If you’ve ever watched one of those old movies with Jimmy Stewart, there inevitably comes a moment where the feisty small town hero he’s portraying has had all he can stand. His American Everymen draw their lines in the sand and defend their turf with monologues laced with folksy pseudo-profanity. You’ll keep your daggone mitts off of his Savings and Loans or you can expect a punch right in the nose! Zynga’s latest social time sink, Empires & Allies, may not feature any cinema icons of yesteryear, but not since Mr. Smith Goes to Washington has a wrathful outburst toward one’s peers felt quite so warm and fuzzy.

Empires & Allies will feel immediately familiar to anyone who has put time into any of Zynga’s -Ville games.  The art and sound design–both bright, boisterous and cartoonish–clearly mark its lineage as a descendant of FarmVille, a game that became one of the biggest and most surprising video game success stories of the last five years. Much has been made of the company’s success with the previously unreachable older housewife population, a statistic that often obscures just how broad and diverse the appeal of Zynga’s games are. At the time of publication, nearly 12 million users log into CityVille each day, only a fraction of whom will be late to driving their kids to soccer practice. Zynga has built its casual gaming empire on shrewd viral marketing and expressive, progressive, non-competitive (or at least passively competitive) game play. Naturally, their next game would be a war game.

Wait. What?

It’s the tension between Zynga’s brand and the military theme that makes Empires & Allies a surprisingly fascinating game. The class of games called “social game” is more a description of a business  model than a genre–indeed, games have been “social” for far longer than Facebook has been around, as any WoW player can attest. This model offers ostensibly free game play, but periodically places formidable speed bumps in the player’s progress. The industry often refers to these as ‘gates.” You can power through these gates by spending premium currency–usually only attainable by spending real world currency or by getting a certain number of friends to actively unlock the gate for you in game. It’s a digital pyramid strategy that incentivizes players to bring their friends into the game if they want to continue progressing. Having a large number of friends in game confers numerous energy saving benefits. The player interactions are casual, friendly and helpful. The more the merrier!

But what if, in FarmVille, your neighbors could invade your farm, draw resources from it for their own nefarious schemes and make it cost extra energy for you to harvest your crops? This would hardly be daring new territory in a PvP game, but remember that we’re playing in the house that casual cooperation built. The worst case scenario for Zynga would be players having to weigh the pros and cons of inviting a friend to play Empires & Allies. Is this person going to be up in your grill 24/7, squatting on your precious ore processors?  Will seeing red icons emblazoned with the grinning faces of her friends hovering over her junta send suburban moms into fits of keyboard smashing fury?

Probably not.

In a shrewd bit of design, Empires & Allies reaches out to gamers with an antagonistic streak while giving its non-traditional casual audience a reassuring, completely consensual, back rub. It turns out the stakes of invading your neighbors are quite low. The aforementioned energy penalty is temporary; no buildings are risked in combat, only the military units used to capture or liberate them. More importantly, expelling the dime store fascists from your turf will earn you an impressive cache of resources.

Zynga helps encourage the war games by assigning each player one rare resource (uranium, gold, aluminum, etc.) that can be produced in their military base. The others are only attainable through warfare (and trade, though I wouldn’t bet on the market instincts of a generalissimo who just spent 80 percent of his GDP on a Bazooka Stimulus Program), leaving players in a state of perpetual resource scarcity and unstable allegiances. The risks of being invaded are low, the rewards great. One might even go so far as to say these external threats are a boon to your economy.

Would that Eisenhower could have lived to see such a military industrial complex simulator!

It remains to be seen if Zynga’s strategy will net them the audience and the numbers they’re looking for. Appdata.com reports that 7 million users log into Empires & Allies each day, considerably less than Zynga’s current biggest hit, CityVille, and slightly less than it venerable FarmVille property. The game fares better with monthly users, however, topping FarmVille’s audience by over 1 million.