Click to Harvest!

Frontier living might be rough, but that isn’t stopping the citizens of Zynga’s FrontierVille from having some Labor Day fun on their homesteads. To celebrate the holiday, there are new missions, new schoolhouse lessons, and a new item collection.

The new missions must be purchased from the FrontierVille store, and all revolve around getting ready to go back to school. The first mission revolves around players finishing their farm chores, and requires players harvest crops, sell goats, and plant fruit trees.

The new school house missions (some of which are limited editions) are: Writing, Hunting, Canning, Early to Bed, and Healthy Education. They allow players to hire more neighbors, get more items from varmints, earn more food from harvesting, replenish energy faster, and give +5 to max energy.

Finally, the new Labor Day collection contains: Book Strap, School Bell, Paddle, Worm Apple, amd Globe. Players can obtain the items by tending clovers, tending neighbor potatoes, tending neighbor tomatos, harvest apple trees, and tending neighbor corn.

Pirates Ahoy from Playfish launched a major new feature this week, to further evolve the game beyond its treasure digging roots. Players can now challenge their friends in ship vs. ship combat! Besides earning plenty of glory, players can also win coins, gems, and other rewards.

Players begin with three challenges per day, and can get more in daily neighbor visits, by digging, or by purchasing them with Playfish cash. Right now, players can only challenge their fellow Pirates Ahoy neighbors. After challenging a friend to a fight, players then pick what attacks they want to perform.

There are three battle moves to choose from – Ram, Shoot, and Shield. Every fight has five attack rounds, and players choose which move to perform each round. Victory is decided in a rock, paper, scissors manor – shoot beats shield, shield beats ram, and ram beats shoot.

After challenging your opponent, they will then need to log in and select their own attack moves. Then you can see which ship came out on top! The more players battle, the higher their battle rank becomes. Thicker shields, more devastiting cannons, and other upgrades can then be purchased. Players can also spend some Playfish Cash to give themselves an even bigger edge.

Happy Aquarium developer Crowdstar has released another handful of decorations themed after L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz.

New decor options include: Dorothy’s House, Ruby Slippers, The Castle in the Sky, and two members of the Lollipop Guild. Two Oz themed tank wallpapers have also been released.

Additionally, the new Toto and Good Witch tank mates have now been made limited editions. Originally these items appeared to be permanent additions to the Happy Aquarium store. But now, like the rest, they will be gone after about 5000-6000 more copies are sold.

FrontierVille developer Zynga has decided that it isn’t quite ready to stop paying tribute to Summer yet. The company has released a new collection of Summer BBQ FrontierVille decorations, to help players further extend the season’s good vibes.

The new decorations are: Picnic Table, Tasty Pig Table, Lawn Recliner, Drinks Tub, Melon Table, Burger Grill, Charcoal, Messy Table, Dutch Oven, BBQ Grill, Steak Grill, Pot o’ Veggies, Smoker, and a Chuck Wagon. The additions are an even mixture of permanent decorations and limited editions, and an even mixture of coin and horseshoe items.

In our opinion the Burger Grill is the most exciting of the new coin items. One thing is for sure – these new decorations are definitely not vegetarian friendly!

Happy Island developer Crowdstar has been slowly and steadily adding to the game’s 1930s gangster expansion. Players now have a large collection of goombah goodies with which to decorate their island resorts.

New items include: Meatball Diner, Studio Swagger, E.S. Office, Private Detective, Genco Pawn Shop, Brick Flats, Garbage Truck, Tombstone, Canole, Coppah Car, and Gangstah Car.

Most of the items are permanent additions to the Happy Island Store, but three of the attractions (pictured below) are limited editions.