While many developers consider the farming genre to be yesterday’s news on Facebook, they may have to reevaluate when faced with the growth of FarmVille 中文版, the Zynga port of FarmVille to the Chinese-language market, and Farmandia, which has a mostly English-using userbase. This week’s AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook games by monthly active users shows the two games pulling in almost 1.4 million new MAU.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	CityVille	100,256,070	+3,678,154	+4%
2.	FarmVille 中文版	2,832,729	+823,326	+41%
3.	Farmandia	1,776,561	+567,823	+47%
4.	Monster Galaxy	5,503,284	+540,745	+11%
5.	GodsWar Online	848,335	+388,094	+84%
6.	It Girl	7,671,328	+362,992	+5%
7.	Texas HoldEm Poker	36,337,038	+332,647	+0.92%
8.	寵物戰爭	657,795	+300,872	+84%
9.	購物天堂	393,876	+256,586	+187%
10.	Casino City	2,235,754	+238,557	+12%
11.	Dragons of Atlantis	910,313	+201,637	+28%
12.	Texas HoldEm Poker – Deluxe ★★★★★★	754,209	+191,791	+34%
13.	Bingo Island	690,352	+188,272	+37%
14.	Mahjong Zen	1,688,821	+184,530	+12%
15.	Hero	1,133,791	+162,549	+17%
16.	YoVille	6,348,169	+158,118	+3%
17.	Mahjong Trails	1,945,942	+157,591	+9%
18.	Totally Spies! Fashion Agents	1,147,353	+138,373	+14%
19.	德州撲克(中文版)	6,313,617	+134,956	+2%
20.	Mynet Çanak Okey	1,621,459	+127,114	+9%

CityVille is still the overall leader with 3.7 million new MAU. But its growth has fallen to a couple hundred thousand MAU per day, and could slow more in the coming week, assuming Zynga doesn’t increase its ad spend.

However, Zynga is doing a great job at growing FarmVille 中文版, the significantly upgraded version of the original game, that it released for the Chinese market. The new FarmVille went more or less unnoticed by most; we first pointed it out on the day before Christmas, when few readers in their right mind were around to see. There’s just one potential problem: unlike other Chinese-language games, which typically display excellent stickiness, FarmVille 中文版’s is quite low, at around a 12 percent conversion of MAU to daily active users.

Going back to Farmandia, promotion also seems to be playing a role with this game. Developer Plarium is one of the top app publishers on Russian social network Odnoklassniki, but it has been growing steadily on Facebook since last August. About a week ago, growth in its top two apps (the other is Fashion City) kicked sharply upward.

Whatever promotion Plarium is engaging in is not enough to make an app grow alone, though. Farmandia looks and feels significantly different from other Facebook offerings; like FarmVille 中文版, it uses enlarged farm plots and avatars, in the Chinese style. It also appears to have dispensed with the concept of energy altogether, which rules most American social games.

Most of the remaining games on the list have appeared one or several times in recent weeks. The exception is 購物天堂, a Chinese-language game by SNSplus that was declining until recently. If you can follow the gameplay, it’s worth a look for its up-to-date design and resemblance to Hotel City and similar games.