Pillow fights are officially the new vampire bites on this week’s list of the top 20 games by growth in monthly active users, taken from our sister site AppData. It’s the second week in a row this “game” has won the top honors, crossing 15 million people with an impressive 20 percent gain. That’s the same as last week, so its growth trajectory has yet to slow.

Game is in parentheses because Pillow Fight is essentially a glorified version of poking or biting your Facebook friends, with hundreds of pillow choices and a virtual currency. In the past we’ve had trouble admitting that these apps are real games — they appear here because they are marked as games in Facebook application directory. But as their features multiply, it’s becoming harder to deny them entry into the club.

The rest of the list is occupied by a mix of old favorites and several newer games that, like Pillow Fight, have been on this list for more than a week. Here it is:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Pillow Fight	15,063,982	+2,982,837	+19.80
2.	Happy Island	9,012,780	+1,496,063	+16.60
3.	Birthday Cards	29,700,484	+1,308,207	+4.40
4.	Zoo World	13,335,340	+1,290,837	+9.68
5.	Tiki Farm	4,732,995	+1,101,304	+23.27
6.	Texas HoldEm Poker	24,197,747	+616,280	+2.55
7.	Country Life	7,229,831	+536,608	+7.42
8.	Wild Ones	1,129,240	+505,543	+44.77
9.	Island Paradise	6,834,434	+395,524	+5.79
10.	My Town	836,347	+366,335	+43.80
11.	MindJolt Games	15,520,918	+363,496	+2.34
12.	FarmVille	74,008,714	+349,171	+0.47
13.	what are you born to do?	1,587,989	+328,267	+20.67
14.	Three Kingdoms Online – Best Browser Game of 2009!	1,001,472	+324,074	+32.36
15.	Garden World	952,987	+316,311	+33.19
16.	開心寶貝	541,375	+256,888	+47.45
17.	Jungle Jewels	2,574,182	+179,226	+6.96
18.	IQ test	1,303,632	+158,597	+12.17
19.	Friends For Sale!	4,810,532	+156,856	+3.26
20.	Ninja Saga	2,179,884	+128,225	+5.8

As we mentioned last week, there seems to be a new trend in island-themed games. The current winner is Crowdstar’s Happy Island, which has risen from third to second place overall. Tiki Farm has lost some ground, adding only half as many MAU as last week, while Island Paradise picked up steam but remained third in the group.

Wild Ones, a Playdom takeoff on Worms coming in at number eight, is becoming one to watch. The game has been out since early December, but its growth was slow at first. Now it’s zooming ahead with over 500,000 new players, growth of 45 percent. It’s still small for now, but seems to have overcome its initial slow growth — see the chart below. We review the game here.

Another game picking up steam is My Town, a new city builder. By next week, it will have crossed a million MAU. That will make it the first significant success for newbie game company Broken Bulb Studios, which is also seeing some success with Ninja Warz.

Finally, there’s an odd exception to this list: Dante’s Inferno, a social RPG version of a console game based on and Dante Alighieri’s classic book coming this year from EA. The publisher, LOLapps, may have forgotten to list it as a game; but that’s not hurting its growth to over five million players, a 23 percent increase from last week. Still, few of the new MAU users seem to be coming back to play again — see the DAU (daily active users) as a percentage of MAU chart below.

Inside Social Games extends a big thank you to our sponsors for supporting the continued growth of Inside Social Games. Check them out below!

Kontagent is a developer of analytics solutions for social application developers.

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Social Gamers Aide Haiti: With the horrid earthquake that struck Haiti a few days ago, the island nation has been in dire need of help. But while international aide has been arriving throughout the week, it looks like everyday people that aren’t in the Red Cross are contributing as well. In light of their recent charitable causes, Zynga is offering “limited edition social goods” within its top games of FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and Zynga Poker. All proceeds will go directly to helping out Haitian citizens in their time of need.

Items include “white corn that will not wither if left unatteneded for a week” (FarmVille), a “Haitian drum” (Mafia Wars), and “a special chip package” that will give the user a rare, premium item (Zynga Poker).

