Investing gems in the future

It's been a while since my last expenditure of gems, and so I had 78 gems saved up for blowing in one go this week.

I'm the kind of person who does like saving their money, and thus would probably have continued to store them up, but with the ever-present risk of gem traps wiping all my gems just to finishing cooking a couple of Roast Chickens sooner, I opted to hedge my bets.

So what did I choose to spend the gems on? Well as anyone who has taken a tour of The Garlic Tree will know, I'm a big fan of having little themed sections in my restaurant, and have got all the ingredients for several such areas such as a Steampunk section and a retro diner section.

So naturally I was looking at adding a new theme, and considered a number of possibilities...

First up was a Winter theme. The advantage here was that I could combine the winter content with some crystal content from around Valentine's Day. However short of gambling solely on the Crystal Gift Box, there isn't really enough decorations to flesh an area out.

So then I considered a sports theme. There's no shortage of content here, and most of it is available for coins. However on closer inspection you'll notice that the vast majority of the decorations on offer are wall decorations. Now my themed areas don't take up much wall space (usually six or seven sections of wall) so I'd be unable to purchase too much of these items. On the plus side, the Sports Bar is a very substantial floor decoration which you'd expect to see as at least a 2nd prize in a box. But at 42 gems I wasn't that keen! So the sports theme goes on the backburner.

How about a musical theme? Well there are three tables to choose from - the Cymbal, Classical and Cabasa - which all cost coins. The Cabasa in particular looks great but it is the one which doesn't have a corresponding chair! Like the sports theme, there isn't a great deal of floor decorations available outwith the Music Box, so I decided to pass on this one too.

The next consideration was a beach section. There is a lot of stuff available for this including a choice of two boxes (Beach Resort and Island Chest) so perhaps this would be the theme I'd settle on. However, a lot of players have been decking out with deck chairs and what not recently courtesy of the Cruise and Carnival themes, so I decided to turn down this opportunity - I like to be different!

And so I moved on to a futuristic theme. This was the one. Something distinctive from what I've already got, and plenty of items up for grabs for coins! So among other things I snapped up a Futuristic Display I, a Holographic Greeter, and Modern Plants. This allowed me to be less dependent on two dips into the Futuristic Box which contains an array of slick items. Here's what I got for 48 gems...

Award of Robot Chef from Futuristic Box

Award of Holographic Tree from Futuristic Box

Maybe not my ideal result, but both items fit in all the same. To finish the job off, I bought two Touch Screen Tables (4 gems each), four Futuristic Chairs (2 gems) and two Krona Counters (38,000 coins each). The latter of these blend into the theme surprising well considering they're from the Swedish updates of some time ago.

The table tennis area of my restaurant has been shelved for now to make room for this futuristic theme. Here's the finished product:

New Futuristic section in The Garlic Tree

So that's me washed out on gems. For now I'll concentrate on saving for my next expansion to 21x24 - I'm just over 2,000,000 coins short at the moment.