Family Village
By Erin Bell,
Common Sense Media Reviewer
Common Sense Media Reviewers
City-building sim has players incorporate own genealogy.
Add your rating
A Lot or a Little?
What you will—and won't—find in this game.
Where to Play
Videos and Photos
Family Village
Community Reviews
There aren't any parent reviews yet. Be the first to review this title.
What’s It About?
FAMILY VILLAGE is a building simulation where players build a city that reflects their own family history. Players create a family tree by adding relatives and filling in basic birth, marriage, and death information, and then "immigrate" relatives into the town to function as its citizens. These family members can be assigned homes and jobs to earn the player coins and help complete quests, and their appearance can be customized.
Is It Any Good?
By incorporating genealogy into the mix, Family Village encourages players to learn about their ancestors while creating a virtual city that reflects their own unique heritage. The family tree is easy to interact with and grow, while the city-building portion offers a nice variety of decorations including homes and commercial buildings, vehicles, and pets. As more details are added to the family tree, players unlock special heritage-related village decorations like regional flags and monuments (to unlock the Golden Gate Bridge, for example, your tree must have at least one relative from California).
Family Village is a fun sim for genealogy enthusiasts with a few kinks still to work out. The character customization options are not very ethnically diverse (creating an African or Asian ancestor, for example, will prove challenging), and the heritage decorations are for the time being skewed toward North America and Western Europe. The game also attempts to link real historical documents such as archived newspaper articles to relatives in the family tree who have matching names, but players must spend premium currency to purchase the documents before they can be viewed.
Online interaction: Facebook friends can be invited as neighbors but they don't have as much of an impact as in other games. If players have identified certain Facebook friends as relatives through Facebook's Family setting, these friends can be invited into the app and will appear in the family tree. You are asked to reveal personal information about your relatives.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can use the game as a jumping off point to talk about family history. Where did your ancestors come from? What did they do for a living? What did they look like?
Families can also talk about what it might have been like to live 100 or 200 years ago. What were the major differences in lifestyle?
Families can also talk about the privacy issues associated with posting
genealogical information online, especially when the relatives involved
are still alive.
Game Details
- Platform: Facebook
- Pricing structure: Free
- Available online?: Available online
- Publisher: Funium
- Release date: April 20, 2011
- Genre: Simulation
- ESRB rating: NR
- Last updated: August 30, 2016
Did we miss something on diversity?
Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.
Suggest an Update
Where to Play
Our Editors Recommend
Best MMOGs
Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.
See how we rate