Inside Social Games

Earlier in the week, we caught wind of Playfish’s coming title, Hotel City. At the time, the game was not actually available — just the beta stages, with little really known. However, we just got access. Here’s our review.

The game turns out to be very similar to our assumptions from a few days ago. Players are presented with a vertical cut-away of a budding hotel. Using a 2D interface, users are able to add new rooms of varying size to the overall structure, decorate them, and hire friends, as they attempt to build a growing hotel business. Obviously, there is a lot more to Hotel City than these generalities, and frankly, each element contains a fair amount of depth; affecting various parts of the game.

With any business-oriented title, income is always the most important. As expected, money is earned by having guests stay for a period of time within one of your guest rooms. Like any hotel, the amount earned is directly dependant on the size of the room being occupied. So, should a guest stay in, for example, the smallest “Budget Room,” they’ll pay one coin upon leaving. If they stay in the larger “Small Room,” they will pay three coins. Curiously, guests will stay in larger rooms for longer, so while they pay more money to stay in them, you go through more customers, faster, with smaller ones.

This actually makes for an interesting player choice that goes beyond larger rooms simply taking up more physical space. Does one try to use many small rooms and rely on high numbers of guests? Or do players attempt to go with quality over quantity? Either business model is viable, which is nice, but likely, most players will choose to build a fair number of the larger rooms due to the greater screen real estate available for decorations.

Like an older hotel game, Chinese title, Happy Hotel, décor is for more than just visual expression. In Happy Hotel, decorating a room leads to a higher cost of renting it for guests. However, in Hotel City, the level of quality your room is at directly affects the star rating your overall hotel receives (just like in real life).

Each room has an experience bar of sorts. As players add new items such as wallpaper, shelves, lamps, and so on, the bar fills up. As you completely fill up these bars, the star rating of the entire hotel gradually increases. Since hotels are only rated from one to five stars, the leveling of this rating appears to be invisible most of the time. Likely, the increase in star rating is exponential, and will require many fully decorated rooms to earn the maximum star rating. Currently, we are stuck at three.

As one might expect, the rating is directly linked to the number of guests that come to visit your hotel, so earning a high one is prudent. Unfortunately, building a hotel is a most expensive endeavor, and you only earn money from patrons so quickly. Thankfully, there are a few ways to increase profits.

Hiring your friends is the most effective long-term method to save on cash. However, in order to hire a friend, they must currently play Hotel City – a surprising change from Restaurant City which did not require them to. Luckily, if you don’t have friends who play as well, the game hires temporary staff computer players to work for a fee. It’s not a tremendous amount, but you must specify just how long they will work and pay all their wages in advance. Once the shift ends (which you can set to be anywhere from two to 48 hours), the hotel will close and a new shift will have to be started.

Another curious means of earning some extra money is by actually poking sleeping guests. You can only do it once per guest; try not to think about how weird that actually is. Nonetheless, sometimes nothing will happen; other times, they will get up, pay, and leave early; and other times, they will leave you a couple hundred coins.

Apparently, the game will also allow for the virtual currency Playfish Cash in addition to the ability to sell back items you bought. Unfortunately, as the game has just gone live and is in early beta, the virtual currency is currently unused and the sell back feature unavailable.

Now, in regards to the elements that are active, one of the best ones has to be the attempt to satisfy the customers. As each guest comes into the hotel, they will tell you what they want, and as the player increases in level (done passively as guests visit your hotel), they will demand more and more niceties. Some will ask for more décor, others will want a gym, and still others may want a night club or bar. These rooms are usually quite large, but will offer areas for multiple guests to enter and pay for.

Beyond the social element of hiring friends, players are also able to keep track of each other’s progress via the standard leaderboard system. As you’d expect, these can also be used to visit your friend’s hotels and earn a little bit of extra cash, daily, by clicking on a money bag that happens to by lying around. Granted, this doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense, and doesn’t really seem justified, but extra income is still extra income.

Overall, the game play complaints for Hotel City are currently minor, with the only significant one being the awkward scrolling the player has to do to see more of where they can place buildings. Beyond this, most of the characters feel very robotic in their movements and the staff does absolutely nothing except stand there. Moreover, the general art style seems a bit too cartoony. While prior Playfish games have incorporated a cartoon style, Hotel City seems almost like something from a bad Saturday morning cartoon. You will either love it or hate it.

