Plant Tycoon
© 2007 Last Day of Work
Your job is to run your own exotic plant business, starting with a few hundred dollars, a handful of seeds, water, dirt and some magical growing potion that can compress a few week's growth into a few minutes of time. Each plant has its own meter indicating its health, age, and approximate price. The goal is to grow and sell as many plants as possible, in order to increase the amount of money in the bank. Doing so requires planting the seeds, watering the earth, monitoring the plants' health, and watching for signs of dehydration and infestations. In addition, some plants need to be pruned in order to increase their value. A store is available, where virtual customers come in and purchase plants. It is possible to set any price on any plant, which makes things interesting. Unfortunately from an educational perspective, while this simulation looks somewhat realistic, nearly all of the seed and plant information is fictional. This is too bad; this type of game would be a wonderful way to learn more about plants if it were based on the real world. The game features more than 500 species of plants, and your goal is to find the genetic puzzle in the seed required to discover the six magic plants of the island of Isola. The game has three time modes; the slowest being real time, making this game a bit of a screen saver. We ran it on Windows Vista with no problems. We did not test the Mac OSX version.
$20, Windows, Mac OSX
Teaches: science, business, economics, plants
CTR Rating: 78%