier than others, but they tend to be a good motivator to check in and play once a day. The downside is that the quests really aren’t balanced and can be exponentially more difficult if you attempt them later in a given game.
The easy way around this is to just stop playing immediately after finishing a given day’s Quests, which doesn’t really seem to be the in the spirit of Treasure Quest. The game isn’t very social, either, as you can post achievements to your Facebook feed but have no real reason to do so. You can spend money on avatar clothes, but it seems smarter to hold on to your virtual gold for unlocking more levels in games. While Treasure Quest is a good collection of mini-games, it’s just not a very social game yet.
