According to our traffic tracking service AppData, World Mysteries currently has 630,000 monthly active users and 80,000 daily active users.

World Mysteries is a hidden object game that bears more than a passing resemblance to Zynga’s recently-released Hidden Chronicles. Both see the player investigating the disappearance of their uncle under mysterious circumstances, both revolve around restoring the mansion to unlock access to additional scenes and both feature an attractive female “guide” character to talk players through the early scenes.

There are two main parts to World Mysteries, as with Hidden Chronicles: the restoration of the mansion — though in this case the player is restoring the interior, not the exterior — and the search for the titular mysteries. Said mysteries lead to the truth behind the disappearance of the player’s uncle. Purchasing objects to decorate the mansion earns Mystery Points, which in turn unlock access to further scenes in the second part of the game: the search for hidden objects in various locations around the world.

In these scenes, players are challenged to locate a list of objects scattered throughout a static image. In order to complete many of the game’s quests, it is necessary to revisit these locations several times in order to earn additional trophies. Each time the scene is replayed, the image and object locations are the same, but the list of objects to locate is randomized. This means that over time, players will learn the location of specific items in the scene and be able to quickly find them all for a much higher score. Bonuses are provided for quickly finding objects in rapid succession, and bonuses are given once all objects have been found depending on how much time was taken to complete the scene. As with most hidden object games, the objects the player is tasked with finding typically have little to no relevance to the narrative reasons for being in the location, and are frequently presented in physically-improbable situations — a scarf wrapped around the Eiffel Tower in Paris, for example.

The game’s social features primarily revolve around visiting friends’ mansions to leave them gifts, and also in comparing scores on the leaderboards for each stage.

Monetization for the game is handled through the sale of both hard and soft currency in exchange for Facebook Credits, though prices in the app are listed directly in U.S. dollars rather than in Credits. Hard currency may be used to purchase premium items to decorate the mansion. These items typically carry a much higher Mystery Points value than those bought with soft currency, so progression through the different scenes of the game is quicker when spending money. Hard currency may also be spent on energy-restoring items and hints for use in the hidden object scenes. Certain objects also require the player to acquire specific building materials to construct them, and hard currency may be spent on immediately acquiring these rather than finding them through normal gameplay.

The popularity of the hidden object genre on Facebook is such that World Mysteries is seeing slow and steady growth in user numbers even though Zynga’s Hidden Chronicles has approximately fifteen times more monthly active users. So long as the users keep coming, Vostu will keep expanding the game with additional cases and scenes to explore, and a “Collections” feature along with two additional types of hint are set for inclusion in an upcoming update — at this time, they’re marked on the interface, but blocked by a “Soon” banner.

Future development on the game will also hopefully include some improved translation from the original Portuguese — some messages are riddled with spelling and grammar errors, and the icon which indicates the game is loading still says “Carregando.”

You can follow World Mysteries’ progress with AppData, our traffic tracking application for social games and developers.

Already ranked among the top ten most popular games on Facebook as recorded by our AppData traffic tracking service, Tetris Battle currently enjoys about 3.1 million daily active users with 2 million of them arriving in the game within the last two months alone. Honolulu-based developer Tetris Online Inc. has set the sky as the limit for the game’s growth in 2012, hoping to grow the total player base of Tetris Battle to between 5 and 10 million DAU this year. If successful, this would place Tetris Battles in serious competition for the top spot of most popular Facebook game overall.

In this report, Tetris Online VP of Marketing Casey Pelkey and VP of Game Design & Executive Producer Eui-Joon “Ace” Youm share the design and deployment decisions that make the game an ongoing success, their monetization strategies, other Tetris Online games and future plans for Tetris Battle expansion Tetris Arena.

Tetris Battle gameplay: Variations of multiplayer

Tetris Battle’s basic gameplay is similar to the original arcade version, except played in several varieties of multiplayer with enhanced competitive aspects. In “Sprint” mode, players race to be the first to create 40 lines the fastest; in “Battle” modes, when a player forms one or more lines on their board, obstacles and hazards are sent onto the playing field of her competitors.