Of course, most of these complaints are merely early beta issues, and many of them will likely see new iterations and fixes later down the line. In fact, the only legitimate disappointment, beyond the overlaying visual style, lies in the 2D interface. The isometric views and aesthetic value in games like Restaurant City was phenomenal, and while 2D works for something like Pet Society, when the users has a building filled with dozens of tiny rooms, it just starts to feel a bit… cluttered.

Visual complaints aside, Hotel City still makes for a fun experience. Furthermore, with its concept of having multiple rooms, many players will probably rejoice in the ability to more easily create a variety of styles to suit their tastes. Granted, there are minor issues here and there, but knowing Playfish, these will be hashed out sooner rather than later. That said, if you’re looking to feed your inner interior decorator, than this is an app you should check out… err… check in….

Zynga has been very quiet the last few months, after a string of big launches last fall. Its only game since PetVille in early December is Poker Blitz, which launched earlier this week but is not yet being promoted heavily (judging by its traffic numbers).

But now Zynga appears to be focusing the big trend of this past winter: SimCity-style city building games on Facebook.

The company has been running ads directing users to answer a few questions on social gaming, then offers them $75 in exchange for taking a 30 minute survey. Inside Social Games contributor Eric von Coelln spotted the ads yesterday, and noted that Zynga asks two question specifically about Playdom’s genre-leading Social City. The game has surged to 6.15 million monthly active users and 2.51 million daily active users in just a few weeks, according to AppData, our independent traffic measurement service.

The first is “How frequently do you currently play Social City” and the second is — quite specifically — “Into which of the following ranges does your current Social City level fall?”

Zynga is clearly trying to figure out just how much users are playing the game. These questions should tell the company a lot about the success of the game. If people play the game all the time and have reached higher levels, then Zynga will know it has a serious competitor. If most people say they barely play and are at low levels, Zynga can better discern if most of the traffic is coming from ads or other non-organic sources.

Either way, the company’s interest in city-building suggests it either has a title in the works already, or is about to start one. We haven’t seen any city-building trademarks come through for Zynga — although it has many others — so the name of the app is anyone’s guess. CityVille? TownVille? SimVille? Take your guesses in the comments.

With a recently-announced $5 million from Playdom, Argentina-based MetroGames is a healthy-looking smaller developer. And, despite a horde of other city-building games, including Playdom’s booming Social City, it has a strong city builder of its own, Towner.

This SimCity’esque application appeared at #12 on our most recent top DAU gainers list. It currently has around 190,000 daily active users, while its monthly active users currently tallies in at around 1.1 million. Growth seems to have taken off in late February — maybe it began spending some of its new funds on ads, at that point? In any case, here’s a closer look at the game.

It starts out about the same as any other city-builder. Users are presented with a grid of green space and are told to place House A into Spot B. Okay, fairly simple. As expected, part of the core play is to manage your income (earned passively via “rent” from structures) and create an aesthetically pleasing cityscape.

This is hardly ground-breaking, so Towners does add a few new elements to the game. This is where MetroGames takes a more farming-style game approach than some of its rivals. Players must periodically repair buildings every so often, as well as inaugurate them when their initial construction is complete. If you do not, rent is lost and the buildings “die” (are condemned).

This is an interesting concept, to say the least, but it does beg the question as to how well this will work outside farming applications. Granted, in the grand scheme of things, a digital house is no different than a digital crop. But they are certainly more expensive, which leads to a big repair cost should you, say, leave town for a week.

Perhaps it is mere doom-saying, but if it costs a ton of money to rebuild a city that looks like something out of The Road Warrior, many users may just as soon leave it and move on to a new game. At least with other city builders, the city can live without you.

Regardless, one element to Towners that is better than the competition is the prospect of resource management. Playdom’s Social City does well with players managing citizen happiness, money, and population, but that merely comes down to constructing leisure buildings, factories, and houses respectively.

While Social City resource management is very general, but it would seem the residents of Towners know a little bit more about what they want. Making them happy requires more than just random entertainment facilities and trees. Happiness is actually broken up into six categories: jobs, entertainment, security, fire stations, health, and education. In order for the population to be 100% happy, all six need to be at 100%, and the larger your city gets, the more of these categories’ corresponding structures (all of which are obvious; schools equals more education points, etc.) are needed.

