• Control your villagers with a few keystrokes.keyboard image by Fyerne from Fotolia.com
  
  "Virtual Villagers" is the first in a series of island management simulation games. The objective is to tend to your growing civilization of islanders and help them advance through a sequence of stone-age technologies to a point of agricultural and social stability. Doing so requires a great deal of patience and forethought, and making poor decisions early in the game can lead to inextricable famine and unrest.
  
  

The Foundation: Food

• Although there are many things to do in "Virtual Villagers," most are optional. One thing your people absolutely can't do without, however, is food. They need to eat or they'll starve and die. Over time, the population can shrink to the point that there is nobody left to build homes and conduct research.
  
  So if you want to develop the other aspects of your virtual village, you must first have a stable food source. Initially, you'll be able to gather most the foodstuffs you need from bushes. Eventually, though, the island's natural bounty will deplete. This isn't obvious at first, but it's essential that in the first days you begin researching agriculture. Once you have the technolgy, assign your strongest worker to developing a farm. This will ensure a steady food supply and give your islanders something to grow from.
  
  

Patience

• "Virtual Villagers" is a slow-moving game. It takes hours for a baby to grow to adulthood and become a productive member of your society. For most of this time, there'll be very little for you to do aside from watch your villagers interacting with one another and their environment. Although you might be satisfied with this for a while, one of the best ways to enjoy the game is not as an active participant or even viewer, but instead to let it run in the background, evolving naturally as you tend to other tasks on your computer such as writing emails or even playing other games. Check in on them every hour or two to see how things have developed and whether or not they need guidance, and then minimize the window once more and let the game take its course. If you don't rush the game, there's less of a chance of overextending your resources and the whole virtual society spinning out of control.
  
  

Uncover Mysteries

• There are more than a dozen mystery "puzzles" in the game that will appear throughout your stay on the island. Solving these puzzles is one of the greatest challenges the game presents, and doing so effectively both advances the plot and gives you in-game rewards. To initiate these puzzles, your villagers must wander throughout the island and find the mysteries. Getting them to do so is challenging at first, as they will be hesitant to leave the beach where they started. As the civilization grows and they expand outwards, you'll find more and more of these mysteries revealing themselves. Once you've solved them all, you'll have "won" the game, though you'll be able to continue playing as long as you like.