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Has anyone else played Dragonvale (http://www.backflipstudios.com/games/dragonvale/)?

I did a search for it and turned up nothing in here. I'm putting it in the Mobile sub forum because I'm playing it on my phone, but it is originally a Facebook game.

Basically, you're running a dragon zoo. The dragons each have a "type", which are drawn (more or less) from the classical elements, i.e. Earth, Fire, Plant, Cold, etc. You breed them together to come up with hybrids. Each dragon needs a habitat, and the habitats correspond to the dragon types.

There are two types of currency in the game, "dragongold" and "gems". Dragongold accumulates in each habitat, as a result of your zoo's clients coming to gawk at your dragons. Dragongold is thus easy to come by, and it's the currency to use for most of the structures in the game, i.e. habitats and other buildings.

Gems are a little harder to come by. You start with a handful, and you can get more by accomplishing certain tasks within the game. These are used to buy certain special buildings, and for some building upgrades as well. Also, you can spend gems to speed things up.

This is where the patience vs money mechanic comes in. Whenever you breed dragons, they take a certain number of hours to incubate their egg. Then the nursery takes more time to hatch the egg. Each building takes time to be constructed. You can speed all of these up by spending your gems.

I like the fact that this game does not hit you in the face every five minutes to try and get you to spend real money. To be directed into the cash shop at all, you have to almost do it on purpose.

The graphics are cute, the dragons are adorable, and those of us with completionist tendencies have plenty to do, just trying to get one of each kind of dragon.

I've been playing (and thoroughly enjoying) for about three weeks now, so I made a point of going on the store and throwing some cash at the devs.

Like I mentioned before, this was originally a FB game, and it's been around for 2+ years, so it's been thoroughly wikified (http://dragonvale.wikia.com/wiki/DragonVale_Wiki).

I've been playing it off an on for well over a year now.  It is cute and I like my themed islands.  Most of the dragon prices are atrocious though if you want to buy them with gems, especially the epic ones.

I played it for a while. Trying to breed the "seasonal" dragons got tedious, though, so I stopped.

Agreed on the dragon prices. When I bought gems, I decided to spend them strictly on park improvements and upgrades, i.e. not on dragons. So far I've only bought the dragons that cost gold, i.e. the basic types.

I played it a lot last year, but the monthly gem dragons were such a pain to breed that I lost interest. It doesb't help that I have it on my tablet, not my phone, and I don't have wifi at my current job.

So far, my efforts at breeding Gemstones (Jet, specifically) have yielded up a Sun, a Rainbow, and one more 48-hour egg that is currently incubating. And a whole mess of ordinary hybrids that I already had. But no Gemstones yet :D