Inside Social Games

This week’s crop of emerging games on Facebook is showing strong gains, higher on average than we’ve seen for several weeks. Each Friday, we source this list from AppData to show fast-growing games that still have fewer than a million players.

And, somewhat unusually, two of the top games are foreign: Okey Oyna is a Turkish social game, while Capitales del mundo! is in Spanish, and has to do with learning world capitals. You’ll also spot a few Chinese-language games on the list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Okey Oyna	615,426	+433,066	+70.37
2.	Roulette Madness	674,511	+426,778	+63.27
3.	Capitales del mundo!	417,043	+345,884	+82.94
4.	Tiki Resort	613,378	+338,504	+55.19
5.	Poker Madness	637,020	+284,849	+44.72
6.	Funflow	562,407	+252,157	+44.84
7.	VIP Challenge	356,940	+245,676	+68.83
8.	Bubble Island	507,703	+244,301	+48.12
9.	Mahjongg Dimensions	400,042	+194,804	+48.70
10.	Enchanted Island	434,004	+188,209	+43.37
11.	Jewel Puzzle 2	308,492	+184,640	+59.85
12.	Collect Roses	494,110	+175,433	+35.50
13.	Jumping Dog	374,632	+168,264	+44.91
14.	SuperPocus	560,688	+159,048	+28.37
15.	快打之王	654,065	+155,261	+23.74
16.	Farkle 2	416,135	+153,051	+36.78
17.	Absolute Solitaire	245,845	+143,286	+58.28
18.	Fashion City	320,947	+136,587	+42.56
19.	The Crazies Tower Defense	201,593	+129,189	+64.08
20.	主題學校	417,081	+126,229	+30.26

Number two is Roulette Madness, and as you might expect, it’s a pretty straightforward roulette game. That doesn’t mean it’s low quality, as the roulette wheel is crisp and well-animated; other visual elements closely resemble Zynga’s Texas HoldEm Poker. An even closer resemblance might be found in Poker Madness, at number five; it’s by the same developer. Various other games are also linked into Roulette and Poker, although it’s not clear if they all have the same ownership.

Tiki Resort was recently released by Playdom. The game is an entry into the “social tycoon” category, and so far it’s a success, although our own testing found that it’s a bit simplistic, focusing more on decorating an island than interesting gameplay.

Bubble Island is growing well; we reviewed the bubble-breaking game at its launch three weeks ago. And last Friday we wrote about the release of Mahjongg Dimensions, based on a traditional Chinese tile game, by Arkadium. So far, that game is on track to reach the million users its developer said it would have in March.

Down the list a bit you’ll spot SuperPocus, by Slide, whose SPP Ranch! Top Fish both recently graduated to over a million monthly average users. Look for a post later today in which we’ll explain how Slide has managed to grow its apps so quickly of late.

And even further down, in the next to last place, is The Crazies Tower Defense, yet another game that we recently reviewed. Keep an eye on this one — it’s not only based on an upcoming movie that may turn out to be a hit, it’s also a pretty solid entry in the tower defense genre.