YoVille: A Beginner's Guide

YoVille is a Facebook and MySpace game that allows users to create cartoon versions of themselves and interact with other cartoon users as they make money and use it towards fixing up your apartment or even buying a house while also earning achievement badges.

You begin by choosing your character. You can be a male or female. You then proceed to select facial features and clothes. Do not worry about getting the perfect clothes, since you are able to buy new outfits in the game.

Once your character is finished, you can go through the in-game tutorial, which will show you how to place new and move old objects within your home.

When your inventory is open, you can drag and drop furniture to place it. You can also drag and drop any piece of already-laid objects to move them or put them back in your inventory.

In order to purchase anything in the game, you will need coins. You start out with 500 coins, but you will quickly see that there are very few things you can buy for less than a few hundred if not one or two thousand.

Players can earn at least 200 coins every six hours by visiting the Wicket Factory and clicking on the control panel on the left of the screen to work. You receive more coins if you increase the number of players in the your "crew."

As YoVille is apt to remind you, players can enlarge their crew by inviting friends from Facebook or MySpace onto YoVille.

The other way in which you can earn coins is by playing either Tic-Tac-Toe or Rock,

Paper, Scissors with other players. You earn 10 coins for each game you win, and five for each draw in the case of Tic-Tac-Toe.

Players can earn a maximum of 200 coins in this manner every 24 hours. An easy way to max out your coins quickly, is to play then quit the mini-game just after both parties made the first move. This will automatically award the 10 coins to your opponent.

You can get all of your opponent's coins quickly in exchange for he or she doing the same for you. This is a common practice and is often referred to as "maxing."

The factory, which always seems to have the most people in one room, is a good place for maxing.

Once you've saved up enough coins you can visit one of a variety of different shops, to purchase furniture, clothing, food, pets, coffee or even a new house.

Aside from earning badges, buying furniture and clothes does very little to help you, but food and coffee can increase your amount of available energy, which can be used to make your character dance around or wave at other players.

Some items cannot be bought with coins and must instead be bought with YoCash. YoCash can only be bought from YoVille with a real credit card. You can also earn YoCash by signing up for web offers, if you click on "Earn more YoCash" along the top of the YoVille screen.

Your character can earn a number of different badges for things like buying articles of clothing or visiting many different friends at their homes.

For most players, the point of the game is save up enough money to decorate their houses in a great place for social gatherings, then inviting as many fellow players to visit.

Although there are a variety of websites that claim to offer tips and tricks for YoVille, Yoville.com is probably the only site you need to bother with. The website's forum is a good place to learn about the finer points of the game.

There is also no shortage of sites and You Tube videos that claim to show you how to cheat. Many of those supposed "tips" are actually just scam attempts to steal from your account.

Basically any "tip" that involves you e-mailing your account login and password to anyone, including YoVille itself, is a scam.

The game's programmers have since corrected some of the other tricks, especially those that make use of a glitch.

One of the more advanced tricks involves the use of Winsocket Packet Editor Pro. WPE Pro can be used to manipulate the data that your browser sends to YoVille's server to do things like increase energy bonuses from food and speed up the maxing process.

Unfortunately, the uses of WPE Pro are too involved to fit into the confines of this guide.