The rules of My Farm

This game trumps Farmville, which bored me within fifteen minutes of starting my little plot of wilting digital radishes, probably because I’d played My Farm before. In My Farm, the world is at your disposal. You can only play on road trips through the countryside, which made it perfect for this vacation through Pennsylvania farmland. The game involves claiming actual elements of people’s farms and properties to plant/furnish your own farm. There’s no real winner, but it can get highly competitive. Here’s a sample scenario:

Ted: I call those cows for my farm!

Fred: Well, I call that cow barn for my farm.

Ted: I call that tractor for my farm.

Fred: I call that laborer driving the tractor for my farm.

Ted: You can’t do that.

Basically, when you play My Farm, anything goes. The goal is to have the most complete agriculturally and geographically diverse money-maker of a farm you can acquire on the same road trip. You can claim multiple vehicles, homes, animals, and shrubbery. You can claim bodies of water and whole forests. You can’t, however, claim the whole universe for your farm. And someone inevitably ruins the game by claiming “that farm for my farm.” So play the right way, people.

Yesterday, I could have claimed any number of natural splendors and oddities for my farm. Check out the pictures below of Boulder Field and the swimming lake at Hickory Run State Park.

A lake bed filled with boulders from the Ice Age

If I'd had appropriate footwear and a hand-carved hiking stick, I could have explored this field of sweltering hot rocks like the prepared people in this picture. Damn.

To think that I was walking barefoot among dozens of these guys like some kind of spider-whispering wood nymph, aka shoeless idiot

Ahh, lake water is so soothing to spider bites