Fans of Monopoly (either the board game or app) will probably like TechPad Productions’ iNetMania, its first game for the iPhone and iPod touch. iNetmania is based on TechPad’s ServerMania board game.

Think of it as Monopoly for dot.com moguls. The object of iNetmania is to build the most successful Web site, defined by the amount of traffic your site receives. As in real life, traffic translates into cash and the person with the most cash wins.

Up to four people — flesh and blood or computer-generated kind — can play.

You begin iNetmania as a start-up with $50K and 4,000 visitors. Roll the die using the accelerometer to move around the board. Your strategy and game play are dictated the squares you land on.

For example, when you’re within six spaces of a Marketing square, you can opt to spend $50,000 for a marketing fee to hold on to your number of visitors or forego paying the fee. If you pay the fee and land on the square you double your visitor count. If you decide not to pay and you land on the square, you’ll lose half your visitor count. Either way, it’s a gamble, just as it is in real life.

The cash from marketing fees and other penalties goes into a CEO Bonus pile. Land on the right square and you get the cash.

You want to avoid Slumps, which kill traffic, and land on Spikes, which boost traffic. The more traffic you get, the more money you’ll make, and cash, like with real Web sites, is what matters at the end of the day.

iNetmania has great graphics, with a pan, tilt and zoom modes. It’s one of the few games that I’ve seen that really captures the feel of playing a real board game, at least in the visual sense. The concept is essentially a reworking of Monopoly and there’s at least as much luck as strategy to iNetmania , which makes it less fun and challenging than the well-known board game.

Still, iNetmania is very well done and if you like board games, this one is hard to beat.

My only quibble is that iNetmania has a “limited-time offer” of $2.99. It’s a strategy that many devs are increasingly relying on. The fact that there’s no mention of when the special is over, is just playing games.

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category: Board Games, Editor's Picks