[image via Kotaku]

Virtual Currencies Exchangeable for Real Money in Korea: Legalities on whether virtual goods and currencies can be dubbed “real” have been vague, at best, worldwide, but it’s apparent value has surfaced from time to time. Well, at least in South Korea, it no longer is: The nation’s supreme court has stated that virtual currency is, in fact, equal to real money. The case was based around the exchange of Lineage II‘s virtual currency, Adeena, for real money. This means, that the sale of virtual currency is being considered the same as a currency exchange and is completely legal within the country.

The full story can be found here.

MySpace Hires Sean Percival: In an attempt to grow more social and reinvigorate the network, MySpace has hired Sean Percival as their new Director of Content Socialization. Having been one of the social networks first 3,000 members, he has been a consultant to the company for some time and is author to the book MySpace Marketing: Creating a Social Network to Boom Your Business. Other merits to Percival’s resume include his blog Lalawag as well as experience from Mahalo, Docstoc, and Tsavo.

Farm Anthology Compiles the Sea of Farming Games: With the deluge of farming games in circulation around… well… everywhere (Facebook, iPhone, etc.), it can be tough to keep track of them all. A new website by the name of Farm Anthology has done most of the foot work for us. The site contains a pretty thorough collection of all of 2009′s farm titles as well as app links, screenshots, developer names, number of users, and how they are being monetized.

Gowalla API Coming Soon: According to TechCrunch, location-based social networking is taking off quite a bit with apps such as Foursquare averaging more than a check-in a second. Already, Foursquare has released an API for the technology (back in November), but now competitor Gowalla is looking to do the same. A post on their blog states that the first version of the API is “nearly complete” and that an official announcement will be coming in the “very near future.”

iVdopia Brings Social Ads to the iPhone: Video-based mobile ad network, iVdopia, focuses most on the iPhone for its advertisements, but according to co-founder Srikanth Kakani, “People don’t buy stuff yet on mobile. They do a lot more than before, but we think the best way to capture people via mobile advertising is to get them to perform smaller actions, like becoming fans of Facebook sites or tweeting on Twitter.” That’s right, in order to become both viral and social, the network is introducing Talk2Me ads to the iPhone that allow them to be shared via Facebook and Twitter. Furthermore, users can respond to them using old fashioned calling, SMS, or email.

Bigpoint.com Surpasses 100M Registered Users: One of the world’s largest online game portal sites with social networking features, Bigpoint.com, has reached a new plateau this week, stating that it now has well over 100 million registered users worldwide with an exceptional portion of those numbers stemming from Germany. In fact, the site states that it grows by roughly 250,000 users a day. Having partnered with PlaySpan over half a year ago to bring in new monetization methods, such as the Ultimate Game Card, it is certainly doing well.

OpenFeint Releases iPhone App: For all those trying to find quality OpenFeint enabled iPhone games, the search just got a little bit easier. At the tail end of last week, Aurora Feint’s social platform for iPhone developers finally got an OpenFeint app in the app store that can search the list games using the platform as well as access all of your friends, challenges, achievements, and so on. The only comment we have is… what took you so long?!

Apple App Submissions Get Faster: 2009 got Apple a number of complaints about the speed of their app submission process from iPhone developers. Well, according to Tuaw.com the site to submit and check app sales, iTunes Connect was down between December 23 – 28, and apparently, developer emails to Apple have been quite happy since then. By the looks of things, improvements have been made to the submission process as apps are receiving notices of approval that are ranging from four days to less than 10 hours!

Asian Social Network Gree Finds New Success: Forbes has named Yoshikazu Tanaka, of Japan, Asia’s “youngest self-made billionaire.” His social networking site, Gree, has earned a whopping $1.6 billion, and the man is only 32. With stock having doubled since 2009, and $170 million worth of shares sold since December 2008, the envy of the region is currently ranked #18 among Japan’s 40 Richest. To top things off, Gree may be getting even bigger, having announced the new “Gree Connect” platform, which will launch in April, 2010.

Foursquare Goes to Harvard: Looks like location-based app developer Foursquare is going back to school as it has, this week, made a partnership with none other than Harvard University. Okay, not really going to school, but with the app, Harvard and Foursquare will help students to actually explore the campus, view notes from the school paper, and read a myriad of tips about various campus locations from a special Harvard-themed, Foursquare website.