Gameplay makes use of both synchronous and asynchronous multiplayer competition. The developer prefers not to publicize the specific deployment method used in Tetris Battle, except to say that its goal is to make gameplay feel the same in both synchronous and asynchronous matches. Players are pit against competitors of a similar level and when competing in real time, they will see their competitors’ actual gameplay depicted onscreen. When playing the game with Facebook friends, matches are entirely synchronous and feature a live user-to-user chat feature. The company intentionally throttles live play connections to maintain good performance, but Pelkey says it still represents “a significant percentage of total games played each day.”

Tetris Online incorporates a number of mechanics to encourage continued engagement, including a leveling system which is used to match players with similar playing abilities, and to unlock new game modes. As with many social games, Tetris Battle also has an energy meter which is drained during play, but replenished over time or via monetization. A “Daily Bonus Spin” encourages regular play by offering players special items for playing the game over consecutive days.

Growth and usage: 80 percent word-of-mouth installs

Unlike many Facebook games, Tetris Battle does not employ a mandatory friend-adding mechanic in which a player cannot progress further unless they send game installation invites to their friends. Instead, says Youm, “We focus on the core gameplay… our core belief is if [players] enjoy the game and stay there, they will invite their friends.”

This partly explains the game’s relatively slow growth rates in its first 6-8 months. Initially launched in July 2010, it first had slow growth and low engagement rates, fluctuating between 7 and 15 percent of DAU as a percent of MAU (or DAU/MAU). Technical issues were also a culprit.

The game’s slow growth was also due in part to a lower install rate: Only 55 percent of players would go from launching the app to completing their first game. The reason for this, the developer believes, is that many Facebook gamers were unaccustomed to Tetris’ keyboard-driven gameplay, since nearly all games on the social network platform are mouse-driven. To address this challenge, Youm and his team put the game’s keyboard instructions in the first loading screen and focused players on only using the game’s main key controls for the initial game. As a result, Tetris Battle’s install-to-play rate increased to 80 percent.

The results of this design and layout change became quite evident in April 2011. According to AppData, the DAU/MAU rate then leaped from 20 to about 27 percent, and then began trending toward 35 percent. (Engagement rates of 20 percent DAU/MAU or higher are extremely good for a Facebook game.) Youm also believes that by April 2011, Tetris Battle had reached sufficient critical mass (then about 500,000 DAU) that word of mouth began to drive strong adoption rates, with current players actively inviting their friends to play. According to Youm, installations based on word of mouth are “at least 80 percent… and the funny thing is, it’s increasing.”

Some of Tetris Battle’s growth is also attributable to a viral mechanism involving tetrimino blocks, which can be combined and redeemed for additional energy. A player who invites Facebook users gets more chances to win tetriminos. Players who are Facebook friends with each other can give each other their tetriminos, which creates incentive for friend invites. Tetris Battle also sees significant growth via updates on friends’ Facebook walls, where news on winning games and other Tetris Battle successes can be posted. (As a skill-based game, Youm speculates that players feel more encouraged to share Tetris Battle victories with friends, than non-skill game updates.) Further, the developer reports that players who come to Tetris Battle via friend requests are more likely to put a full effort into the initial on-ramping experience, and are therefore more likely to convert.

In more recent months, Tetris Battle has seen noticeable growth through Facebook’s launch of the canvas app ticker, which amplified the game’s viral word of mouth. The developer hopes that Facebook makes it possible for users to immediately join friends in a multiplayer session, just by clicking on the relevant app ticker update. Doing this, they believe, would increase general growth of multiplayer games on Facebook.

According to the developer, the game now enjoys a peak concurrency of nearly 200,000 players, and routinely averages about 100,000 players throughout the day. Twenty percent of the total playerbase is classified as core players, defined as those who play over an hour a day. As noted, the game has an energy system, which kicks in after 30 minutes; at that point, a player must wait for an hour to refill their energy (i.e. playing time), or purchase extra energy. Core players are therefore playing at least twice a day and/or monetizing.

