Casinos are increasingly interested in Facebook. Following last month’s partnership between Harrah’s Interactive and Playdom to launch WSOP Poker on the social network, the Las Vegas-based Golden Nugget brand of casinos and hotels has brought on Last Legion Games for a branded Facebook title, Golden Nugget Vegas Casino.

Gold Nugget is certainly a game that’s more visually pleasing then many virtual spaces, with its display of lights, character, and overall atmosphere. More than that, however, its social interaction is a step above the rest — even if reminiscent of a prior title from RockYou, My Casino. All the same, Golden Nugget does suffer from some usability problems and holds an art style that many may not care for.

Like most virtual space oriented applications, the objective of Golden Nugget Vegas Casino is more or less whatever the player makes of it. If one had to give it a label, however, it would be to build up a successful casino.

Doing so is easy enough, as the players can make income from a very wide variety of casino games. First and foremost, this is where the game stands out most. Unlike others of its ilk, there is just about every Vegas game one can think of, including Red Sushi Bonsai Express Slots, Golden 21 Blackjack, and Spin Cycle Roulette. Moreover, as the player levels up, others unlock including dice at the bar, video poker, craps, and a boat load more.

Each game has three elements as well: Operation Cost, Run Time, and Revenue. It isn’t enough to merely purchase a game, but players must actually pay money to keep it up and running, with the higher revenue machines costing more. Of course, the higher cost also means that the machine will run for longer. For example, the Red Sushi slots will only run for 30 seconds, while Calamity Jane Poker runs for 24 hours. Once the time is expired, the profits must be collected right away or they will decrease, and the game will earn no further income until reactivated.

Another interesting aspect to the games is a feature called “Luck.” The more one operates their machines and tables, the more this statistic goes up, and the higher it is, the more coins one earns from their various games.

Luck can also be increased by visiting friends’ casinos. In fact, this is where the social elements take a step above the rest, creating a whole other level to game play. Like in My Casino, players can actually play the different games their friends have set up, betting the money they have on hand. However, whereas the RockYou app only had one game to play, Golden Nugget has a trove of them. They’re not all active yet (though likely, they will be at some point), but currently players can participate in roulette, dice, blackjack, poker, video poker, slots, and probably a few more we haven’t found yet.

This is, however, where some of the usability issues come into play. When one clicks on the machine or table, the mini-game does not immediately pop up — the player’s avatar has to walk over to it, which one might not realize in a busy casino. A bigger problem comes from in-game purchases. Bigger and better décor and games are gated by level, but players can’t even see what will be available in the future. Unfortunately, players might think the game just doesn’t have much to buy (we did), without which there’s no obvious reason to play more and earn specific rewards.

As for visuals, the environment looks great with all the style, flashing lights, and moving objects. The characters themselves have a bobble-headed, stretched face isn’t particularly appealing. Thankfully, there’s at least a wide variety of them walking in and out of the casino, although all have just three basic animations: stand, walk, and cheer.

All in all, Golden Nugget Vegas Casino is a pretty amusing game, and a welcome change from the constant stream of farming clones. Granted, it does have some rough edges still, but the core concept and the Golden Nugget brand really do help to differentiate it quite a bit. Whether that will resonate with players remains to be seen; it has about 48,000 monthly active users, but only 1,522 that return on a daily basis.

In the new world of social and mobile gaming, one character is mostly missing from the new mix of developers, marketers and service firms: the game publisher. Without the high production costs and rigid distribution hierarchies of the traditional gaming industry, companies that brand and publish games created by others have seemed like they might be a third wheel.

Aside from a few counter-examples, like 6 Waves, successful social game companies have typically developed and publish their own games.

Zattikka is out to change that. Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of the company — it’s based in the United Kingdom, and has only been around for a year. But it also has $5.5 million in fresh funding, co-founders who previously headed Virgin Interactive and Rambler Media, and plans to raise between $50 million and $100 million for its publishing model.

The main connection between Zattikka and Silicon Valley is Joel Breton, the newly-hired head of North American operations. Breton, who was previously director of content at MTV’s portal, Addicting Games, will be looking for teams of developers to work with.

Breton’s focus is wide: he’s looking for online, social or mobile games to publish. The key is finding startups that have the right expertise, but need enough money to get their ideas off the ground. “The publisher is there to provide funding and backing so that the team doesn’t have to throw all its resources into one game,” says Breton.

Some have discounted the idea of publishers on Facebook or mobile platforms because there’s less of a defensible position for them — Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins, for example, told us in a recent interview that EA’s ability to lock up the early game publishing market depended on its control of shelf space in physical stores.