Pirates Pillage Apple: According to 247wallst.com Apple’s booming App Store may not be as well off as it could be. Apparently, the company has lost over $450 million to piracy since the Store’s inception back in July, 2008. Of the 3 billion downloaded applications, an estimated 13% – 21% are paid apps leading to quarterly revenue between $60 and $110 million. Unfortunately, reports of pirated games and applications on the iPhone is well over 100,000 and growing rapidly.

GCREST Expands to North America: GCREST, an online entertainment company from Tokyo, Japan, opened its doors in San Francisco this Thursday. As the developer of the popular social MMO, TinierMe, the company is looking to expand its presence in America based on strong user demand, according to VP of Global Operations, Masuru Ohnogi. Currently, American teens represent over 50% of the player base behind TinierMe.

As virtual goods become more mainstream, a range of companies are trying to provide virtual goods services to anyone who wants to use them, from social game developers to social networks themselves and other web sites. Orca is the latest to emerge, having launched last August.

Its white-label services include digital gift cards, payments and virtual currency systems, and rewards. More established rivals, like PlaySpan and Live Gamer, have focused on providing their services to gaming companies. While they are expanding beyond games, too, Orca’s focus is broad, including non-gaming destinations, like entertainment sites.

Orca’s products include:

Payments: A white-label service where a company can offer users a PayPal-style payments service but with their own brand. Users can store payment information, like a credit card number, with the brand.

Rewards: This service lets a brand have their own service for earning digital points, and converting them in to rewards. It also offers digital gift cards, so a brand can provide a set amount of points in a digital format for users to give to each other.

Virtual Currency: Similar to rewards, companies can create a system for accepting real-money payments in exchange for virtual currency. The currency can also be traded, gifted, earned as a bonus, or through an online affiliate.

Orca offers additional features, including analytics, a way to communicate with users, and pre-ordering.

The big idea here is that virtual goods are becoming a more mainstream way of making money online and all sorts of sites are going to want to implement some form of virtual monetization system in order to capitalize on the trend. There are already quite a few examples of what Orca wants to enable, that people might not think of as virtual goods. For example, airlines have long offered frequent flier miles in exchange for using a branded credit card or participating in other offers. With Orca, as chief executive Roger Wood tells us, any company can implement whatever part of its monetization service that it feels is the right fit for its plans. Instead of having PayPal or another brand clearly providing the service, Orca lets the site take control of the image around the product.

Role-playing games on Facebook may seem like an overdone genre, but Castle Age shows just how far it can go beyond “join my mafia.”

For the record, there isn’t anything wrong with the way many existing Facebook RPGs play. They could just be so much more. At first glance, though, Castle Age may seem just like these other titles. The basics are all there, with your standard stats of attack, defense, stamina, energy, etc. Players do quests to gain experience, or fight players to gain dominance. They even visit town to buy equipment to become stronger and land to earn income. However, despite the familiarities, there is something deeper behind this fantasy RPG.

Upon entering the “world,” players are greeted the story of their burning home and immediately prompted with a choice on whom to save. The character becomes their first hero/general which allows them to actually do quests. As the player progresses, certain quests can be done with any hero, and others require a specific one that they may find or purchase later. Also, various heroes grant their own unique bonuses to the player. As an example, we ended up with the cleric Penelope who grants a 1% discount toward all soldiers – more on them in a second – purchased in “Town” (this is where many soldiers, items, magic, and so on are bought). Later, players can unlock, through quests, or buy other heroes for different bonuses. However, only one hero at a time can grant their special abilities by being equipped as a general, meaning that this will likely play into some strategies at later levels. Moreover, by level 10, players can even begin upgrading these units.

Soldiers needed for your army to complete many quests and fight other human opponents. At their core, these characters are nothing more than machine guns, knives, and explosives that you might find in something like Mafia Wars but because of their dramatic artwork and that they are not objects, but people, makes them feel more like units in a strategy game and not an inanimate things.