Another interesting element to this app is that it actually makes use of a virtual currency called Towner Cash, as well as Facebook Credits. The Cash is used for expanding your city limits and a few decorations. In regards to the former, however, you can still expand for free based on the number of neighbors you have (friends that play too), but if you can’t get anyone to play with you, you will either need to spend some money, or slowly earn one Towner Cash at a time for every level up.

In regards to the decorations, these are obviously not required, so the need for Towner Cash is less prevalent. Not to be confused with decorations like trees – dubbed “Green Space” – this decorum consists of famous landmarks such as the Arc’De Triunf, a crashed UFO, or the Statue of Liberty. Curiously, some of these can also be purchased through Facebook Credits as well. Logically, this seems a bit odd, but perhaps it is a means to simply entice users that may have Credits lying about, to spend them, rather than buying a new virtual currency.

Another surprise to Towners, is that it doesn’t seem like the player can actually place their own roads. Maybe because the game is “Towners” – town, not city – this is justified, but the only road is one that circles the entire building space. The jury is still out on whether this is a good or bad design. It does alleviate some of the tediousness of placing and layout roads one grid space at a time, but being able to do so gives the player’s virtual space a little bit more uniqueness, and helps to make a city or town feel more complete.

Overall, Towners takes some interesting paths in constructing its city-builder. While it incorporates all of the standards, it does enough differently to stand out. That said, it’s not clear whether or not some of the features will have the effect the developer is hoping for. But so far, so good.

Social sports applications are some of the oldest and most literally “social” games on Facebook: Users compete with friends to do things like create fantasy sports leagues or pick winners for tournaments like the March Madness college basketball championships happening now. These apps can also be a more powerful way for more traditional sports companies to reach Facebook users.

And so, Yahoo is buying Citizen Sports, one of the leading social sports developers on Facebook, for an undisclosed amount. In the announcement press release, Yahoo describes how the company will fit in with its destination site, Yahoo Sports:

Yahoo! Sports’ content will be integrated into [Citizen Sports' products], creating a seamless experience for sports fans wherever they are. On Yahoo! Sports, users will be able to broadcast their allegiances, create or join a conversation with friends and fans and cheer for their teams through Citizen Sports’ applications.

Citizen Sports currently has 719 applications (many for specific teams) on Facebook, according to our independent measurement service, AppData, for a total of 1.51 million monthly active users and 156,000 daily active users. It appears to have an early lead over rivals CBS and Watercooler, in terms of traffic to its March Madness bracket app. Yahoo Sports had 39 million monthly unique users in the US last month, according comScore — funneling these users into Citizen Sports’ apps will lead to more traffic on Facebook.

AllThingsD, which broke the story yesterday, reports that the startup raised $10 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partners Kevin Compton and Doug Mackenzie, through a separate investment vehicle, Radar Ventures. It used to be known as ProTrade, the virtual sports stock market, before it changed its name and product line and started building social apps a couple years ago.

Playfish has been quiet in recent months, but it’s now working on a new title called Hotel City. The game is live, but in the early beta stages, so we’ll be saving a full review for later. Here’s what we see, now.

The game is a cross between Restaurant City and the Chinese title, Happy Hotel. That said, the emphasis will most likely be on the former, as the Restaurant City elements will probably pertain to the concept of streets full of hotels, hiring friends, and decorating isometric interiors. In regards to Happy Hotel similarities, it likely includes the concept of increasing the value of rooms through decor and letting your non-employee friends (as well as non-player characters) check in and pay you fees to stay.

Happy Hotel has a bit more to its guest recruitment than just this. There’s a whole spiel about recruiting better paying guests, critics, and celebrities to increase your hotel’s rating and popularity. Playfish could incorporate something similar, but the company has, in the past, always tried to be more original with its concepts, than others. Expect features that are similar, in essence, to other Facebook hotel games but done in a much more different way. Nevertheless, in the end, all we know for sure is that the game will grant “more customization offers than ever before” and that you “will employ some of your friends,” with the goal of becoming a 5-Star hotel.

