Foursquare for Fable game Kingmaker does 50,000 sign ups

To be honest, Microsoft's Foursquare for Fable - aka Fable III: Kingmaker - hasn't been the overwhelming experience I hoped it would be.

Over the weekend, it seemed not to work at all, at least on my Android phone, as I tried to plant flags deep in enemy territory, or Stoke, as normal people call it.

Today, it's been working fine but as I haven't left the house, the location based part of game has been irrelevant. I've just been planting flags in my virtual backyard.

Still, Microsoft seem jolly pleased.

"The response has been phenomenal - over 50,000 people have signed up, which is a fantastic result," Microsoft's director of Xbox and Entertainment Stephen McGill told UK trade magazine MCV.

Anyhow, to be honest Fable III: Kingmaker is less a game and more a marketing app for the Xbox 360 release Fable 3, which creator Peter Molyneux is pushing for five million sales. Fable II did 3.5 million.

Location-based, free, and available for iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7, Fable III: Kingmaker rewards you with virtual gold you'll be able to upload into the console game, while playing out a Red versus Blue flag planting battle across the UK and Europe.

Each player is placed either in the side of the Rebels or the Royals, and gets 10 flags per day to place on the game map.

Obviously, your location is based on your smartphone's GPS, with players supposed to travel into enemy locations to drop their flags, and conquer territory.

Each territory is owned by the team that's planted the most flags there.

Planting flags generates gold for the player - 50 coins per flag or 100 coins for each new location tagged - while you can go to specific realworld locations to gain treasure pots of 2,000 or 5,000 gold coins.

Encouraging further activity, at the end of each week, whichever side is winning, its players all receive 1,000 coins, and every player who plants all their flags daily for a week also gets 1,000 coins.

And a special pot of gold will be shared by the team with the most territories when Fable 3 launches in October 29, while the entire game will run until January 2010.

You can sign up and see what's going on via the web interface - here.