In fact, the artwork plays a lot in the connection to the game as a whole. Despite copyright issues half a year ago, Castle Age has come back with new and absolutely gorgeous fantasy art. Each screen has a character that no matter how insignificant they seem, is dynamic and memorable looking. This is a visual representation of a fictional writing rule to never make a character a flat or stock character no matter how tiny their role, because it isn’t believable or memorable. In the case of Castle Age, the imagery fills the role of remembrance, but it is that other art form, writing, that makes it feel more believable.

For every page and every character, save the purchased units like foot soldiers, there is some small bit of text that is designed, with word bubbles, to look like the character is speaking to you. It might be a tip, instruction, or just what services they offer, but each piece of it feels like part of this world. This isn’t Shopkeeper 32A selling you that +5 to Attack Dagger. It is Vulcan, a fiery blacksmith with biceps the size of your head and a hammer half again as large. In fact, this same writing is what drives the player further into the story of the game.

Bit by bit, the story unfolds for the player with each piece requiring more experience to be earned — “A hero wishes to meet you: Earn 5 experience points.” Once a quest is done, then that new piece of story is unveiled. And, coupled with the art, the player actually gets sucked in to the game world. However, this same method leads to some very smart social features as well.

Every so often, the story will come to a boss. Rather than a simple quest, a story blurb will introduce it and the player must defeat it to move on. However, in order to attack it they use the stat, Stamina, which in most RPGs, is used only to attack other players. Frankly, this simple double use of the stat has actually given meaning to it for players that previously only cared about story in Facebook RPGs.

Anyways, with the boss fight, the battle is open for several hours. Each boss has a great deal of hit points, thus requiring many attacks to defeat it. Since one attack uses one stamina, and players have relatively limited stamina before they must wait for it to recharge, help from friends becomes very useful. Players can actual issue a “Call to Arms” that cries for help on their newsfeed, and friends can join and attack as well, earning a little bit of experience for themselves each time they take a swing at the big bad guy.

Additionally, players can also invite friends to join to not only grow their army size (like in Mafia Wars), but assign them to their Elite Guard as well. This makes for another level of gaming and social depth as the Elite Guard are friends who are assigned to specific jobs – Cleric, Thief, Paladin, etc. – that grant the player special bonuses (i.e. +1 Attack) for a 24 hour period.

The game is further deepened by the player’s ability to ”worship” demi-gods every 24 hours and thereby earn favor to purchase rewards, chests with random rare units for army, and more. However, this is still just the tip of the iceberg. Castle Age is extremely deep and complex with a myriad of features to learn. Just to list some examples beyond these demi-gods, players can duel each other one vs. one or with armies for stat bonus, they can earn achievements, create items and monsters with alchemy, generate epic bosses, train with non-player characters, visit the oracle for special bonus (offers and currency sales), repeat quests to gain influence and extra stats, as well as purchase and participate in constantly changing special offers an items in-game.

With just under 3 million monthly active users, Castle Age has certainly been a slowly growing game but one that has endured not only the test of time, but legal issues as well. It is a game with beautiful artwork, deep story and play mechanics, and a complexity that is completely forgotten through its immersiveness. So long as it can avoid anymore unnecessary copyright issues, this is a game that ought to continue to grow over 2010, and after playing it, you will certainly see why it was one of the top ten most significant social games of last year.

Taken with last week’s list of the top 20 rising games on Facebook, the contents this week reveal an interesting mini-trend: once again, multiple Chinese games are in the top 20. There are five in total, including Three Kingdoms Online and Happy Hotel. The other three, even more notably, are exclusively Chinese-language (you can probably spot them).

It’s no secret that Facebook has quite a few Chinese-language users. Even though Facebook is blocked in China, millions of people who speak various dialects of Chinese use the service across Asian and around the world. Larger developers, like Hong Kong-based 6 Waves and Beijing-based Rekoo, have already made a name for themselves in social gaming circles.