On a different note, it is somewhat surprising that Playfish is not taking the city-building route — especially because its parent company, Electronic Arts, owns the formative Sim City franchise. Already we have seen a number of city games from small developers as well as NanoTowns from Digital Chocolate and Social City from Playdom. Meanwhile, other competitor, CrowdStar is going with tycoon games, having released Zoo Paradise.

Still, while the SimCity-esque games seem to be the bigger boom at the moment, Zynga has also trademarked the names HotelVille and Hotel World, so we could be seeing more hotel games soon.

Last week it was number two; the week before that it was nothing, because it had just been released. Social City, the new city building game from Playdom, has flown to the top of our weekly AppData list of top Facebook gainers by daily active users, adding more new players than games several times its size.

There’s obviously some heavy advertising from Playdom behind the scenes. But as we found when it was brand-new, Social City is actually a great game. Nevermind that players have experienced technical problems since the game’s launch; they keep coming back anyway.

Proof is in the numbers. We’ve been watching Social City’s DAU as a percentage of monthly active users — the number of people among all the players who return daily — for several days. Following the launch-time spike of new DAU, Social City’s percentage settled to its current 44 percent. Defying our expectations, it hasn’t dipped any further. It’s an extremely high number that seems to show Social City’s new players genuinely love the game.

Nevertheless, Playdom still has to fight it out with other publishers to rule the emerging city building genre. At lower positions below, you can see two similar games, Towner and My City Life:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Social City	2,475,502	+1,732,288	+69.98
2.	Birthday Cards	2,636,459	+1,333,714	+50.59
3.	FarmVille	30,973,370	+1,060,995	+3.43
4.	Café World	8,896,906	+366,051	+4.11
5.	Texas HoldEm Poker	6,637,643	+332,075	+5.00
6.	Mafia Wars	6,552,404	+201,596	+3.08
7.	Tiki Resort	590,285	+192,160	+32.55
8.	Pet Society	4,456,973	+152,818	+3.43
9.	Bubble Island	580,362	+150,714	+25.97
10.	MindJolt Games	3,329,168	+144,263	+4.33
11.	Bejeweled Blitz	2,798,882	+87,439	+3.12
12.	Towner	189,978	+77,490	+40.79
13.	Mahjongg Dimensions	228,713	+63,324	+27.69
14.	2010 Bracket Challenge	54,335	+49,459	+91.03
15.	PoxNora	46,975	+46,507	+99.00
16.	Country Life	2,577,705	+46,329	+1.80
17.	My City Life	532,022	+38,604	+7.26
18.	Games	279,840	+38,579	+13.79
19.	Bola	87,397	+37,532	+42.94
20.	SPP Ranch!	200,026	+34,773	+17.38

Following Birthday Cards, which is only loosely a game, there’s a foursome of Zynga games: FarmVille, Café World, Texas HoldEm Poker and Mafia Wars. All said, Zynga has managed to add about a million DAU since last month, edging over 67 million this week.

Tiki Resort returns us to Playdom. This island resort building game was released a couple weeks before Social City, but it only has about half the players and far fewer DAU. Still, if you’re not measuring it against its sibling’s stand out growth, Tiki Resort is doing pretty well.

One special circumstance to note this week: every one of the top 10 games on the list is from a large or well-funded company. That’s not the case every week, but it may happen more often as the big boys acquire ever more leverage to promote their products.

Although Playdom chairman Rick Thompson is personally investing in other social gaming startups, the company itself has just put $5 million into Argentina-based developer MetroGames. The investment is an unusual move for a social gaming company; acquisitions have been the norm.

Although MetroGames has popped up from time to time on our weekly gainers lists, it has stayed pretty quiet — although its new city-building game, Towner, is growing fast. We currently count 8 of its games on AppData, our independent traffic analysis service for Facebook apps. The company says it currently has more than 30 total between Facebook and the web. Playdom chief executive John Pleasants will join its board.

More, from Damian Harburguer in the press release:

We are very confident MetroGames will become one of the world leaders in social gaming during this next wave of explosive growth in the industry. We already have more than 30 games online across Facebook and our own social gaming platform and many more to be released during 2010. We are pleased Playdom has recognized our potential and chosen to invest in us.

The press release says that this money is just part of its first venture round of funding, so the company may have raised more, or could be looking to do so.

