What is Car Town?
Car Town is a car and garage game that started out on Facebook, made by Cie Games. You buy cars, customize them, put them to work in your own garage, race your neighbors and level up to unlock more cars, parts and decorations. The look is pure early-2010s Facebook: bright colors and cartoon drawings, with chubby cars seen from an isometric angle.
On Facebook you needed your profile to play. Here you don't need Facebook at all: you play in the browser with an account of your own, and progress from the Facebook game is not imported. Everyone starts fresh after signing up.
How do you play Car Town?
The game revolves around your garage. You see your lot next to a street with an intersection, road signs, other people's cars and your work station, which is a lift. Customers drive up and line up in front of the garage: click one to see what they need, start the job at your station, then come back when it is done to collect your pay.
The top left shows your level and, under it, the garage value bar, next to your coins and your credits (blue points). The bar along the bottom gives you My Garage, Edit Garage, Buy Cars and Glove Box. Click any car you own to open its panel: Customize, Picture, Sell and four activities, Friendly Racing, Road Trip, Car Show and Deliver Pizza.
Buying a car, painting it and winning a race all give experience, and every new level opens more of the shop. New accounts also get a tutorial with a neighbor called Rusty, who walks you through your first job.
Which cars can you buy and how do you customize them?
Buy Cars is the car shop. You can sort it by newest, model name, manufacturer name, price or the level that unlocks each car, or search by name. Click a car and it appears in a showroom with its name and year, its class (a single letter), a performance score, color swatches, the experience you gain from buying it and the price. More than 350 cars are on sale, in five classes.
Customize opens the editor, with tabs for Paint & Graphics, Wheels, Tires, Body, Performance, Suspension, Window Tint and Lights. Paint accepts any color: a palette with a brightness slider, R, G and B fields and a hex code. The car changes color as you pick, and you confirm the purchase with coins.
There are more than 2,000 parts on sale, enough to make two cars of the same model look very different.
How do friendly races work?
Friendly Racing is a reflex minigame, not a driving simulator. Click Start and the lights come on: wait on yellow and press the green button the moment it turns green. The sooner you press after green, the more points you get off the line, and leaving early counts as a foul.
Then come three gear changes. Click to shift as close as you can to the green line on the rev counter without going past it: landing on the line earns a bonus, while overshooting can push your score below zero. The highest positive score wins, and beating a neighbor pays coins and experience, with a daily limit for each player.
A Practice button lets you train with no rival at all, and friendly races need no fuel.
Neighbors, garage and decoration
Edit Garage is the shop where you decorate your lot. Its tabs cover work bays (lifts), storage, functional items, miscellaneous objects, chairs and tables, floors, walls, doors, windows, signs and lot expansions, with more than 500 objects in all. Each one costs coins or credits, and Reset Floor restores the floor.
You can expand the lot 11 times, from 10 x 10 all the way to 40 x 40. Your garage value rises with the value of your cars and objects, climbing through ten titles from Flimsy to Exalted.
Add Friends opens the Neighbors panel, with tabs for Neighbors, Requests, Search, Invite, Gifts and Photos. Two neighbors, Rusty and Axel, come with the game. Requests, gifts and visits have been checked with automated tests but not yet with two real players, so treat the social side as new.
Car Town without Flash: account, languages, browser and phone
Car Town runs in the browser at cartown.fbgamesweb.com, with no Flash, no download and no installer. Creating an account is free: a username of 3 to 24 characters, a password of 8 or more and, if you want, an email. Your progress is saved on the server and tied to your account.
The game comes in English and Spanish only: there is no Portuguese, French, German, Russian or Chinese interface, even if you are reading this page in another language. We tested it on Chrome on a computer and have not tried phones.
It is a beta. The high-stakes racing track is closed, a few placeholder windows are still empty, and some cars in the catalog have incomplete artwork. If something breaks, open a support ticket.