In the English-language category, ten of the apps you’ll see below were also present last week; these steady growers are worth keeping an eye on. More on some of them below. Here’s the list — remember that these are the games that gained the most users over the course of the last 7 days and ended the week with between 100,000 and 1 million users.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Garden World	835,217	+396,647	+47.49
2.	Wild Ones	788,966	+368,478	+46.70
3.	Three Kingdoms Online – Best Browser Game of 2009!	857,967	+338,310	+39.43
4.	My Town	672,974	+319,219	+47.43
5.	開心寶貝	427,189	+225,895	+52.88
6.	Flying Dog	826,573	+171,154	+20.71
7.	Happy Hotel	950,714	+126,684	+13.33
8.	開心花園	446,177	+97,802	+21.92
9.	Warstorm	423,940	+94,324	+22.25
10.	DRIVe Around The World	206,026	+88,810	+43.11
11.	Sanalika	102,398	+87,168	+85.13
12.	Bite Me	614,197	+83,905	+13.66
13.	Doorbell	901,799	+78,774	+8.74
14.	Spot The Difference	312,737	+68,524	+21.91
15.	Ninja Warz	673,604	+57,777	+8.58
16.	The True Age Test	443,435	+56,187	+12.67
17.	Which Zodiac Sign Are You Most Compatible With?	267,791	+54,854	+20.48
18.	Friend Block	904,856	+42,707	+4.72
19.	歡樂癲地 Funland	630,220	+39,052	+6.20
20.	Dogbook	889,957	+37,464	+4.21

Believe it or not, the majority of the games you just saw have nothing to do with farming. The exception there is Garden World, in the top spot, which is set to cross the million player mark soon.

Aside from that game, there’s a distinctly marshal tone to many of the rest. Wild Ones involves dogs shooting bazookas at one another; Three Kingdoms Online follows an ancient Chinese tale of war, while Warstorm is a card-trading game and Ninja Warz puts its focus on character training. Click through the text links following each name (except TKO) for our reviews.

Also present are a few assorted slow-growing apps that are nevertheless building up significant bases. Flying Dog fits in there, as does the vampire-themed Bite Me. The list also includes Doorbell and Dogbook, although neither of those are actually games.

Our pick to watch: My Town, which almost doubled from last week. While it borrows from the farming genre, there are enough unique touches to potentially guarantee the success of this city-building game’s small developer, Broken Bulb Studios, which also makes the slower-growing Ninja Warz.

MySpace may seem like an underappreciated platform, but that’s not the case for the developers — especially game developers — who have been busy building for it over the last couple years. Engagement and revenue per user numbers are higher on the site than on market leader Facebook, according to multiple people in the industry.

And now MySpace is taking good steps to help developers. It announced a new analytics API and reviewed its recent API additions today at its San Francisco offices. By providing better analytics and channels for growth, MySpace can help applications figure out how to keep users on the site longer, and have it be a more relevant place for entertainment — its strategic focus.

Rather than trying to build new features, like what Facebook is doing with its Credits virtual currency, MySpace is improving what it already has — which is that it is the number two social network gaming platform after Facebook. Many applications have millions of users, with Playdom and Zynga at the top. The demographic skews young and more than 80% American, an audience that likes to play games and pay for virtual goods.

MySpace is focusing on the fundamentals for developers, to help them build bigger businesses and invest more in the platform. As an example of that, Dave Peck, the company’s director of engineering, platform and mobile, told us today that the third-party monetization companies on the platform are doing a good job already. Despite rumors we heard a year ago about a MySpace virtual currency, we don’t expect to see one any time soon.

The News Corp.-owned company got new management last spring, and it has gone through significant restructuring and product changes. Entertainment is the mission now; the company was busy with its music service earlier this year, for example. MySpace’s platform hasn’t seen a lot of changes for awhile, that’s about to change.

The platform will include in-house stats available for developers to access remotely via REST APIs. While the company also plans to make more data public, the metrics below will be for app owners only. Expect to see more in the next couple of weeks. MySpace says it has been working with a range of developers on the APIs already and is looking for more input.

The company is also testing out uses of its data in MySpace Labs, building applications in-house that run on the platform — another way to get developers interested.

Metrics:

• Installs
• Uninstalls
• Impressions
• Viral channel usage and success (clicks on notifications, invites, etc., installs coming from those locations)
• API usage (frequency of API usage)
• Ability to segment this info based on location, gender, age range, etc.