Obviously, there’s no direct equivalent to shelves in virtual markets. Breton, though, points out that there are still plenty of startups that not only need money to build their game, but can’t handle marketing or promotion once it’s done. “It’s on a different scale from an Ubisoft or Electronic Arts right now, but I think with the growth this market is experiencing, when we get down the road we might see that publishing for social network games really starts to pop,” he says.

Within the next couple of weeks, Breton will be setting up Zattikka’s new office in San Francisco and starting to look for his first external partners. Zattikka’s first round of funding has also just closed, so the company will soon be back on the fundraising trail, he says.

The folks at TeamLava are expanding their repertoire of social iDevice titles with the recent launch of their new city-builder, City Story, for both the iPhone and iPad.

Adapting many of the mechanics found it the developer’s popular Farm Story application, City Story also resembles its Facebook counterparts. But despite being quite similar to games like Playdom’s Social City, City Story feels like it has even greater social potential than some Facebook games. It has succeeded so far on those merits, being the current #2 app on Apple’s top free iPad app list, and #5 for the iPhone. All the same, it’s far from a perfect game, with some unfortunate issues stemming from a very low progression curve.

Like all city-builders, the object of the game is to create a thriving, bustling city. The core game play is no different than any other social version, save being on a mobile device. The success of one’s city is broken up into two major elements: Population and Happiness.

These two statistics translate into three major types of structures that can be created: residences, businesses, and decorations. As one would expect, residences build up one’s populace. The higher the population, the more happiness is required, which comes from businesses like schools, cafes, and shops, as well as decorative elements such as parks and roads. Larger, more effective buildings will also become available as players level up.

The big issue with this population vs happiness mechanic, however, is there does not appear to be any real reason to concern oneself with either stat. It is possible that one would be unable to increase population should happiness be too low, but due to a very low difficulty/progression curve, the issue never presented itself. Also, once a building is placed, its value appears to be set, with no forward effect. In Social City, every house continually produced more population while businesses produced small amounts of income. However, the former could not be done without enough happiness. That does not appear to be the case here.

In City Story all revenue stems from contracts, fulfilled at factory structures, that take a period of time (a few minutes to a few days) to complete and will expire if not “harvested,” so to speak, after they finish. Moreover, as one levels up, more factories will be available for construction and better, more lucrative, contracts as well.

Despite the importance of revenue in the game, it’s almost pointless early on. When starting out, players are given a moderate amount of land in which to build upon, as well as an almost absurd amount of starting money. This suggests a progression problem. In less than 15 minutes or so, it was possible to fill the entire virtual space with structures and décor and still make it look quite good. At that point, there was nothing more to really strive for.

This potential flaw is mitigated slightly by unlocking expansions, but by then, starting money is more or less gone, and factory income will take some time, leaving users with the very little to do.

Eventually, the players will only be able to expand with virtual currency or the use of in-game money and a set number of neighbors. Luckily, neighbors aren’t hard to come by in City Story, as players can interact with the whole of the community, and after creating a Storm8 ID, can add any other players as neighbors.

Of course, if players don’t wish to add random people as neighbors, the social features of City Story still shine, for they can visit any other person’s city and help them out by cleaning up to five buildings a day (10 if they are a neighbor). For the player being helped out, they will receive a claimable bonus to income and experience, Additionally, helping others out will also earn the user Star Ratings.

Like in Farm Story, when players visit the social tab of the game, a list of random individuals appear that can be visited. The higher one’s Star Rating, the higher the chance that they will appear first in that list, effectively improving one’s growth in the game. In addition to this, players can also send messages and comment on each others’ walls within the app.

As if there were not enough social elements to City Story already, the game also has Facebook Connect integrated into it. With it, users can take photographs of their and other users’ cities and not only save them to their iDevice, but post them to the social network as well.

Overall, City Story is not a bad game, with a design that’s quite visually satisfying when one builds up their city. Unfortunately, it is so easy to progress early on that it’s easy to feel that the game’s possibilities have been prematurely exhausted. Honestly, it just gets boring once the space is full, and while the social features of the app are phenomenal, we wonder whether or not that will be enough.

Three months ago, Zynga Beijing was created with the acquisition of XPD Media, a small developer in the Chinese capital. Now its first product is out, a translation of Zynga’s Texas HoldEm Poker for the Chinese-language markets.

