OK, so what guy hasn’t thought about how great it would be to be Hugh Hefner. Hanging out in your pajamas all day, swimming at the grotto, parties day and night, and…, and …, oh yeah, and the ladies of Playboy. One of the great inequities of life is that there can only be one Hefner and the position has already been filled. However, you can now at least see what it would be like to live the Hefner lifestyle with the upcoming game, Playboy: The Mansion.

The guests arrive for another famous Playboy party.

Playboy: The Mansion (PTM) literally puts you in the role of Hefner himself. However, like Hefner you must start from scratch and work to build a name for yourself and your magazine. Work?!? Quit your complaining, we’re talking Playboy magazine here after all. So how do you build an empire? Well, you’ll have to successfully launch and produce a quality magazine, build a network of key contacts, throw legendary parties, and construct a renowned mansion that will inspire video game programmers.

PTM will be played in two different modes: campaign and empire. Campaign mode presents you with scenarios with a set of goals for you to accomplish. For example, one mission challenges you to establish the Playboy Foundation. This requires you to gather a group of philanthropists to help fund the Foundation’s first major film project. This may sound straightforward enough, but when the film’s director lands in jail and the composer has writer’s block things get a tad trickier. It’s not that you don’t have enough on your hands with trying to put together a party to wow the philanthropists and separate them from their money and with keeping the politicians at bay, but such is the stuff of scenarios. Empire mode is the game’s sandbox mode. Start with the bare minimum, launch your magazine, and build your empire.

At first glance PTM is sure to draw some comparisons to The Sims. After all, you have autonomous simulated people with different interests and motivations interacting and forming relationships. However, while The Sims was all about keeping a needy and sometimes uncooperative sim happy, PTM is much more goal-focused – you’re building an empire here, not making sure that you make enough trips to the bathroom during the day.

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