CastleVille Royal Councilors: Make new friends without losing your privacy

While CastleVille is already available to play on Zynga.com, apparently that pool of gamers isn't big enough for some users to make progress in the game, so Zynga has made it even easier still via the introduction of the Royal Councilors. If you play FarmVille, you might be familiar with this sort of feature, as "FarmVille Friends" allows players to add strangers as neighbors without actually adding them as Facebook friends.

In the case of "Royal Councilors," the same stipulations hold true. If you elect to be a part of this pool of eligible players, you'll randomly receive friend requests from other CastleVille players, who will be added to your neighbor bar and can be visited or helped like any other "real" neighbor you have in the game. However, they won't be your full Facebook friend, so you don't have to worry about them seeing any of your information, outside of your name, profile picture and frequency with which you continue to play CastleVille.

You can opt to actually add any helpful neighbors as full Facebook friends, but you're not required to in order to visit them and earn bonus energy, coins and other prizes by doing so. Either way, this should help players that are stuck trying to "tend X items" at their friends' Kingdoms, but may not have enough active neighbors that still play the game and have those items available.

As of this writing, it seems as though there might be some bugs in this Royal Councilors feature, as we haven't been able to find any players that are actually available to add, but hopefully this will all be worked out in the coming days. If you'd rather not appear as one of these neighbors, you'll need to manually remove yourself from the pool by clicking on the Royal Councilors button in your friends bar, then clicking on the question mark in the corner, and finally uncheck the "Count Me In!" box as seen below. Just don't be surprised if you receive a few requests in the time it takes Zynga's system to pull you out of the pool.

What do you think of this Royal Councilors feature? Will you allow your name to be available to other CastleVille players if it means earning faster quest progress or having more neighbors to visit? Sound off in the comments!