Right now, those only include Taiwan and Hong Kong, because Facebook is mostly banned in China itself. Other reports incorrectly state that Zynga’s game will be available in China.

Combined, Taiwan and Hong Kong account for 11 million of Facebook’s 500 million users, as measured by our data service Inside Facebook Gold. This morning, we looked into Taiwan’s user demographics and found that its users, many of whom visit Facebook for the games, tend to be in their mid-twenties — not a bad market for Zynga to tap into.

But a potential base of 11 million users, whether good gamers or not, isn’t enough to swing the needle for Zynga, which still has over 200 million monthly active users. Further, Zynga is going up against established titles like Boyaa’s 德州撲克 (translated, simply Texas Hold’em Poker), which is Facebook’s largest Chinese-language game with 3.2 million users (we looked at it and two others this morning).

So at best, Zynga can expect a few million users for its localized version of Texas HoldEm. Zynga probably isn’t trying to capture a lot of users at this point, though.

The Chinese version of Texas Hold’em is the company’s first localized game ever, and as such likely serves two purposes. The first is as a tester to see how worthwhile it is to localize big games like Texas Hold’em for any foreign market.

Second, the release should give Zynga a better idea of how its games will do with Chinese-language users, for a potential advance into mainland China at a later date. Doing so is quite difficult, as foreign companies need a Chinese partner with some ownership interest.

As with Zynga’s acquisition of Conduit Labs, announced this morning, the company didn’t offer any official statement.

In the wake of the World Cup, there are still a few soccer-oriented titles popping up around Facebook. The latest to be released is the soccer management sim, Soccer Tycoon from Dynamo Games.

Similar in some respects to the successful Bola soccer title from Three Melons/Playdom, this app takes on a more tycoon-game approach, making team management feel almost secondary.

Overall, the game is solid. The questions are more about the market potential. World Cup timing aside, it may skew too far away from any actual soccer-playing to be attractive to fans of sports games. And it may be too sports-themed for people who prefer other types of tycoon titles.

The matches themselves are simple enough. Players are pitted against random opponents (presumably non-player teams) and a match will play out automatically, displaying a skippable, jumbo-tron visual of what’s happening. You get a little control before the match, though. You can view the overall skill level of both teams, and a blurb of notes from their NPC manager, suggesting how to play.

Users can select a team strategy to employ such as Stonewall, That’ll Do, Crowd Pleaser, etc. Unfortunately, these look to not visibly affect the outcome of the game itself, but rather, they augment the amount of coin and fans (experience) earned for a win, loss, or draw. Moreover, as one levels, new, “better” strategies become available.

There is a risk associated with higher level strategy, however. First off, the team only has a set amount of energy, and higher strategies consume more (once it reaches zero, it must slowly recharge over long periods of time). In addition to this, there are increased risks of injury or red card bans.

Injuries and bans are where Soccer Tycoon tends to take a different approach in that players can sort of manage their team. From an in-game shop, players can purchase first aid to heal injured players and legal appeals and bribes to reinstate banned ones.

Player training also follows this same route. Rather than doing exercises, trading players, or buying new contracts “training aides” are purchased and applied to them. These increase that player’s skill by a set amount and, in turn, makes them more effective in games. Also, as a side note, energy can be refilled as well with items purchased from the shop using both virtual currency and in-game currency.

In-game currency is where the tycoon aspects of this application comes into play. Though matches earn the largest chunk of change, players can further increase their earnings by building up and decorating their virtual stadium. The term “decorating” has to be used loosely, however, as everything one constructs is placed in a set spot. Nonetheless, the field itself and its surroundings can be upgraded with seating, trees, lighting, and so on. These are more than just for aesthetic appeal as well, for they increase the amount of income earned when playing a match.

Another tycoon aspect to increasing revenue is a rather wide variety of concessions and attractions that can be built around the outlying lands as well. These consist of burger stands, drink vendors, and even hotels and casinos. Passively, these structures earn the player money, and must have their stock refilled periodically (for free) by the player. Furthermore, they can be replaced or upgraded at anytime.

Initially, only four of these money-making buildings can be constructed, but players can expand their real estate at the cost of virtual currency or five friends and a chunk of in-game coins.

While on the topic of social elements, these mostly consist of leaderboards and visiting one another’s virtual spaces. As per the typical, visiting also entails the “helping” of a friend by clicking a help button when some random event is happening to their space. On a more useful note, friends can also play each other in friendly matches once a day to earn a chunk of change, and doing so did not appear to drain any energy, thus making multiple friends prudent for a budding soccer entrepreneur.