Playdom is one of the largest social game developers, with strong presences on Facebook and MySpace. It raised $43 million on a $260 million pre-money valuation last fall and bought social app developer Green Patch and iPhone developer Trippert Labs; it most recently bought OffBeat Creations, earlier this month. Its latest game, Social City, is currently taking our charts by storm.

Gambling card games are easily one of the oldest forms of social games on Facebook, or on the internet in general. They’re easy to make, not very complex, and many people who would be interested in the first place already know the rules. It’s no wonder that Zynga’s TexasHold’Em Poker (now Zynga Poker) was one of the top social games for so long.

However, Zynga Poker is a bit dated and not everyone likes to play synchronously against others (especially when they are learning how to play), and so, the social developer has released Poker Blitz, a Facebook game that adds a little bit of that Las Vegas flare to an old genre.

We took a quick look when we spotted it live last night. Now, here’s our full review.

There are two key difference between Poker Blitz and the older title: The game doesn’t have all human players sitting around a table; and, it isn’t quite the same game format as the many Hold’Em games circulating various social networks. Essentially, players get two cards and the House gets two cards. If you make a bet, you get five more, and if you like the hand you have, make a second (or fold if your cards are bad). After the second bet, the game announces who won, the player or the House, and its on to the next hand.

Each round consists of 60 seconds to earn as many chips as possible; hence the name “Blitz.” However, it is all done so in this highly satirized collection of levels that represent Las Vegas, Jersey Beach, and even, well, Antarctica. Each level, however, is gated based on the user’s level, so the more you play, the more stages become available.

Of course, unlocking new places to play is for more than just aesthetics, as each stage has its own set of rules. For example, in the earlier areas, players have a tutorial help element that displays the percent chance to win and what sort of hand they hold, while later ones do not. In addition to less hand holding, the later, unlocked stages, also tend to have higher stakes per hand, and a few even remove cards from the deck.

As one can imagine, it gets very difficult to play at these later points, and thus harder to earn chips. Currently, however, the individual earning of chips doesn’t seem to mean much. You get to customize an avatar (and eventually a house, that is “coming soon”), but none of it costs anything yet. Nonetheless, your earnings do count towards your Team’s total value.

In addition to leaderboards made up of Facebook friends that play, there’s a weekly challenge. By adding people to your team, the game tallies how many chips everyone has cummulatively. Unfortunately, it’s not 100% clear what the challenge is — the game has been out less than a week — but the current challenge appears to be reaching a tally of 1 million chips, between all your teammates. Certainly, this is a daunting challenge, as you can only bet up to 500 chips at a time at the ealier levels (higher level stages allow for bigger bets, though we haven’t unlocked them yet).

Of course, there wouldn’t be much incentive if it was just a random number. Teams that reach the 1 million mark will become eligible to win an iPod Touch, but they only have five more days to do so after winning. Of course, this number becomes increasingly difficult to attain as players can only play so many rounds until they are out of “tokens” – which basically acts like energy in Mafia Wars - and have to wait an hour or so for them to recharge.

That’s okay though, because the game actually does have some good ways to make the most out of the rounds you have available. Poker Blitz actually incorporates two unorthodox elements to poker games. These are the “Mystery Box” and the concept of power-ups. The former is basically something that you win during play that could contain thousands of chips, or a random power-up. Now don’t think that one is better than the other, because the latter can completely change the tide of a hand, granting players the ability to make their hand “luckier,” swap cards with the house, double the pot, or even view one card in the House’s hand.

Honestly, though, the last power-up doesn’t seem all that useful, because it gives you no real gist of what they hold. That said, there are a number of things one can’t do in games like this. Poker is a strategy game of knowing when to fold, when to bluff, and when and how much to bet. Obviously, you can’t do all of this (especially forms of bluffing) on a game like this where you’re facing computer opponents. To that end, Zynga Poker still seems like the better choice of apps.

Nonetheless, Poker Blitz is still fun, for what it is, and is something a non-poker player would probably love. To that end, there is nothing wrong with gameplay, but there is a bit of a complaint in starting the game up. In fact, this is a complaint for most new social games lately: First of all, Poker Blitz requires you to let them email you with offers and updates in order to play. [Update: Apps can require email sign-ups, but Facebook won't provide emails except through the API. In this case, Zynga directs users through the Facebook API once they click on its interface.] Normally if a player wants updates or offers, they will go to the game and click the offers button. Frankly, this is just a recipe for unwanted spam. That isn’t to say Zynga will do this, but if all Facebook games start making this requirement…. Well, you get the picture.

