Turn the real world into a profitable empire with Cashsquare
Cashsquare is a free app requiring iOS 7.0 or later that turns the world around you into a game for starting your very own real estate empire. The game uses Facebook and Foursquare to retrieve locations around you to compete with other players to "buy," then build upon and earn income on when others check in. Think the Monopoly board game with tie-ins to the real world and social media.
Start Cashsquare by logging in with your Facebook or Foursquare account, then your handy tour guide of sorts will lead you through the first few steps of the game. Choose a nearby location to set as your headquarters which the game calls the "heart of your empire."
You start off with $150,000. You use this to "purchase" properties around you like residences, banks, businesses as well as empty land. The other form of in-game currency is gold nuggets, and the game grants you with 250 of these to boot as well.
My first purchase was an apartment complex down the road from me. I got a bit too excited because this property alone cost me about $220,000, which was more than the $150,000 I had. Luckily, if you don't have enough money, Cashsquare lets you put some of your gold nuggets toward the purchase. It's worth noting that this was on the high end of the pricing scale - most of the properties nearby cost anywhere from $50,000 to $75,000 so you don't blow all of your money on the first purchase.
After buying the property, the guide instructs you to hire an employee that will work and earn you income. Each property has its own card for monitoring income and expenses. When you put your employee to work, you earn income at the end of the shift. You also earn income when real people use Foursquare to check in to your owned property. However, every 24 hours you have to pay some expenses too, which take a bite out of your profits.
All of this, by the way, happens in real time. It's generally difficult to earn money quickly. The employee has working hours that translate into real minutes. For instance, at my apartment complex the shift is about 8 minutes and 30 seconds. You have to wait that amount of time to earn any income.
Oh, but there's always a costly catch with these types of games, isn't there? Yes, in Cashsquare you most certainly can earn money quickly! You just have to be willing to spend some. At the bottom left, tapping "Advertise" speeds up the work process, but it costs gold nuggets. If you run out of gold nuggets, you have to either tediously wait to earn more in very incremental amounts or buy more via in-app purchases.
The game is certainly interesting and unique enough in that it basically turns your actual surroundings into a game of Monopoly, but it suffers from a fatal flaw that most of the games within this genre also suffer from: if you want to get anywhere at a decent pace, you have to spend real money. To hire more employees, you need to have income, if you want income quickly, you need gold nuggets, if you want gold nuggets, you need to open your wallet and spend up to $100. Seriously. The same applies elsewhere in the game, even for purchasing more properties because when you run out of land, you have to acquire more using gold nuggets.
If you don't mind the type of game that either requires you to spend money or check every few hours or days to see any progress, Cashsquare might be for you. The design is decent and gameplay is generally easy. Unfortunately, it seems people often lose their interest after a few weeks with these types of games because it becomes too difficult to move forward for free. Perhaps you're better off spending your time and money on something of greater value.
