Travian

While on the band trip, I was introduced to a simple web browser game called Travian. While it's not the most action packed or graphically amazing game, it is fun and strategic...somewhat. You create your little village among thousands of other villages (all bigger than yours when you start). All those other villages are controlled by other players who are probably going to "farm" you, or use their army to steal your resources. Your only hope of defense is the week or so that you get as a novice protection period. After that, you're fair game to anyone who just sees you as an extension to their own resources.

The game has three parts in theory:
Beginning, where you create your village and start your game
Midgame, where you grow your city and start to branch off into other villages
Endgame, where you try and work with alliance members to try and defeat all other alliances and win the server with your "good word, how much free time do you have???" skills

Pros: It doesn't take that much time out of your day to play and it's not very hard. There are the most reasonable internet gamers on Travian that you will ever meet in your life. You can usually just ask someone to stop attacking you and they will. This completely caught me off guard (mercy on the internet...who would have thought?).

Cons: You will want to check your village (even if it takes 8 hours to build something) every second of your life. It doesn't matter that you didn't have enough resources to buy what you're saving for and won't for another 10 hours, you'll still look every 5 minutes.

My advice to all those who want to start playing, find yourself a nice alliance towards the end of your novice protection. You'll instantly have friends, protection, and mentors. Also, just look at the game a maximum of 4 times a day (morning, afternoon and before you go to bed are prime times). I promise that it truly isn't worth expecting an attack every 10 minutes. There are worse things than loosing 5 hours of inactively gained resources.

I'm on US server 4 for now, I might start with US server 2 when it restarts though.
Link to the United States servers

Rating: B