The other issue, is it feels like a lot of social games are taking advantage of the fact that most Facebook users are not “gamers.” At the top of the last half a dozen games reviewed, there is a nifty little “setup progress” bar. This bar, has nothing to do with being able to play a game, but only consists of steps such as allowing emails, becoming a fan, bookmarking, allowing automatic feed posts (sometimes), and giving a 5-Star review. The reason for doing this is understandable, but always asking players for a 5-Star review defeats the purpose of “reviews,” doesn’t it?

That aside, Poker Blitz is still a wonderful little card game app that most non-poker players will probably enjoy. Considering the level of cross-promotion Zynga games get and the millions of players on its other titles, this is a game that will probably grow very quickly. Whether or not it will get up there with other titles from the developer is yet to be determined, but expect to see Poker Blitz’s AppData page rise in some of our Top 20 charts in the near future.

Most of our readers gladly take the time to look when big developers like Playdom, Zynga, Playfish (Electronic Arts) and CrowdStar launch new games in a popular genre. But sometimes smaller late-comers do a great job out-innovating the big guys — here’s a look at two thematically contrasting titles.

The first game is World at War, a modern warfare-style take on the classic mafia role playing game. That said, the game has all the standards: Money, missions, energy to complete the missions, stamina to battle other players (dubbed “ammo”), and so on.

Really, it’s the style that’s most interesting. Everything is based on modern military technology, with the goal being to build up the largest military force in the world. Of course, to do so, users must complete missions in order to level up, unlock more powerful weapons of war, and use the money earned to build up their forces of land, sea, and air.

This actually is where World at War stands out a bit: when you choose your country, you don’t get bonuses such as “faster energy regeneration” or “faster health regeneration.” On the contrary, the perks go towards branches of your military. As an example, if you choose the United States, your air force is stronger than others. If you are the United Kingdom, your navy is stronger. This obviously plays a fairly significant role in choosing what units to build when.

As far as the units themselves go, these are more or less the equivalent of items in something like Mafia Wars. They add attack and defense stats to your profile, and are required for certain missions, and in the end, a squad of riflemen is still, essentially, the same thing as an uzi or what-not in another RPGs (though it is a bit more gratifying to have little minions rather than just a gun).

Additionally, players can also build up a base to earn periodic income, but what is different is that the user can convert outdated structures to new ones as they increase their level and unlock new buildings. In many other RPGs, you are forced to buy more land (which you can still do here). Furthermore, each building can be upgraded up to three times to improve efficiency, and some of them even grant bonuses to health, defense, attack, and so on.

Okay, granted, World at War isn’t wholly original, but then again, most Facebook RPGs aren’t. Do missions, level up, buy new stuff, invite friends to become stronger, and take over the world – in theory. That’s about every social RPG in a nutshell. However, if you like modern military technology, and you’re sick of mafias and gangsters, then this is an app worth checking out. Moreover, with over 1.1 million monthly active users, you certainly won’t be alone.

The next app is the exact opposite to World at War, in that it is about peace. Called Ocean World, much of the game’s user based appears to speak Chinese, judging from its page; the developer is little-known Stand Up Network. The app has around 255,000 monthly active users.

Ocean World is your standard virtual aquarium game. It is a bit behind the times, as that boom appeared to peak last fall, but the game is still a decent rendition of this common genre. The basics are all present: buy fish, feed fish, plant decorations, and make the world a happier place.

One thing that makes the game stand out, however, is the overall atmosphere that comes with it. The visuals are a cross between Zynga’s somewhat cartoonish FishVille and Tall Tree Games’ more realistic looking Fish World. It actually looks quite good, and there isn’t a bad selection of decorations to choose from either.

What makes Ocean World more interesting is that players are in the ocean, not a tank. That means all of the visuals are centered around reefs, beautiful shells, and actual sunken ships. There are still fun, random, items tailored to special holidays. At the moment, these are decorations themed for St. Patrick’s Day and the Chinese New Year. Unfortunately, these all cost the virtual currency, Sun Coins, or an exorbitant amount of the in-game Shell Coins.

