Treasure Isle

Zynga, creators of the Villes (PetVille, YoVille, FarmVille)is getting their feet wet in the treasure genre with Treasure Isle. It just became available today, for me anyway.
It has elements of several different types of games. Players have a home island where they rest, garden, and decorate. The home island also has a gem tree, with jewels of a particular color. Mine is blue. It looks like players want to befriend neighbors with different color gems as different treasure chests require varying colors of gems to open.
Resting is an important element in this game, as energy is a limited commodity. I ran out after just a few minutes of digging for gold and treasure chests. Rather like the real world, in that respect, where I also run out of steam after a short period of exertion. This is different, though, from games like PetVille and YoVille where one can play for much longer without energy becoming an issue. One gains energy by resting, eating fruit (which you can grow on your home island or find on islands you visit), or buying energy packs. This is somewhat similar to the leisure principle at Social City, another fairly new game I play. There players have to build in a certain percentage of leisure options such as water parks and museums to keep the population happy and growing. New citizens will refuse to move into your town when the work/leisure ratio is off and you need the population to keep growing in order to build new factories to earn more money.
I do see a downside for nature-lovers in this island paradise game. Treasure hunters down tropical foliage with machetes to get at the treasure buried beneath. Perhaps a future update will allow those of us who are overly sensitive to environmental ethics to plant seedlings to replace what we dig up. :)