In this hectic world we live in, many times work and appointments must come before the fun and joys in our lives, including that of getting to play videogames whenever we want. Gone are the days when we could fire up a game of our choice and spend hours toiling away – now we seem to game in stolen moments here and there. With that in mind, perhaps it is no wonder that casual games have become such a popular gaming choice (especially with women who make up the vast majority of casual game players), as casual games allow us to either jump in and get those quick fixes of gaming bliss or either play them for as long as we want when we do have the time. In honor of the casual game, we'll be bringing you a new Casual Game of the Week every Monday to help you find that fix you might be needing in your life, and this week we have: Build-a-lot

I had a psychology teacher who once told me that if you want to invest in anything always invest in land, because it's the one thing that we can never make more of. He had a good point, but up until now I've never had the opportunity to put his teachings to work. Thankfully along comes Build-a-lot, a game that has you trying to build up the perfect communities while dollar signs dance in your eyes. Ah, it's good to be a multimillionaire…if only virtually.

Money is the root of everything in this game, and so it must always be your number one thing to be mindful of. The main way that you make money is by owning homes, which are automatically rented out upon their completion. On the Money and Goals tab there is a meter constantly filling up, and whenever it's filled you take in the income from those houses you own. There are a variety of houses you can own, from the simpler one-story numbers on up to some really fancy places. An easy way to raise the rent is by improving your houses, which aren't too hard to do for the simpler houses, though the more expensive houses take more money and materials to upgrade, but then again the potential rent increase could be worth the risk.

You're only given three workers for each level, but you can purchase a new worker for $50,000 and now you have more workers at your disposal so you can get more work done. Of course, work costs money, but you also need materials in order to buy and upgrade housing. Each build or upgrade costs a certain amount of materials, so you'll always have to be buying materials to keep your supplies plentiful. Oh, and did we mention that to build buildings you need their blueprints first? Yes, there are a lot of conditionals to meet, but it's surprising how easy it is to figure everything out as everything proceeds and flows smoothly from one action to the next.

The game is split among communities, which are then separated into individual levels. Each level will start you out with your community, which comes with several pre-placed land development types – there are naked plots of land that someone else owns, plots of land that you own that haven't been developed on yet, houses you already own (which are colored blue), and houses that other people own (which are colored grey). The game will then give you a series of goals you must meet in order to move on to the next level, which include having a certain amount of one type of house, having a specific type of house fully upgraded (three stars), earn a specific amount of annual income, or having so much money in your pocket at one time. Most of the goals are given to you right at the beginning of the level, though there are other goals which can happen part of the way into a level to really shake things up. Other goals that must be met include building working buildings, such as post offices that can bring you mail that bring you a little extra money, buildings to improve your material and labor usage, and many others.

There are two ways to lose: 1) have no money to do anything, and 2) you run out of time. Each level gives you a constantly counting down timer, and in order to beat the level you need to be completely done with all your goals before it reaches empty. Each level's time meter also has a little notch in it, and if you complete the level before the timer goes beyond that spot you get an extra special gold star – it's not much, but it's nice to get it and know you aced a level.

Graphically the game is pretty simple, but the individual buildings and the relative few animations are soothing and pleasing to look at. On the audio side of things you have a nice little melody that plays throughout the levels and plenty of sound effects ranging from the explosion of fireworks upon beating a level to the hammering of building a new house to the sound of a bulldozer crushing the foundation of a house.

At the end of the day I was surprised by how fun it was micromanaging the construction of all these different buildings and trying to amass a big a fortune as possible. The game will also test you at times, as it can provide quite the challenge as you work to complete goals as fast as possible, and when you're getting down to the wire your heart will really pump as you frantically work. In the end, Build-a-lot is a fun game that everyone should try.

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