It’s not often that a strategy game comes out on top on Facebook. But that’s what has happened this week, with Playdom’s new game Verdonia gathering the most new monthly active users of any emerging game on Facebook (meaning those under a million MAU).

We reviewed Verdonia right after Playdom stealthily released the game, finding a much deeper level of complexity than is standard even for most strategy games on Facebook. It’s most similar to Evony, which we recently found out has three quarters of a million players, about as many as Verdonia is reporting now.

Here’s the full AppData list of 20 games:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Verdonia	775,927	+763,669	+6,229.96
2.	Fashion World	934,094	+404,652	+76.43
3.	Zoo Kingdom	588,227	+246,149	+71.96
4.	Millionaire City	773,922	+240,746	+45.15
5.	Phrases	938,393	+145,907	+18.41
6.	Mahjong	777,658	+139,106	+21.78
7.	NanoStar Siege	639,776	+128,206	+25.06
8.	Maya Pyramid	197,270	+127,408	+182.37
9.	Sweet World	487,668	+115,916	+31.18
10.	Goooaaal	237,316	+112,921	+90.78
11.	- Clicks Racer Challenge	501,866	+101,291	+25.29
12.	Chocolatier: Sweet Society	217,563	+95,050	+77.58
13.	快樂島 主	309,785	+90,507	+41.28
14.	Funfari	605,924	+73,633	+13.83
15.	Age of Champions	765,964	+72,257	+10.42
16.	Epic Goal	142,364	+72,227	+102.98
17.	Super Dance	316,482	+71,149	+29.00
18.	航海傳 奇—— 一閃一閃亮晶晶，曉溪想要“五顆星”	187,167	+66,135	+54.64
19.	Classic Word Games	460,653	+63,311	+15.93
20.	Bubble Popp 2	517,075	+62,290	+13.70

There are a number of genre-based games to pick out. Fashion World is part of a mini-fad of store management games that we’re seeing; this one is about running a clothing store (for hipsters, by all appearances). It’s about to cross a million MAU. Sweet World and Chocolatier: Sweet Society are similar (we’ll review the second of those later this morning).

Next up is Zoo Kingdom, the first title from Blue Fang Games. Despite a profusion of zoo-themed games like Zoo World and Zoo Paradise, zoo-keeping seems to be a reliable category, in which we’ve seen several new developers test out their muscles. Zoo Kingdom has raised about half a million MAU over a month, with almost half coming from just the last week.

Millionaire City, a creative variation on the city building genre by Digital Chocolate, is doing quite well; a bit further down at number seven, you can also find NanoStar Siege, by the same developer. The latter title, a strategy, has been out for three months, but stopped gaining players for a significant portion of that time.

Mahjong is the latest version of the classic tile game, in yet another category that has a number of moderately successful titles. But we’ll end with Maya Pyramid, which, like Verdonia, is in a category yet to be fully mined on Facebook: in this case, puzzles. It’s actually a pretty interesting game, in which you have to make combinations to pass each stage and build your pyramid; failing to finish a round means you lose a life, at which point you either have to wait or buy another with virtual currency.