Soccer Tycoon is a fun game but on the negative side of things, players might be surprised by the lack of soccer-playing. There is no real training and nothing that really says “soccer,” or sports for that matter, other than the theme. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it may lead to a number of disappointed potential players.

Conversely, its heavy tycoon elements will appeal more to the wider portion of non-soccer fans. Unfortunately, these players may not be heavy sports game fans (very few sports titles have done well on Facebook), and thinking this is another one, they may flat out ignore it. Moreover, when the World Cup came around, there was a massive boom in soccer titles, as people less interested in the sport became so. Now, with it long past, that enthusiasm is gone so these noted players are even less likely to try.

In the end, Soccer Tycoon is a pretty good game as is, yet it still has features coming down the pipe. It’s an app that is technically sound and with no significant game play complaints. All the same, the biggest issue stems from premise and timing.

[Editor's Note: The following article presents analysis and data excerpted from Inside Facebook Gold, our research and data membership service tracking Facebook's traffic growth and demographic landscape in global markets. It was originally published on Inside Facebook.]

Each month, we’ve been digging up and reporting on the application demographics for international markets, focusing on Facebook’s biggest countries. For the past two months that has meant the United Kingdom and Canada, which are relatively similar to the United States.

Today, though, we’re looking a bit further afield, to Taiwan — a small island nation off China’s coast that nevertheless sends seven million monthly active users to Facebook (and that’s out of a total of 15.1 million Internet users in the country, according to 2008 estimates from the CIA).

Taiwan provides an interesting case study on East Asia’s social networkers. Although its users no doubt like to “stay connected to family and friends,” as Facebook’s motto proclaims, the real motivation for many to join Facebook, and return day after day, is the platform’s popular social games.

Not just “Facebook users,” the Taiwanese are first and foremost social game players; we get the distinct impression that if Facebook weren’t the platform, users would still find a way to connect to their favorite social games elsewhere. Thus, Taiwan gives a more accurate view than most other countries in that region of what the average social game user looks like, and how they engage with social properties on the Web. Due to both that difference and cultural variations, Taiwanese user demographics for games are sometimes quite different from nearly identical games in the West.

We chose three games for our sample: 德州撲克 (Texas Hold’em Poker) by Boyaa, 開心農場 (Happy Farm) by Five Minutes, and 開心 Lounge Bar by Happy Elements. These three play much like their poker-playing, farming and restaurant sim counterparts in the US, like FarmVille, Zynga’s Texas HoldEm Poker, and Restaurant City.

Unlike the American versions of those games, though, which often bring in many older users, Taiwan’s average age for all three games is impressively close, coming in at around 27:

(A note on methodology: to arrive at the average age, we used the means of each age group we measured.)

Another significant difference from Western app demographics comes up when comparing the gender distribution. While popularity between males and females did vary slightly between each app, they all showed fairly even splits where Taiwanese users were concerned.

It’s often said that the average social game player in the US is female and in her 40s. By contrast, Taiwan’s demographics suggest that Asia’s app users will be much younger, and include members of either sex — useful knowledge for both developers and marketers looking to reach certain groups.

Of course, averages can also be misleading. Our data on age splits for each of the three games, across six age groups shows some stratification in age distribution of Texas Poker players, while other games like Happy Farm, are seeing more even distributed. Complete data for this story is available via Inside Facebook Gold.

In the US and most other Western countries, farming games draw nearly twice as many women as men. Here, men have actually edged women out, 50.2 percent to 49.1 percent. Where women rule is in the more nightlife-themed game Happy Lounge Bar.

Some stereotypes do persist across cultures, though. Take note of the greater number of men playing poker, some 61.7 percent; Zynga’s own Texas HoldEm isn’t much different, at about 67 percent male to female (data for many more apps is available to AppData subscribers).

For companies hoping to work in Asia, it will be important to keep the subtleties of the audience in mind. As demonstrated above, there are significant variations in some user behaviors and relatively little in others; we’ll return to the subject in future posts to further define those differences.

The above analysis presents a sampling of the data that’s available through Inside Facebook Gold, Inside Network’s research and data membership service. Inside Facebook Gold also includes monthly global traffic stats, demographic data for over 15 of Facebook’s top country markets, and data on the site’s top languages worldwide. To learn more or join the membership, please visit Inside Facebook Gold.

In its fifth acquisition of the year, Zynga has bought Conduit Labs, the developer of Super Dance and Music Pets. Fittingly, Conduit will become Zynga’s fifth American office, taking the name Zynga Boston.

