Mafia Wars: Halloween Loot Event! Starting Friday at midnight (PT), all jobs and fights have a chance to give you special Halloween-themed items. Act fast because the event ends Monday, November 2 at midnight (PT). Sneak a peek into a few of the items!

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Mafia Wars Loot Suggestion Contest by Zynga

Get your Twitter on with Zynga and Mafia Wars.  That’s right; Mafia Wars team is taking new loot suggestions via Twitter. Here’s the scoop:

Tell us what kind of loot you want in Mafia Wars! Submit your idea for a new weapon, armor or vehicle by tweeting a description of it. Tell us a name, a look or anything we’d think is awesome.

The team will choose 10 winners and create your item as a new limited edition loot. Winners will get 50 reward points plus 501 of the new loot!

To Enter:
1. Follow us on Twitter @MafiaWars
2. Send a tweet with the following sentence: “I want [describe your item] in #mafiawars. http://bit.ly/MRIkY”
3. Make sure you include #mafiawars and the bit.ly link!
4. Enter as many times as you want. Any offensive or inappropriate entries will be disqualified.

Contest Ends Friday, September 18th.

The fine print:

Submissions of new Mafia Wars item names and descriptions to twitter.com/mafiawars give Zynga Game Network Inc. (“Zynga”) the following rights: the unrestricted, unconditional, unlimited, worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual fully-paid and royalty-free right and license to host, use, copy, distribute, reproduce, disclose, sell, re-sell, sub-license, display, perform, transmit, publish, broadcast, modify, make derivative works from, retitle, reformat, translate, archive, store, cache or otherwise exploit in any manner whatsoever, all or any portion of the Mafia Wars item contest submission and any supporting materials for any purpose whatsoever, in any and all formats; on or through any and all media, software, formula or medium now known or hereafter known; and with any technology or devices now known or hereafter developed and to advertise, market and promote same. Zynga is under no obligation to use any submission.

Please be original!

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Moscow is the next Mafia Wars city. Zynga is kicking it off with some cool new loot.

Mafia Wars: Moscow Preview! To celebrate the upcoming release of the Mafia Wars: Moscow, all jobs and fights can drop Russian Mafia items. Collect them all for a chance to unlock an exclusive item. Hurry before time runs out.

If you’ve not played yet today, you can expect to see this box pop up.

Here’s one of the fine Moscow loot drops:

There are eight pieces of Russian goodness and they are dropping randomly on all missions. Get out and get your Moscow preview loot.

Cheers,
Don Jordan
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Mafia Wars, a Zynga favorite, has added some new toys – Boosts! Never got one yet? Well they’re not hard to come by.

Here’s what the game shows about boosts:

These one-shot items can help you fight or defend better, and even give you discounts on energy required for jobs. Once consumed they are gone, so plan your actions wisely. You can only buy up to 20 of each boost each day.

Some examples:

The boosts are initially collected by re-vaulting collections.  Each collection has a specific bonus it gives.  Each bonus boost is a one shot item.

Making life easier with these though is the ability to buy a bunch up each day. They don’t stack, meaning only one boost of a type gets used at a time.  In addition, they get used automatically when you are the victim of an attack if you’ve used a defense boost.

The boosts awarded for each collection are given off to the side of each collection.  No need to hunt them down for research.

I’m looking forward to trying these out to see just how effective they are. Hoping you do the same and can share your experiences.

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Tonight Zynga releases Mafia Wars Lottery on Facebook. You can follow the discussion on the Zynga Mafia Wars official forums.

You can see it now in action though it’s disabled; check it out here. (may be live by the time you check this out)

The lottery spawns a whole new collection as well. I’ll keep you posted here.

Sometimes you get lucky and spot stuff.

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Join my Vampire clan.

So you’ve read that you can enjoy Mafia Wars missions and more in Cuba. But you might not have known that properties is a whole new ball game. Gone is Mafia Mike’s place; now we have plantations, factories, and fields.

The Zynga team has this to say:

Each Cuban business can be purchased once and produces crates of a particular product every 3 hours. Once the crates are produced, they will be stored in your warehouse, ready to be sold for a profit.

Also, this bit of information as well:

Your Cuban businesses can be upgraded in the following ways:

Quality (5 levels) – your business will produce a higher quality product every three hours, allowing you to sell each crate for more pesos; quality upgrades cost twice as much as quantity and capacity upgrades.
Capacity (10 levels) – your business can store a larger quantity of crates in the warehouse.
Output (10 levels) – your business will produce more crates every 3 hours.
Remember to come back often to sell off your crates and maximize your profit!