Monetization and demographics

The developer reports that Tetris Battle earns close to the puzzle game average of 1 to 2 cents in average revenue per daily active user, or ARPDAU. (Tetris Online declines to state specific ARPDAU for their game.) That monetization rate is typical for the game’s US audience, they say, with other English-speaking countries (Australia, Canada, the UK) also earning good monetization. At this range and at a conservative estimate, revenue for Tetris Battle probably exceeds $1 million per month.

Tetris Battle’s monetization options center around energy, decorations, and functional items, such as “armor,” which protects a player’s rank on the game’s leaderboard from decreasing whenever a player loses a match. Overall, functional goods that improve a player’s gameplay, such as speeding up the movement of their game pieces, monetize best. For the game’s 20 percent core users, a “fast speed drop” of incoming blocks is the most popular monetized item. Special discount sales of goods also increase monetization rates, as does localization of the game. Tetris Battle was also recently localized in Chinese, which resulted in a revenue increase among Chinese-speaking players.

Demographically, Tetris Battle players are roughly split 50/50 by gender, and retention tends to skew younger; in this case, meaning players in the 20-40 range. Core gamers (those playing for over an hour a day) are more male. In terms of players by country, the game reportedly grows in tandem with Facebook’s expansion into the international market. (Players from Denmark, for unknown reasons, comprise a disproportionately large percentage of the user base.)

Leveraging and protecting the Tetris brand on Facebook

According to Pelkey, the Tetris brand name has been an important draw for first-time players; however, retention depends not on the brand, but gameplay and user experience. He applies this lesson in general advice to Facebook game developers involved with other well-known brands and franchises: “You have to deliver a great game, period,” he says. And that includes adding features to the game that leverage all of the platform’s social components: “In Facebook, you better deliver [a game] that has something extra, and not only engages the player, but engages their friends as well.” So far, Tetris Battle is among the rare examples of games from the arcade era to succeed on Facebook.

Given that, and the continued growth of Tetris Battle, some might wonder if it will face copy-cat competitors which frequently beset successful Facebook games. In this case, Tetris’ holding company, Blue Planet Software, has a history of successfully protecting the Tetris brand from imitators in the legal arena. While games in themselves cannot be copyrighted, elements of a game can be trademarked; in this case, the Tetris logo, Tetris theme song, and tetrimino playing pieces enjoy that legal protection. As an example of Blue Planet’s protection strategy, a Facebook game called Blockstar, which had a striking resemblance to Tetris, was legally acquired and co-opted by the company in 2007. This move contrasts the fate of Scrabulous, a Facebook imitator of Scrabble that was shut down by the board game’s rights holder.

Instead of doing that, says Pelkey, “To help reduce the amount of time our legal team spent on shutting this particular game mode down, we were fortunate to befriend the individual who programmed [Blockstar]”. The company went on to “embrace it as an official game mode, making it a part of the Tetris history.” It’s still available within Tetris Friends, with 350,000 MAU. (Before joining Tetris Online, Youm himself was developing a knock-off of the original Tetris for an Asian developer.)

Future plans: Tetris Arena, localization and beyond Tetris Battle

In the second quarter of 2012, Facebook should see the launch of Tetris Arena, a gameplay mode in Tetris Battle that’s now in closed beta. Aimed at the core gamer market, Tetris Arena focuses on multiplayer, synchronous play, in which players compete live using the same playing pieces.

Given that focus, it will also come with a global ranking system — the first Tetris title to have one. For this reason, Tetris Online believes that the Arena mode will draw core players hungry to prove that they’re among the very best at the game overall. Also reflecting the developer’s goal to present Tetris as a competitive sport, Arena will also come with a spectator mode. The company has been testing it on gamers by publishing the Arena game mode’s unlock code on Twitter. Since starting this activity, the Tetris Battle Twitter account has gained 260,000 followers within two months. The Arena game mode is entirely live play, but since it’s still in closed beta, it represents a smaller percentage of the daily games played; the company expects this to grow as the game is opened to more players.

Monetization for Tetris Arena will vary from the main Tetris Battle game, with more functional consumable items. Since the game exists within the main app, the company plans to focus early launch on in-game cross-promotion.

