I may have said this before, but I grew up in Michigan, and went to school in Kalamazoo. With that kind of background, it's inevitable that I know, and love, the game of Euchre.
Euchre is a card game, somewhat like a truncated form of Bridge. Four players are arranged in two pairs; partners sit across from each other, and cannot see each others' hand. Table talk is, er, frowned upon (back when I played in college, it was worth a swirly....). The players only use half a deck, the 9, 10, J, Q, K, and A of each suit, and the 5s are kept as score cards (each team uncovers a dot for each point earned). The object of the game is to score 10 points. Points are earned for winning at least 3 out of 5 tricks in each hand.
At the beginning of a game, one player chooses the trump suit. There are various rules on how this player is selected; he can be the guy to the left, right, or across from the dealer. In any case, the lead position rotates around the table with each hand. When a player leads, he can call a trump and play card, or pass. When a suit is trump, its cards are the highest ranking on the table, in order of rank, with one exception: the Jack of trump and opposite-trump (the other Jack of the same color) are the bowers. The right bower, the Jack of trump, is the highest card on the table; the left bower, the other Jack of the same color, is the second-highest. Because 4 players only receive 5 cards each from a total of 24, there are always 4 "mystery discards" to figure into your calculations.
I won't say too much more about the rules, mostly because I haven't played in 15 years. That'll change soon, though, because I just found free flash Euchre games at Yahoo Games. You can check them out at this link. I like the simple graphics layout, the basic game rules, and the interactive nature of the site. It's a good place to learn, or re-learn, the game of Euchre.
I'm a big fan of the Age of Empires game series (although they're not flash games, and they're definitely not free, so I haven't talked about them here), but it's possible to find similar games at the online flash game sites. On such game is called Imperium. I found it at FreeWebArcade.com.
This is definitely a fun little game. You start on an island, and can choose one of two cities as the center of your empire. You'll need to build resources: food, money, wood, iron, steel, etc, so that you can increase your population, build armies, and conquer the rest of the island. Take over every section of the island, and victory is yours. And how sweet it is, too.
There are levels of complextiy to this game. First, you need to balance your empire's production, imports, and exports to maintain an every increasing level of prosperity. The status bar will show how you stand on various items, whether they are increasing or decreasing. If anything gets into negatives (wood or food, for example), your citizens will start leaving your city, abandoning it and leaving you without workers to produce or soldiers to defend. Defeat will come swiftly.
You'll also need to build a balanced army. Make sure that you establish a mix of sword-soldiers, spear-soldiers, archers, horsemen, etc. An unbalanced army will go down to swift defeat, but a well balanced force will be almost unstoppable.
Overall, I liked this game. The graphics are a bit cartoonish, but in whimsical way that was kind of fun. There is a very detailed help section and tutorial, which will teach you how to play and win, and several difficulty levels to choose from. This game gets a good rating from me, but not from my boss at work....
