A few weeks ago we took a look at Chorebuster (review), a complex, yet very powerful chore management tool. Today, one that's been making the rounds around the office is Chore Wars, a seemingly ridiculous concept that attempts to make repetitive tasks like washing the dishes and vacuuming worthwhile for things besides sanitation. Did we mention this is set in a magical universe with monsters, treasure and certain peril?
The concept is simple: users band together in guilds, and give household chores various reward levels. Those rewards translate into character upgrades, in a Web based MMORPG that you play with your friends, family, or roommates. Consider it like a very stripped-down version of World of Warcraft, where leveling up requires some real-life elbow grease.
Pick from a variety of user-created chores. Each gets its own experience point denomination.
(Credit: CNET Networks)While it doesn't play like a video game, Chore Wars has a simplified Web interface that lets members of your party create and claim chores. The actual chore creation process is a joy, with a simple Web form that lets you fill in the name of the chore, along with values for gained experience points, gold, and various character attributes. The real fun, however, is thinking up treasure and monsters, which you have the potential to run into every time you claim to have done a chore. This opens up a dialog where you can find out if you've managed the task unscathed, or run into perils you or others have dreamed up.
The real nitty-gritty of Chore Wars is its management system, which lets users easily claim chores using a drop-down menu, or by picking one from the "adventure" page. You can keep track of the chores each user has claimed, as each one gets its own status update (a la Twitter), along with a time stamp to let you know when it was taken care of. What might be the only dampener here, is that as group administrator, there isn't a way to dole out chores to other users, or separate chores that are individual from those that are communal. In this sense, Chore Wars fails. However, if you have kids or roommates who are honest about taking care of things, this honor system works.
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Chores are an unfortunate side effect of domestic existence. Things need to be done, people need to do them, and dolling out who does what, and when can lead to an exasperating amount of effort for parents, roommates, and authoritarians. Everyone has their own system, and many rely on a piece of paper, or in some cases a homemade Wheel of Fortune-like spinner that decides whose fate it is to clean the upstairs bathroom or scoop up the dog poop from the back yard.
ChoreBuster is a service that mixes these two ideas, providing a free, Web-based scheduling tool that can also randomize who has to do a chore.
ChoreBuster lets you set up chores for multiple days and users.
(Credit: CNET Networks)As administrator, you can create your family or chore participants one by one and begin building a chore list. You can set recurring chores, on a daily, weekly, or custom basis, along with adding odd one-time chores as they come up. This schedule is then made available to everyone online, and can be easily printed out to get stuck on the fridge or other common area. There are also e-mail reminders, a mobile version of the site, along with a Yahoo! Widget that can show each user what they're supposed to do that day.
After testing out the site this morning, my one qualm is that adding several tasks and assigning them is cumbersome, more so than it would be to simply open up a spreadsheet and start writing things down. Maybe I'm just used to scheduling things in Google Calendar and Outlook, but I found it took too many steps. However, for power users, and those looking to really dig deep and add 30 or more tasks--I can see learning ChoreBuster's management system paying off. With enough effort and foresight, you can set it up to swap up tasks on a daily basis continuously for several months with little or no effort on your part.
ChoreBuster could be a lifesaver for big families, and large communal group living situations like fraternities, sororities, and summer camps. It also offers some great integration features for a free service like the e-mail reports and the desktop widget.
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