And here are the APIs as presented by MySpace at Le Web last fall (you can see the full thing below):

• Real-time stream: Get the full stream in real-time pushed to your site.
• Status and mood commenting: Get MySpace status updates and moods to your site, and allow your users to comment from your site, with those comments appearing back in the MySpace Stream.
• Open search: Allow searching people by name or email address, with filtering/narrowing search results by gender, age, and location.
• Photo Upload: Easily allow users to upload photos into MySpace from your sites or MySpace Apps, and vice versa.
• Share on MySpace (a feature formerly called PostTo): Posting to MySpace is a simple way for MySpace users to share content from their favorite websites into the MySpace stream.

It is also updating its implementation of the OpenSocial platform standard to 0.9. This includes updates to the OpenSocial Markup Language (OSML) and communication channels for data

• Activity Publishing Into MySpace: Allow users to show activities from your site in the MySpace Stream for quick, secure, and easy sharing with friends
• App updates: Multi-User App Activity — send invites up to 20 people at a time
• App Activity: visible to friends regardless of if they have the app installed
• App Notifications: now appear in users’ mail center

Sure, tower defense games are fun, but they are a dime a dozen. However, what if you could combine the automated ease of such a game with the pacing and resource management of a real-time strategy game? Oh wait, you can! Space Station: Frontier, a relatively young iPhone app from Origin8 Technologies does just that. The OpenFeint-powered title forces players to carefully pick and choose what to build, when to upgrade, and how much they should start praying as wave after wave of hostile aliens seek to destroy humanity’s hope.

Basically, Earth is out of resources and it’s up to the player to mine asteroids for raw materials. Problem is, you are light years away from home and there is a race of less than hospitable aliens that want you out. To make matters worse, they have a rather sizable armada to throw at you, and this space station of yours is for mining, not battle.

The game is broken up into two major categories of play: Survival and Mining. While these both become mini-games, they are what make up the app’s campaign mode. Through a simple tutorial, players learn about the three basic elements of Frontier which consists of energy, miners, and weapons as they either survive for X amount of time or mine Y amount of materials. Since the space station itself cannot move, energy nodes must be built to extend how far structures can reach. The initial node is placed and powered by the space station, and the player spider-webs them out into a network of defenses and mining facilities.

Each node can only hold four attachments, so already there is not only a limitation on resources but space as well. Once nodes are in place, defenses and miners can be attached. Miners will automatically recover resource from nearby asteroids and defenses will automatically attack anything in range.

Here’s the catch: Without power, nothing works, so players must not only build a defense network to defend the central station but power nodes as well. One breach, and it could be lights out for half your grid. This is made further complicated by the fact that difficulty does begin to ramp up drastically once you start feeling complacent. What is nice, however, is that players are given enough time to make tactical decisions due to early warnings that notify the location of incoming enemies, in addition to formulating strategies as they apply to the balance of weapons, power, and mining.

To add further depth, players will earn credits from completing campaign missions or from the Survival and Mining mini-games. These credits are then used to purchase new weapons and upgrades such as a tactical nuke for dealing with swarms of fighters, or lasers for intercepting missile. Furthermore, with the campaign difficulty increases, making use of these other modes to gather money for new technology actually becomes very important.

Honestly, the only complaint to be had with Space Station: Frontier is minor at best in that many of the weapons and enemies look very similar. Of course, with the utter chaos that ensues as levels go on, it is hardly something most users will worry about.

Frontier is easy to learn and difficult to master, which means you won’t get tired of it fast. It is further bolstered through social features powered by OpenFeint. Of course, this means leaderboards, but worth noting is that unlike other iPhone games that make use of such social platforms, Space Station: Frontier has a very impressive number of achievements to earn and show off.

The game has only been out since late December, so it hasn’t seen a lot of ratings from users yet. Part of the reason is likely the $2.99 price tag, which, while inexpensive in the grand scheme of things, probably deters a lot of users that come across it. That said, however, this is an app that is more than worth the cost and, quite frankly, as fun as most fully priced PC games. Granted, it doesn’t have quite the longevity of a $50 game, but Space Station: Frontier is more than good enough to have that potential, and could easily be something great with such a scale.

Social Gaming Network has just gone through a management shuffle. Chief operating officer Randy Breen, a gaming industry veteran who joined the company earlier this year, is the new chief executive. Founder and outgoing chief executive Shervin Pishevar is now the executive chairman.