The Conduit acquisition looks quite similar to Zynga’s buyout of Challenge Games in June, with that company being renamed Zynga Austin. Challenge, like Conduit, started with good prospects and interesting ideas, but didn’t produce any huge hits on Facebook.

It’s fairly clear that Zynga bought Challenge for its talent, not its games. In less than two months, Challenge’s games have declined precipitously; its biggest, Warstorm, went from 560,170 monthly active users on June 2nd to 152,261 today.

Conduit may have been anticipating this acquisition for a while. Its first effort, the music site Loudcrowd, was shut down on July 29th, according to its homepage. Music Pets has evidently received little promotion, already having fallen from an April high of 1.2 million users to 362,053 today. That title was also the last released by Conduit, all the way back in February. [Update: Conduit writes on its company blog that both Music Pets and Super Dance will be shut down.]

However, it seems unlikely that all of Conduit’s efforts to date will go to waste. The company’s games stood out for their music-focused design, which incorporated licensed content from some some of the biggest names in pop.

Licensing music from the record majors isn’t easy, but Conduit put special effort into hiring former music industry execs and building connections. The company also has several designers who worked on Rock Band.

Could Zynga use this talent? You bet. While Conduit’s titles didn’t become particularly large, Zynga won’t have missed the example of Nightclub City, another music-heavy game, which was built by MyTown creator Booyah. That game has now reached 6.5 million monthly active users, growth that CEO Keith Lee told us came more from word of mouth between music fans than advertising.

Zynga’s pace of new releases this year has been molasses slow, with only FrontierVille, Treasure Isle, and the ill-fated Poker Blitz appearing since January. But we’re fairly certain that it won’t have its new studios sitting on their hands, either.

One more interesting detail about Conduit: its CEO, Nabeel Hyatt, founded [ed.: correction, see comments below] was a founding member of a cross-promotion effort for small social game developers called Applifier this May. We hear that Applifier has become quite successful — so much so that Hyatt relinquished his leadership role to Jussi Laakkonen, another founder and now CEO, a couple months ago. Hyatt could also bring some interesting perspective on promotion to Zynga.

Before Playdom was bought by Disney, we got into the habit of listing out its previous acquisitions each time it made a new one, to help keep track. Here’s the 2010 list for Zynga, excluding Conduit:

• Serious Business in February
• XPD Media in May
• Challenge Games in June
• Unoh in August

For the Conduit Labs acquisition, the investors were Charles River Ventures, Prism VentureWorks, and possibly other, unknown investors. Conduit had raised $8.5 million since its founding in 2007.

Every mobile phone carrier and manufacturer in the world is trying to reproduce Apple’s iPhone; that much is obvious. But are they also trying to anticipate Apple’s moves in software? Yes, at least according to Scoreloop CEO Marc Gumpinger.

Scoreloop is a social platform for mobile phone games, providing leaderboards and other social features to downloadable games. What makes it stand out from a competitor like OpenFeint or Plus+ is that it sells a white-label version of its platform to anyone that wants it. Today, that’s a major Taiwanese carrier called Chunghwa Telecom.

Tomorrow, it could be any other carrier in the world — or all of them. Gumpinger says he’s talking to firms around the world. However, he’s willing to credit Apple, which is planning a mobile social effort called Game Center, as much as his own company.

“Apple Game Center has alerted everyone from operators to OEMs that there needs to be some focus on gaming,” says Gumpinger. “It’s pretty obvious that the success you’re seeing on Facebook is moving to mobile. But in mobile there’s none of the infrastructure that developers are used to on Facebook.”

While the iPhone itself will have Game Center, other phones will need some equivalent. Android may eventually get one, depending on Google’s social plans. But in the meantime, Gumpinger says that mobile carriers are starting to see a social platform as a way to show value to their customers.

“What the operators are looking for is a deeper relationship with their subscribers,” says Gumpinger. “[The companies] need to offer their customers something they really want. Games turn out to be the most interesting market to re-establish end user relationships.”

Down the road, that may mean that each mobile carrier has its own social network that gamers sign into when they start playing. That could result in a fragmented market, but in its current form Scoreloop connects to various other networks including Facebook, and Gumpinger says that data on user activities is currently shared across all the white-labeled versions.

Scoreloop itself is getting pretty big. The company says it gets 100,000 new signups per day, driven mainly by Android gamers. That’s up significantly from May, when it claimed 300,000 per week (or about 43,000 daily).

