Clash of Clans

Who’s heard the words Clash of Clans bandied about of late? Well, if you have children – especially of the male variety – who are allowed devices, it will most likely be the talk of the town. And if you’re like me, you will have no clue what it is all about.

All I know is that the kids are buried in their devices utterly absorbed in this Clash of Clans palaver. Apparently all the players on Clash of Clans have code names so they often don’t know who other players are in real life. However, through one of those bizarre chain of events, Master 11 recently found out one of his ‘friends’ went to primary school with me and now my interest was piqued. Are people my age really interested in playing this game and what was it all about. I made myself sit down with him one day to find out.

He opened the screen to reveal what looked to be a maze of brick walls with tiny buildings and fortresses and cannons and things within. I say ‘things’ because that was about all I could make out. Even with my glasses on, I was struggling to identify what anything else was. Already my attention span was waning.

“But what is the aim of the game?” I impatiently asked.

“You have to try and build up a village and the other people try and destroy it,” he patiently answered.

“But where are the bathrooms and how do the people that live there go to the toilet?” I asked, leaning closer to the screen to try and find something of interest.

“Oh, they don’t have things like that,” he said.

I tried to understand, I really did but, as he went on to explain about trophies and buying things for his town, I found my mind drifting off to what I should cook for tea. I made one last attempt at showing interest.

“What are you typing?” I asked, leaning in to try and read the tiny text on the side of the screen.

“I’m having a conversation with one of my friends in my clan.”

“What are you saying?”

“I just said ‘Oh nooo L’”

“Why?”

“Because they destroyed some of my village.”

“But why didn’t you defend it?”

“Because they did it while I was asleep last night.”

That didn’t sound very fair to me and why were they in the same clan in the first place if they were attacking each other’s villages and, besides, what kind of village didn’t have a toilet?

Then I remembered it was indeed ‘Taco Tuesday’ so I made my apologies and, none the wiser, went to thaw the mince instead.

Footnote: for the sake of enlightening readers I have Googled the subject: Clash of Clans is an online multiplayer strategy game which tasks players to build their own town (in the form of a clan) using the resources gained from attacking other players through the game's fighting features. Its primary objective is to be the person with the most trophies. You earn trophies either by successfully attacking someone else's village, or by successfully defending against an attack from another online player. As you earn more trophies, you climb the ranks and are matched against opponents of equal or greater skill. The ultimate goal is to work your way to the top — the Champion class. To get there, you need to spend either a lot of time or money to upgrade your village, train your soldiers, and develop the best strategies for both offense and defence. Players can conjoin to create clans - groups of up to fifty people - who can then partake in clan wars together, donate and receive troops, and talk with each other.