As noted, Tetris Online recently launched a Chinese-localized version of Tetris Battle, garnering improved monetization in Chinese-speaking countries. In 2012, the company also plans to release localizations of the game in Spanish, French, Italian and German, with one new language deployed each month. All these versions will exist within the same Tetris Battle app ID, which will therefore enjoy any growth these additions are likely to attract. The developer notes that the game tends to gain growth momentum when it’s made available in a given country, and word of mouth kicks in; localization should further drive this growth.

Tetris Online also plans to launch a second product in 2012, a head-to-head multiplayer game, which will not be Tetris branded. Another game, Tetris Stars, which combines mouse-driven gameplay with a more casual variation of Tetris, is currently in open beta; the developer is still developing its Q1 2012 plans for that title.

Facebook games in 2012: Words With Friends vs. Tetris Online

At the start of 2012, several top Facebook games shared some common traits with Tetris Battle. Among these are Words With Friends (with 7.9 million DAU, 16 million MAU), Bubble Witch Saga (4 million DAU, 11 million MAU), and Bejeweled Blitz (3.1 million DAU, 9.2 million MAU). All currently enjoy strong growth, especially as compared to other games now topping the popularity charts, such as CityVille and The Sims Social, which have comparatively flat growth. Given these trends, it’s likely that puzzle/arcade games will emerge as 2012’s leaders on the Facebook platform.

For the part of Tetris Online, they consider Tetris Battle’s most direct competitor in the coming year to be Zynga’s Words With Friends. From Youm’s perspective, Words has the advantage of mobile connectivity and cross-platform play. By contrast, competitive Tetris games are difficult to deploy on phones, especially smartphones with touch screens. Additionally, EA holds the rights to mobile versions of Tetris and would need to be brought on as a partner for any mobile deployment of Tetris Online games. However, Youm argues that Tetris Battle has a more global reach than Words With Friends, with the Scrabble-like game probably limited in appeal to regions where English or Romance languages predominate.

These strategic assumptions will be tested as Tetris Online rolls out localized versions of Tetris Battle in 2012, aiming to cater more directly to European and Spanish-speaking countries. In any case, the company sees this year as an opportunity to transform the Facebook platform’s competitive space. Youm argues that multiplayer competitive games are more sustainable for developers, because unlike most other genres, there’s no clear end point where all the game’s content has been enjoyed. Just as Tetris the brand continues to thrive nearly three decades after launch, he believes multiplayer games on Facebook can thrive as long as people are interested in playing them against each other.

“The success of puzzle games gives people something to think about,” as Pelkey puts it. ”At the end of 2012, maybe there’s a different face of gaming in Facebook.”

Full Disclosure: In 2010, the author briefly consulted for Avatar Reality, an unrelated 3D virtual
world developer founded by Henk Rogers, president of Blue Planet Software.

Originally a Kindle title, the match three puzzle game has built up a small, but dedicated fan base on Facebook, where it has 160,000 MAU according to our AppData traffic tracking service. The game is also available on Google+, where it has about half as many users as it does on Facebook according to Spry Fox’s CEO and co-founder David Edery.

When Inside Social Games reviewed Triple Town in October, Spry Fox told us more features were coming and last week the company made good on the promise, introducing a major update that changed the game’s UI, expanded the gameplay with a world map, introduced daily bonuses and added new premium currency called Diamonds that can only be purchased with Facebook Credits.

Inside Social Games reconnected with Edery over the weekend to ask him about the development process behind the changes and to see what else the Seattle-based company has planned for the franchise.

Inside Social Games: We know that Triple Town is still in beta, but this is a very big update. How did Spry Fox approach designing it? 

David Edery: The difference between us and many other game companies is we consider the design process an ongoing thing. Our decision to release a game to the user isn’t dictated when we think it’s done — a successful game is never done — just if it’s fun and it meets certain internal benchmarks. If it does, great, let’s put it out there.