Yesterday, game publisher Arkadium announced the addition of 20 new employees to its workforce of 80 people. But while Arkadium is usually still identified as a casual gaming company, all 20 will work in social gaming, along with some existing producers who have switched to social.

We talked to CEO Kenny Rosenblatt to learn why, when many Facebook developers say they’re looking for ways off the platform, Arkadium is looking for ways in.

Other casual developers have had trouble on Facebook because they don’t fully understand user metrics and the design process, according to Rosenblatt. “The importance of analytics and the notion of games as a service, an ongoing, iterative process of making your games better and better … a lot of companies didn’t realize how important those things were and gave up,” Rosenblatt says.

Now Arkadium has begun using its existing casual game network of six million users to as a testing ground to find the best candidates for Facebook. To help experienced casual producers understand how to build for Facebook, the company also has an internal “boot camp” that employees who are switching over can enter.

Arkadium is also building a platform, Arkadium Connect, to make it easier to place its games on Facebook, with built-in monetization and analytics. Although only for its own games for now, the platform will be opened to outside companies in three to six months, Rosenblatt says.

Overall, Arkadium seems happy with its progress so far on Facebook. Its biggest hit so far, the Chinese tile game Mahjongg Dimensions, hit a high of 1.5 million users and has since declined by a third, but Rosenblatt thinks it and similar games can become permanent fixtures on the network.

“That’s the myth we were looking to bust, that social games need to be built from the ground up to be social. That’s true to build a FarmVille, but we do think that popular game mechanics work on every platform,” says Rosenblatt. “We have a lot of evergreen games in our library that you can play over and over, and that’s what we think really lacks on Facebook right now.”

And, at the end of the day, Facebook is the place to be, even for avowed casual game companies. “I understand that there’s this reliance on Facebook and people are scared of that, but that’s where the users are,” says Rosenblatt.

Earlier this year, the folks over at Watercooler (now Kabam) and Sport Illustrated released a Facebook version of fantasy football for the short spring football season. With the fall 2010 NFL season getting ready to start up, SI Fantasy Football, presented by GMC and Finish Line, has reappeared in its latest incarnation. It’s a simple enough app to learn, with a lot of familiar features for all the fantasy football players out there.

Obviously, the biggest concern with a fantasy football title is the sea of other clones and imitators circulating the web. However, SI Fantasy Football does manage to stand out with what the developers claim is the first, and only, multiplatform rendition, not only designed around social mechanics, but playable on Facebook, SI.com, and any mobile device.

Starting out, players have two choices. They may either start their own league, or join an existing one. If the league is public, anyone can join so long as space is available (20 people is the max), and should it be private, the creator has exclusive invitation rights. From here, it’s all fairly straightforward as a date will be set for a “draft” and players will pick and choose who they want for their fantasy football team, so long as at least four teams are present.

Once that’s done, the team owners in each league face off against one another in head-to-head matches, and based on typical fantasy football rules, a winner is determined. To clarify these rules for anyone unfamiliar with fantasy football concepts: as drafted “virtual” players progress through real NFL games, their stats, such as yards rushing, passing touchdowns, sacks, etc., are translated to the virtual game. The better your draft picks do in reality, the better they do in cyberspace.

In addition to initial drafts, players also have to be aware of potential trades and free agents. Obviously, this requires a lot of monitoring of both what’s happening in the NFL as well as in your own SI Fantasy Football league, so Kabam has integrated a means to keep track of your team directly through a mobile phone. Since the game is in conjunction with Sports Illustrated, it also conveniently incorporates both NFL news with the fantasy football tips. It even has a downloadable “Fantasy Football Draft Kit” containing top 100 player profiles, position rankings, strategies, and even a mock draft.

Of all the game’s elements, the biggest differentiator is the fact that it is on Facebook. Traditionally speaking, fantasy football can be pretty hit or miss when it comes to social elements. Some people play just to play, while others like to rub their victories in other peoples’ faces. Well, it’s no different here, except that Facebook makes it exceedingly simple to do the latter, allowing players to share their fantasy going-ons, post trash talk to walls, and even take part in local discussion boards.

Overall, SI Fantasy Football doesn’t bring a lot of new concepts to the table, but it’s still an evolution of the game. In truth, building it out socially on Facebook seemed like a logical place for it to go in the first place, and now, fans can play the game, communicate with friends, and get some of their sports news all in one centralized location. Already the game is north of 117,000 monthly active users, and the NFL season hasn’t even started yet. How it will do, once it does, will be the real test.