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If you don’t know what WarBook is, you probably have a job that’s cooler than mine. WarBook is what the members of the desk-chained working class are busy with for the nine out of ten hours they spend at the office. It’s a text-based RPG application for Facebook where you build your own kingdom, train an army, and amass more land by attacking other kingdoms, burning their villages, pillaging their farms, and raping their wimmin on church altars.

Life before Warbook: I look like I can’t even break a plate

Before WarBook came into my life, I was a naive college graduate whose “burgis twang” became an endless source of amusement to her coworkers. Genetics and real world conditions make me too nice to retaliate at those who choose to make me the butt of their jokes. If I were to be drafted into the army and placed smack dab in the middle of a battle, I’d be the fodder placed at the front of the line. If I were a civilian during times of war, I’d be the farm girl who dies in the burning barn because I fell asleep instead of watching out for enemy soldiers who want to get their gunpowder-covered hands inside my cornflower-blue dirndl. Thanks to WarBook, no longer will I be the helpless maiden with naught but a metal pail to defend herself with! No longer will I be the nearsighted new recruit whose shoulder will break at the rifle’s recoil! I am a lvl 11 Warlord of a kingdom seventeen thousand acres wide, patrolled and defended with an army 137k+ strong. AND I WILL PWN UR SOULZ.

She may not look like much, but Laurian is a ruthless warlord. Rly.

I’m probably not the best person to blog about WarBook since I know next to nothing about strategy. Over coffee, Pete (who, in the world of WarBook, is Mordo the Fat, Diplomat for the Premiere Alliance and self-proclaimed patron of Codex Zabulon) enchanted me with stories of alliance warfare and tried, bless his soul, to educate me on the math governing the right number of soldiers, knights, pikemen, and elites to take to battle with me. The whole lecture, of course, flew way over my head the way any conversation that involves numbers does. Perhaps I should have taken down notes. I am currently having difficulty breaching the defenses of enemy kingdoms around my size, but every Warlord has their moments of defeat.

You might be wondering how an utter ditz everywhere like such as myself could have possibly amassed so much land and so many troops in the span of three weeks. Well, my faithful readers and loyal subjects, hang on to your mouses for I shall reveal to you my secrets to Warbook success.

My success. Let me show you it.

The key to victory is friendship. You think I climbed all the way to the top through my own hard work and effort? Hell no! In the first place, wimmin only play games like RPGs to get guys to like them. It makes us look like we’re smart and into elves and other ghei shit guys wank off to at night when in truth, the only thing girls know about RPGs is that we want to marry Legolas someday. That being said, if you are a girl, becoming a Warbook success story such as myself is a piece of cake. It doesn’t matter if you choose to be a Wizard, General, Warlord, Visionary, or Mogul. As long as you have a vajayjay attached to your crotch, you’re a sure win!

A fine example of the friend type you’d want to invite to Warbook

The first thing you do upon adding the Warbook application to your already cluttered Facebook page is to invite your fellow Facebook friends to join the war. The invitation process requires serious thought, because you’ll want to invite the friends who spend 20 hours in front of the Internet each day. The type of friends who won’t be able to resist a juicy invitation to a simple text-based RPG on a social networking site. This alone will earn you 100,000 gold for every friend who accepts your invitation. See how easy you have it already?

In about a day, the friends you invited should be about ten levels higher than you. This will really come in handy when your fledgling kingdom gets attacked by players stronger than yourself - which will happen a lot while you’re still a n00b. Don’t be stupid and exact vengeance on these bastards yourself; you don’t want your troops to die needlessly! All you have to do is to give the names of your attackers to your stronger friends, and they’ll retaliate in your name.

Some of the members of the alliance Codex Zabulon

At this point, one of your friends should already have the one million pieces of gold required to start an alliance. An alliance makes the whole telling-your-friends-about-your-attackers process easier and the retaliation process more convenient for them. Make sure that the friend who initiates the alliance christens your coalition with a sinister sounding name. A name that conjures up images of villages reduced to ashes, its former occupants impaled through their anuses by the gates of the once-majestic kingdom. A name that will strike fear in the hearts of men and make them lose control of their bladders. Let me show you an example. The “We Love Dinuguan Fan Club”, as suggested by Pau, is NOT an alliance you’d like to be part of. A name such as that brings to mind a group of potbellied, middle-aged fathers feasting on pig’s blood and Beer na Beer on rickety wooden benches at the sari-sari store in the kanto. Which is pretty much how the Man Blog editors spend their weekends, but we don’t want people in Warbook to know that, do we? Luckily, Fritz (Corinthian in the world of WarBook) came up with the million gold before Pau could, and our alliance was hereafter to dubbed Codex Zabulon.

The only kind of aid your friends and allies can give you is in monetary and soldier form. WarBook is constructed in such a way that you can’t leech off other people completely. Thus, the only way for your kingdom to grow in size is to attack other kingdoms yourself and take land from them by force. Here are a few helpful tips on how to launch a successful campaign:

Don’t bother attacking kingdoms who
- have been attacked heavily recently
- have been attacked moderately recently
- have not been attacked recently
- have been sacked once or twice lately
- have been stripped off most of their resources by invaders
- have not been sacked recently

Make sure you use the Spy function before launching an attack! This way, you’ll find out how many soldiers, knights, pikemen, and elites they have versus yours. If they have more troops than you, don’t even think about it.

I rarely ever use the Survey function, but it sort of helps seeing how many mines, forts, barracks, barriers, and amplifiers the target kingdom has. Unfortunately I don’t know what to do with this information so I just kind of ignore it and attack anyways.

Players with a bunch of unclickable letters attached to their names means that they’re part of an alliance. Don’t bother attacking them unless you want your kingdom to get ass-raped by their friends.

Players who aren’t part of an alliance probably have a shitload of forts and pikemen defending their land. Don’t bother attacking them.

Do you have a Warbook success story you’d like to share? Tips, tricks, and strategies? Tell me all about it! I’d love to hear from my fellow warmongers and decorated heroes.