Further adding to the atmosphere, the fish actually grow and change as they reach adulthood, rather than just get bigger. Of course, you sell them when this cycle completes (“release them”), and then buy some more. Standard aquarium game economics. As players continue to repeat this process of buying, feeding, and releasing, they earn new levels and, in turn, unlock new fish and decorations to purchase.

The music helps pull the game together, too. It’s not some bouncing rhythm like so many other virtual aquarium titles have, but rather it’s a very tranquil tune that fits with the mysteries of the ocean. Frankly, with the opening directions of the game talking about saving the sea, it sounds like something you might actually hear at a place like Sea World.

In the end, neither World at War nor Ocean World bring anything significantly new to the realm of social games — but they show that smaller developers can take a tired genre and make it interesting, even when the big developers are using their resources to get the most users.

Zynga has been pretty quiet over the past few months. The last game the company launched was PetVille, back in early December, and it has recently allowed some of its less successful titles to shed users, focusing in on a handful of big hits. This emerging strategy makes the release of Poker Blitz, a new casino game, all the more significant.

Poker Blitz follows in the footsteps of Zynga’s first-ever hit, Texas HoldEm Poker. Today, Texas HoldEm is Zynga’s third-biggest game, with 28 million monthly active users — that makes it Facebook’s seventh-largest app overall.

But there’s one problem with Texas HoldEm: it’s a skill game that requires deep expertise and strategy to master. Even playing a few casual hands requires more knowledge than, say, planting your first seeds in FarmVille. Texas Hold’em has a devoted following of many millions worldwide, but Zynga’s version, HoldEm, is ultimately unlikely to break out — especially as expert players graduate on to playing for real money.

The solution in Poker Blitz is cutting down on the skill gaming elements to make Hold’em more welcoming to inexperienced and casual players. Let’s take a quick tour of the game.

Graphically, Blitz has much in common with Zynga’s YoVille, from the initial setup of an avatar to play with to the dealers and casinos. Building up a character need only take a few moments, and then you’re on to the tutorial.

Next, Zynga hits players with a forced email subscription screen. This is a calculated violation of Facebook’s latest developer rules, which insist on giving users the ability to opt out [Update: This is not clearly a violation, but it's also not clearly in compliance. More here.]. The game isn’t fully released yet, though; this feature will likely disappear soon.

As in Hold’em, you’re dealt two cards, while five more are laid out on the table. But the differences begin there. As most hands are dealt, you’ll have the option to swap your cards if you don’t like them. You can also fold without betting. Some rounds will offer the option of flipping over one of your opponent’s cards, others a “four leaf clover” special power that gives you a “luckier” hand.

Unlike Hold’em, there are no rounds of betting before the fourth and fifth cards are laid out on the table. And at lower levels of Blitz, you’ll get to see the likelihood that your hand will win the match. All told, the odds are heavily stacked against the dealer. You’re also playing one on one instead of against a table of other players — though there’s a “team” element of the game that’s yet to be released.

As you win hands, you’ll unlock mystery crates that hold prizes. Each round of play is timed at 60 seconds, though winning a hand will add to the timer.

Perhaps most importantly, there’s a limit to how many rounds can be played each hour, along with special tokens that only appear every few hours. At the moment, there’s nothing players can do to buy more time, but Zynga obviously has the option of letting people pay for or earn more time. There are also inventories and a virtual home that are only marked “Coming Soon”.

All of Zynga’s changes make Blitz more of a video game than a casino game like Texas Hold’em. In recent years, as Hold’em players have gained notoriety through massive tournaments held on ESPN and other channels, they’ve replaced the seedy image of gamblers with one of glamor and excitement. Blitz is an attempt to give players the powers and high lifestyle of a pro player without doing any of the work to get there.

Meanwhile, players who do want to take Blitz to the next level will doubtless be nudged on over to Texas HoldEm, with its more serious atmosphere and standard rules of play. This two-for-one strategy isn’t just canny; it’s the latest way to promote games, since Facebook tightened up its viral distribution rules.

We’ll keep an eye on Blitz as it grows, and review the game again once Zynga unlocks some of the special features mentioned above.