If you look at Realm of the Mad God [Ed. Note: A massively multiplayer game Spry Fox co-developed with Wild Shadow Studios] its been live and in the public for quite a long time now and we’ve made fairly massive changes to it. Of course there’s inevitably some people who will get upset when you change something that they really like. In general we try to be careful and only release big changes that we think will appeal to people significantly more. We’re perfectly willing to make big changes to our games if we think its in the game’s best interest and people will appreciate it over time.

ISG: One of the things you didn’t change much were the social features. You now get a daily in-game currency bonus based on how many friends you have playing the game, but Triple Town is still mainly relying on “word of mouth” viral mechanics. Are you trying to focus on slow, long term growth rather than a fast viral spread? How feasible is that considering the lifespan of an average social game is between eight to 12 months?

Edery: Our goal for all favorite franchises is to try to turn it into a hobby — something that people will indulge in for years and years, and obviously that’s not going to happen unless a game evolves. Not that I’m comparing Triple Town to World of Warcraft, but if you look at World of Warcraft today, the game has changed in every way since it launched — the design has fundamentally changed and it has many, many times the amount of content it had when it launched. There’s really no difference to our minds between Triple Town and World of Warcraft in the sense that we want people to be playing Triple Town in 10 years too and we think that there’s lots of things we can do to make that happen and you’re starting to see a taste of that. This is really just the tip of the iceberg. We have plenty more stuff planned.

ISG: Triple Town made a few year-end “Best Facebook games of 2011” lists. Were you concerned about introducing changes to a game that had been well received critically?

Edery: No. We’ve been doing this long enough that it doesn’t scare us. We’re not reckless about it and we test things pretty carefully, and we’ve learned over time that if you’re careful about it, this kind of evolution is better for the game. We feel that despite the inevitable hiccups that will happen when you make big changes we can deal with the repercussions.

ISG: Speaking of the critics, Triple Town had been praised earlier for only having one type of currency in the game, but the update introduced a new premium currency. Why the change?

Edery: We want to be as generous as possible with coins, which are the most important currency in the game because the stuff in the game that really matters can only be bought with coins. We didn’t want to find ourselves feeling pressure to start to be skimpy on them, [but] we were looking farther out into the future and thinking if we wanted to keep adding ways to get more coins we were going to start coming under some pretty serious business pressure to be less giving. Our solution was to put in a premium currency and not go crazy with it.  That will help us continue to be as generous as we want to be with the regular currency.

ISG: Were you finding the game wasn’t monetizing as well as you wanted it to?

Edery:  It’s actually been doing better than we expected to be honest with you. We’ve actually been pretty happy with our revenue on Facebook and Google+ and we’ve been very happy with our retention. In general, we’re very happy. We hoped Triple Town would be a big hit, so we’re just grateful to have a game people like.

ISG: Have you noticed that there seems to be a more active Triple Town community on Google+ than on Facebook? 

Edery: There’s no question that there seems to be very visible chatter and really interesting conversations on Google+ right now. I don’t know if it means the community is more active or if there’s just one or two people on Google+ that have been more proactive about rallying other users. We’ve definitely noticed it and we like it. We’d love to see that kind of thing happening more on Facebook and we blame ourselves for that. We’re going to be setting up forums [on Facebook] soon. There’s a lot of things we haven’t done that a decent game should do to let players make their voices heard.

ISG: Spry Fox has mentioned an iOS app is on the way. When is the mobile version of Triple Town coming out? Will it be cross-platform at launch?

Edery:  All we can say is really soon. We haven’t submitted to Apple yet, but we’re close. We have every intention of making it cross platform, timeline T.B.D. [Ed. Note: Edery clarified this with us and explained the first version of the app will be standalone, but future versions will eventually be cross-platform.]

ISG: How do you feel about Yeti Town? Many people have pointed out it is very similar to Triple Town.

Edery: I wish I had a canned answer for you. I think the press has spoken for us. When we saw it we thought it was very similar and I’ve seen many articles that say things like “swap bears with yetis and ice cubes with gravestones and you’ve got Triple Town.” We were disappointed to see that. We felt it was not something that another game company should do to an indie like us, but what can you do?