The company has started as a Facebook game developer but has spent the last year or so focused on iPhone games. Those games have been downloaded 15 million times, the company says, and are on approximately one in every three iPhones.

Nonetization on the iPhone had until last fall relied on selling apps or running ads on them. But SGN and other iPhone gaming companies have a new and potentially big way of making money. Apple made it possible, starting in October, to sell virtual goods within free applications. SGN has since released virtual items for sale in free versions of some of its titles, including flight simulators F.A.S.T. and Skies of Glory. This year, it and other companies could see a lot of new revenue as a result.

Cards, strategy, role-playing — each of these genres have very distinct features to them, and while games have often used elements from two out of three, it is rare that all of them get thrown into one melting pot. But they have been, in BitRhymes‘ Facebook app, The Warlords. Though it is a game that starts out virtually identical to card strategy titles like Warstorm, this little creation had a few unexpected surprises in store.

Also notable: BitRhymes is one of the larger developers on MySpace but so far hasn’t had much of a presence on Facebook.

The Warlords really did feel like an identical clone to Warstorm when starting out. Players select a hero card to lead a squad and five normal cards to fill it. They then proceed into an automatic bought where their choices are put to the test, performing based on stats such as speed, attack, and health (which is printed on the card). Truth be told, if you played Warstorm, then you’ve played this part of the game, but upon finishing the initial tutorial, The Warlords turned into something else most familiar.

This app actually plays like most Facebook RPGs (complete with Energy and Stamina to perform actions) rather than just a strategy card game. Players are able to jump into four different sets of quests. The core set is dubbed “The Chronicles of Fergon,” and make up the central storyline of the game. Players proceed through them using the squads they have formed and battle opposing decks automatically. As they complete such quests, they are rewarded with experience, coins, and the occasional new card.

Beyond the Chronicles, players can also engage in Treasure Quests, The Oracle’s Temple, and Monster Quests. The first is your typical Facebook RPG quest that requires X,Y, and Z item to begin and is completed merely by clicking “Do Quest” (assuming you have enough Energy). As for the other two: The Oracle’s Temple seems to be a simple quiz type of deal where players help out a “new warlord” by helping them pick out the proper cards (i.e. choosing the card with the highest attack power), while Monster Quests are quests that require card battles and multiple completions within a limited span of time (i.e. 48 hours).

As a matter of fact, Monster Quests, makes for one of the most interesting features. Doing the quest one time takes a decent amount of energy and only completes it by a small percentage. However, you can ask your allies to help you reach 100% completion with experience and gold earned based on the amount contributed.

Of course, Warlords comes with your standard RPG elements as well. This includes Battles against other players, Properties that can be bought for steady income, and the Oracle for earning and using virtual currency through offers.

Now, as far as the card strategy itself goes, it does seem to have some decent depth. As with Warstorm, most cards have special attributes to them such as “attacks a random enemy” or “deals double damage to cavalry,” thus building your deck carefully becomes very important. Furthermore, Warlords also has a few special cards that affect all others in play, such as the Log Barrier, that have no attack but reduce the damage taken by friendly units by one.

Yet Warlords feels like it doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. As part RPG and part card strategy, there is a clash in pacing. This isn’t helped by the high energy cost to do quests, but even without it, players only get to see a few battles and a few units before they have to wait for energy or stamina to recharge.

Understandably, most social games are only meant to have a few minutes of game play, but for a strategic card game, it is better to allow them to see more of what they can do. Also, as a card game, collection is a big deal too, but because of the slow speed of progression, the only way to get more cards is via purchase, but even then you are limited to only one or two per standard play period. In short, there isn’t enough reward to keep the player going and keep them going.

In the end, BitRhymes is trying to fit the concepts of card collection and strategy into a traditional RPG rule set, and so far it doesn’t feel like it’s working. With just under a million monthly active users, the game is doing okay, but the cards just don’t feel as important as the RPG element, and that likely isn’t the goal the developers had in mind. RPGs are usually slow, yes, but why does this one have to be? True, Facebook users shy away from the very new, but is it not possible to make something feel the same, but still play different?