Gem Dilemna

I am playing the game DragonVale a lot on my iPhone. One of the most previous resources in the game is gems. They help you buy some things that can only be purchased with gems. They also speed up lengthy tasks. I think you start the game with a few gems. You can get more gems by having friends give you gem gifts. You can also have your dragons compete in events at the colosseum. The final way to get gems is to pay real money for them.

I always enter my dragons in the competitions. However those take 24 hours to complete. I also participate in gem gifting to friends. These friends usually return the favor. It does not cost you anything to give a gem gift to a friend. The only limitation is that you can give away a maximum of 3 gems a day. That worked fine when my friend were Kit Kat, Momoko, and Little Kat. Now I added Grannie Kat to my friends list. Ooops. Three gems total among four friends means somebody will not be getting a gem each day.

Momoko thought I might be able to skip giving the gems to the high ranked players like Kit Kat and Momoko. I thought I could alternate between the friends. That way I evenly divide them up. Just can't give everybody a new gem each day. There is one final option. You can buy a "gem tree" in the game. That increases your daily gift giving quote to 6 per day. The only problem is that the gem tree itself costs 100 gems. This is a big time catch 22.

I could do what Momoko and Little Kat did. They just spend some real cash and bought up some gems. However that option feels like cheating a bit. I don't want to artificially speed up my game by paying money. That defeats the purpose of the game. The fun in the game is that you have limited resources that you need to manage. I am sure I will figure this out.