It’s going to be fun and it’s becoming more about resource management, ala Civ and Sim City, than just about knocking over jewelry stores. There are still missions though and some of them are an interesting take on Cuban crime, such as ransacking a local plantation.

I’m pumped about the new features and will keep you posted.

Please share any goodies, tips, and tricks here or on Facebook.

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If you’re an avid Mafia Wars player, chances are you know most of the ins and outs. Just in case you don’t, here’s a link you’ll appreciate.

Zynga has gathered a forum just for a Mafioso Training Grounds. It’s got posts such as “Ultimate Loot/Item List” and “Job Mastery Guide”. These contain complete breakdowns of rewards and strategies. As far as I can tell, the posts are quite up to date.

One of the biggest tips I can give you is get the best attack and defense items you can put your hands on. Secondly, if your fellow mafia members don’t have some of those items, share. Give away a rocket launcher or two, spare a body guard, and share share share your extra collection items. Building your mafia strength pays for everyone.

One other social aspect I want to touch on is posting your mafia invite code. Good grief folks, we see your updates, we know you play Mafia Wars. How about just putting the link on the side of your profile and leave it at that. Oh and maybe consider getting your own blog or website and posting your invite code there. Just a thought?

Yours,
Don Jordan
aka Todd Randall Jordan or Tojosan

Lots of folks are playing Mafia Wars and not getting all their entitled too. What? You’re level 200 and have great stats? Did you know what all those tiers you dabbled in on your way up give rewards?

Rewards and not all that cheesy either. Not only do some jobs provide special items, each tier has a set of collections to be completed. Each set you vault results in a specific bonus.

Beyond that though, completing a tier has it’s own rewards. So you completed a tier one time and forgot about it? Your loss. Complete a tier three times and you’ll receive a unique prize. Each tier has its own.

Completing the Street Thug tier three times nets you the Pistol Bayonet: +4% damage dealt in fights. Another tier mastery drops an item with 30 seconds off of your health regeneration timer. Each is along those lines, enhancing some facet of your profile.

Unfortunately no one else can really help you complete these. They’re drudgery honestly when you could be doing more rewarding missions monetarily. Truth though is that you’ll have more money than you can use in this game, so don’t sweat it.

Here’s a link to the mother of all Mafia Wars rewards lists. If it still works, bookmark it or memorize it, if not, start compiling your own with your mafia.

Good hunting,
Don Jordan
FB Profile – Mafia Wars link is on the profile on the left.

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So what’s up folks with this splash screen? Seriously? Does someone get here by accident?

One of my favorite games but sheesh, more of that will mean less of me.

Pathwords is a Facebook word game by zynga.  If you’ve not played it, but love word games, check out Pathwords.  This article is to give you some tips once you’ve wet your whistle.

First off, it’s important to understand the scoring.  Let’s look at the word chart.

What immediately jumps out to you?  It’s how the points don’t scale up right?  The biggest bang for your buck in making longer words is from 3 letter to 4 letter words.  You’ll do the most to improve your game just getting out of scoring 3 letter words.

Another thing to notice is the significant jump at 7 and 8 letter words. To get there, you’ll have to do something besides look for longer words, you’ll need to create them.

Beyond scoring, there’s another trick to the words.  Have you ever thought you were out of words, even 3 letters long?  Not true.  The game never leaves you without a word.  So another key to mastery isn’t just longer words, by accident, or intent, but learn those three and four letter words cold.

A good example are GET GUT GIT.  Those words occur fairly frequently. Learn the more unusual ones with Z, V and J.  Those will be your most difficult letters to rid yourself of.

The dictionary used is the TWL Scrabble Dictionary. Check out the Official Tournament Word List entry on Wikipedia.

The zynga team provided their own tips in the help section of the Pathwords game.

• Instead of clicking the Submit button, you can click the last letter of your word again.
• You can also drag the mouse to form your word. When you release the mouse button, your word will be submitted.
• Be careful of how you use shuffles. The first one costs a mere 20 points, but they can get very expensive very quickly. If you don’t have enough points to pay for the next shuffle, you can’t use this feature.
• Expert players will manage their letters carefully to help them form big words for huge points.
• Check out your current word right underneath the board. If your current letters form a legal words, the word will be green. If not, the word will be red.

These aren’t word tips, but trust me, playing with mouse drag is the fastest way to go.  I actually find this true even with the touchpad on my Mac Book Pro.

So let’s sum up.

• Make longer words when possible
• Create longer words on your own, be selective when you have choices
• Learn the three and four letter words by heart
• Focus on learning words for V, J, and Z.
• There is always a word.

Let’s get playing.  Be sure to friend me on Facebook and challenge me to a game of Pathwords.