Castle Age

Castle Age is a Flash-based game available through Facebook, set in a high fantasy universe. The player is a monarch who returns to their war-torn kingdom, and begins a quest to recover various crystals scattered throughout the Lands of Fire, Earth, Mist and Water, as well as the realm of Demons, Undead, the Underworld and Heaven, with a bonus level in Atlantis.

It's basically Mafia Wars, but Recycled in fantasy novels.


 * Allegedly Free Game: Favor Points. A major cause of They Changed It, Now It Sucks for certain players, who perceive the game as having shifted dramatically towards favouring those who buy large quantities of them.
 * An Axe to Grind: A number of axes are available, including a magical one.
 * BFS: A few are available to players. Zarevok's Meat Cleaver - meat in this case being that of 50 ton monstrosities from Hell - comes to mind.
 * Big Bad: Mephistopheles was eventually confirmed as such, though his initial boss form was considerably weaker than some that followed. A much harder encounter later followed.
 * Bonus Boss: Lots of them; Bahamut, Alpha Bahamut, Ragnarok the Ice Elemental, Genesis the Earth Elemental, all the dragons, all the sea serpents and that's not even scratching the surface. In fact, since to progress through the quests you only have to do the one that involves the boss (which is not the actual battle itself) every boss is optional in a sense.
 * Boss Banter: Depends on the boss, some bosses cannot speak. But those that do, can range from taunting or threatening the players, or giving funny comments.
 * Boss Battle: One per Land/Realm
 * Darker and Edgier: the Heart of Darkness sidegame.
 * Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Azriel and Mephistopheles are pretty much fights against God and Satan. You can fight some of the demigods later.
 * Drop the Hammer: Players can also use hammers
 * Evil Is Sexy: Some of the bosses, such as Sylvana, Keira, and Lotus.
 * Fighter, Mage, Thief: The starting choice among four heroes: one Fighter, one Thief or two Mages.
 * Fireballs: Players have access to magic, including variations on the basic Fireball
 * Foreshadowing: The developers like to do this. For the first few chest sets, the epic generals foreshadowed their appearance in the story (Azriel being a notable example). Paying close attention to the story lore also gives a few more hints about what's to come.
 * Heel Face Turn: Four of the six demi-gods have been bosses of late, though it seems that you are pulling this trope against Ambrosia.
 * Heroic Fantasy
 * High Fantasy
 * Keep the Reward
 * Luck-Based Mission: The random encounters based on your Elite Guard when you do quests. If you have lots of people in your Guard, you win and get extra quest progression and/or a unit/item. If you lose, you get less quest progression and no reward.
 * Money for Nothing: Even more so than Mafia Wars, it won't take long to start raking in ridiculous amounts of Gold. This is because of the Land system, by which you buy properties which give you a fixed income every hour. Unlike Mafia Wars, you don't need to collect it, so it doesn't matter how long you're offline for - the second you sign in again, you'll receive it all, even if it's tens of billions.
 * Our Dragons Are Different: They come in four varieties, which from weakest to strongest are Emerald, Frost, Gold and Ancient Red. As they were the first monsters released, they're the only ones who aren't known to be sentient.
 * Our Dwarves Are All the Same
 * Pyrrhic Victory: Every recent monster released ends like this, with the vast majority of the player's army, including sometimes the player himself, dying at the end.
 * Randomly Drops
 * Random Encounter
 * Recycled in Space: Mafia Wars
 * Required Party Member: Certain heroes are needed for completing quests.
 * Royals Who Actually Do Something: You. Some Heroes and Bosses serve this as well.
 * Scrappy Mechanic: Elite Guard members only stay with you for 24 hours, meaning every day starts with trying to fill it for the serious players. There have been repeated calls for this to be extended to, say, five days instead.
 * Shout-Out: Many, to fantasy games of all kinds, from Baldur's Gate (Zarevok is very clearly named for Sarevok) to Final Fantasy (Bahamut much more closely resembles the creature from that game than the mythical entity).
 * Stripperific: The female heroes.
 * Sssssnaketalk: Bahamut
 * They Changed It, Now It Sucks: The game started out with no monsters, so PVP was the only thing to do besides questing. With more and more monsters being introduced, the game now favours players who spent their time fighting them. Needless to say, people who joined the game early who built their characters around PVP stats aren't happy.
 * Our Dragons Are Different: They come in four varieties, being, weakest to strongest, Emerald, Frost, Gold and Ancient Red. As they were the first monsters to be introduced, they are the only ones besides serpents which are not known to be sentient.
 * Vendor Trash: Lots of it, though the Goblin Emporium actually gives it a purpose - players can trade ten items towards a random better one. This includes the really rare loot drops like the Death Touch Gauntlets and Keira pieces (though it's no quicker to get these that way) and certain exclusive elite items like Celesta's Devotion (best weapon in the game after the no-longer-obtainable Zarevok's Meat Cleaver as of August 2010). That said, there's still many items that have little to no value that can't be used in the Emporium - unless you get Kobo as a general, his special ability being to allow you to use more kinds of items in his shop (and to use fewer of them for the same results).