Zynga today announced their newest wild west-themed game entitled FrontierVille, where players tame the wilderness, grow a family, and build a thriving frontier town. The debut of FrontierVille follows their recently launched Treasure Isle that quickly became the fastest growing Facebook application of all time with 25 million daily active users. The game follows the ‘ville’ theme of games and is part of Zynga’s recently aggressive strategy to expand their markets. They’ve recently announced FarmVille for iPhone, partnerships with Yahoo and DeNA in Japan and are accelerating the release of new games. This is likely in response to their recent loss of traffic.



FrontierVille is now available and Zynga describes it below:

FrontierVille brings a western theme to the Zynga family and leads a new generation of social games by introducing new features including multiple avatars on a single screen under one player’s control. For the first time, Zynga is introducing virtual families allowing players to customize a spouse and raise a virtual family. Additionally, FrontierVille, the first game from the Zynga East studios, is a “living world,” where players contend with wildlife encounters, varying weather, and vegetation growth.

“FrontierVille gives users creative new ways to connect with people around the world while bringing out the pioneering spirit in all of us,” said Brian Reynolds, Zynga’s chief game designer who led the development of FrontierVille. “FrontierVille is Oregon Trail meets Little House on the Prairie meets FarmVille.”

The game begins by giving you a wagon and some land, and players are responsible for taming the wilderness and exploring the land around your plot. Some of the key feature are: Family: Raise your own fantasy frontier family. Customize your make-believe spouse, and watch your little kiddies grow up. You can always change your own pioneer avatar, and you can move all the members of your family around for work and adventures.

Crops: After you’ve cleared enough land, it’s time to plant some crops and trees. Buy seeds and trees in the marketplace. Be careful to not let your crops wither as they become worthless, but don’t worry, your neighbors can always revive your crops if they wither. Harvested crops yield extra coin, food, and experience points.

Varmints: The wilderness is filled with dangerous vermin. Snakes, groundhogs, and bears lurk behind trees, rocks, and tall grass. You’ll have to attack or chase these varmints off your homestead.

Neighbors: Add friends as your neighbors to help you chop trees and build your log cabin. You can also hire your neighbors to get work done quickly.

Reputation: Being a good neighbor to your fellow pioneers earns you hearts. As you gain more hearts, or points, your reputation level increases. A good reputation makes you more useful to friends to hire you.