Buy and sell foursquare venues with web-based game Fourocity

A few weeks ago, we wrote about a Monopoly-like game called Foursquaropoly. It turned out to be one of our most popular posts ever. Since then the students working to bring it to life have rebranded it as Metropoli (to avoid the obvious legal challenges) and launched a Kickstarter project to get it funded, but the project is currently less than 20% funded.

Meanwhile, a team of developers built a similarly themed app during the most recent Foursquare Hackathon called Fourocity. It’s a simple game, but it’s picked up a surprising number of fans.

With Fourocity, you pick venues anywhere in the world and “buy” them using your initial $50,000. For each person who checks in there on foursquare — whether they play fourocity or not — you earn $1,000. You can then use that money to buy ever more popular venues. Venues are “appraised” by Fourocity based on their popularity to determine their initial selling price.

Unfortunately, joining Fourocity now is a lot like playing Monopoly where the board owner automatically gets Boardwalk and Park Place (each with a hotel) before the game even begins. Many of the most popular venues — NFL stadiums, Disney World theme parks, train stations, airports — are already purchased by the game’s earliest adopters… and they have zero incentive to ever sell them (even if an option to sell were available, which it’s not).

The game is structured in such a way that the early adopters will only continue to amass money that lets them buy more venues — and, thus, amass more money. With no access to the most popular venues, there’s literally no way for latecomers to catch up to the leaders. That, sadly, takes most of the fun out of the game before you even begin.

Hopefully the game’s creators will be able to transform the game into more than a paradise for early-adopting collectors. I’ll be checking back regularly, because the concept here is pretty intriguing.

Have you tried Fourocity? What do you think?