There are dozens of online gaming communities that you can join. Some are totally adult oriented, while others are targeted at children. You can play for money, as in gambling games, or you can play for fun.
One such gaming community is Pogo, which you can locate just by searching or going to Pogo.com. There are two platforms under which you can join. You can always join for free, and many people play on Pogo in this manner, but that also involves having scheduled intermissions during your game play for advertisements from their sponsors. This is not a non-profit organization, so advertising is how they make their money. But, you can also pay just about $35 a year and play uninterrupted. Game play is unlimited for that cost and down-time is very rare.
Pogo is not a super advanced site. There is no role playing, as in World of Warcraft or others. The games are under categories such as: Card, Board, Puzzle, Word, Casino and Arcade & Sports. In almost all cases you can play against the computer or against other gamers in rooms. The rooms are divided into topics and into ages and sometimes into levels of skill or the number of people in a game. Each game also allows you to set certain options for play. Each game also has a tutorial on how to play and most games allow you to practice with “robots”. The site is very user friendly and designed in such a way as to allow almost anyone to play the games. Many of these games are the same games you grew up with or are growing up with.
Yes, kids regularly play under their parents’ accounts here. Tabs in many games allow you to choose age groups from teens to 50s and up. Each game also has chat rooms, which allow you to go to a private chat room if you wish to play with a special group of people and talk privately. The public chat rooms that are more on an ‘adult only’ level will be annotated under the room options and it is a simple matter of not going to those rooms to find clean, curse-free, fun. As with all gaming sites, it is recommended that younger children be monitored on what rooms they are in and it can still be ‘family game night’ in front of the computer with Pogo. The paid version is called Club Pogo and there are some games that are only for paid membership, but there are more than enough games for play that are not under the fee-based club.
Under Card games you have a number of different types of solitaire, hearts, gin, bridge and canasta. Board games include Monopoly, Dominoes, Cribbage, Chess, Trivial Pursuit, Risk, Backgammon and Battleship. Word games include Word Whomp, Crossword Cove, Scrabble, Word Search and the like. Puzzle games include Mahjong and a number of fun games for different levels of play. The Casino games are what you might think, but you are always playing for tokens, not money. Under Arcade & Sport you can play Pool, Golf and Shuffle Board.
Most games have a jackpot amount of money associated with them which is annotated in the menu. The dollar amount goes up to $4999 with the jackpots doubled up to $4999 for Club Pogo members. You can also win badges for playing, which is where the real fun comes in. Winning the jackpot is like winning the lottery-winners are few and far between, but each week new challenges for new games are announced and the goal is to win that badge. You can even look over your badges that you’ve won so far and you can go back to get badges you weren’t able to get on the first go-round. The ultimate gamers will fill the annual badge album. Tokens also add up and you can use them to enter money or gift contests, kind of like a raffle.
On the whole, Pogo is a family-friendly site that offers a wide variety of games. They have even expanded to include downloadable games and they have a ‘mini-mall’ where you can design an avatar, called a ‘mini’ and can change wardrobe, hairstyles, accessories and backgrounds as the seasons or your whim change, all for the price of a few tokens. Your ‘mini’ has no other function but to be present in game rooms and is not animated, though some of the backgrounds are.
If you are looking for a place for good, clean, fun and a place where you can make friends or chat with strangers, then Pogo is worth looking into. It won’t cost you a thing to check it out.
Along with writing, Joseph enjoys working in his flower gardens. Garden Harvest Supply is one of his favorite gardening web sites where you can buy perennial plants and potted bushes.