We’re hoping that our fans will support us and go and download [the Triple Town app when it comes out] and give us good reviews. We’re hoping that people in the press will speak out on our behalf. I think everyone realizes that Triple Town was the innovator here. I also think this is an issue for people in the industry.  Innovation in the social games platform is something that’s relatively rare and its threatened by activities like this. At the end of the day we’re going to keep plugging away and keep making games, but every time someone comes in with something that’s very similar it obviously makes it very difficult because they’re eating into our market and decreasing the profits from our successful titles. All we can do is reach out to the community and ask them to help us if they want us to keep doing what we’re doing.

The game was developed in San Francisco by a team of established video game industry veterans hired by Zynga for the project. This includes Gabriel Knight creator Jane Jensen, ex-EA art director Margaret Foley-Mouvais and longtime hidden object developer Cara Ely. as we’ve previously mentioned, the effort Zynga put into building this team suggests a deeper level of commitment to the hidden object genre than a low-cost reskin of rival hidden object games Gardens of Time (Disney Playdom) or Mystery Manor (Game Insight).

In Hidden Chronicles, players are invited to solve the mystery of their fictional uncle’s disappearance in his mansion. Solving the mystery involves completing hidden object puzzles both within the mansion and in other areas on the mansion grounds. Each puzzle completed earns the player soft currency, experience points, a static ranking called Estate Points and potentially unlocks news puzzles in different parts of the mansion. Completing all puzzles in a specific location (or “Chapter”) earns the player another clue in the larger mystery of the uncle’s fate.

The hidden object puzzles themselves are more like Gardens of Time than Mystery Manor. For example, objects remain in the same locations no matter how many times a player attempts a puzzle with only the specific list of objects that the player needs to find changing with each play. Additionally, finding objects in quick succession nets the player a scoring bonus, which earns the player additional rewards like the premium currency Trophies. At launch, the game will only feature one hint item within the puzzles — a spyglass that reveals the general area of where an object is. Ely tells us that additional hint items will be made available through friend gifting or reaching a certain level.

Taking a page from CastleVille’s book, Hidden Chronicles uses Trophies as a means to extend gameplay through land expansions around the uncle’s mansion. Some sections of land contain additional puzzle sites that flesh out the story — such as a tree house area behind the mansion — while others can be used as decoration space, which increases the player’s Estate Points with each decoration purchased. New land expansions also cost the player coins and clue items that can be gifted by friends or purchased with premium currency.

Aside from the traditional single-player hidden object games, Hidden Chronicles also offers mini-games like jigsaw puzzles or card matching as a break from the typical gameplay. The game also features a competitive head-to-head mode where two players race to find as many objects as they can in 60 seconds on special levels. At launch, this mode will allow players to challenge a friend or rematch a friend only once per day each. Ely explains that Zynga may adjust the cap to challenges based on player level.

Beyond the head-to-head mode, social features in Hidden Chronicles are limited to gifting clue items, visiting friends to earn the standard Reputation soft currency featured in most Zynga games, and achievement posts that appear on player walls and news feeds. Interestingly, the wall and news feed stories offer word scrambles rather than the traditional bragging text. Though solving the scramble doesn’t actually have any effect on the game itself, it’ll be interesting to see if the mechanic is more compelling than brag posts that invite players to click to earn in-game rewards.

The game monetizes primarily through level unlocks. It appears as though all puzzles in the game can be unlocked if the player has enough coins, Reputation, Estate Points, Clues and/or is a high enough level. These components can be bought and the requirements bypassed with premium currency (purchased with Facebook Credits), which allows the player to progress through the game more quickly.

Hidden Chronicles launches on Facebook today. Zynga’s last game, CastleVille, currently enjoys 37.1 million monthly active users and 6.7 million daily active users as tracked by our traffic monitoring service, AppData.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Puzzle Adventures currently has 60 monthly active users and 30 daily active users.

Puzzle Adventures sees players solving a series of progressively more difficult jigsaw puzzles, while competing against their friends to score as many points as possible on each. The act of placing puzzle pieces is adapted for a click-and-drag interface, with additional clicks used to rotate puzzle pieces. Scoring is based on how quickly players can complete a given puzzle and can be increased by successively combining individual pieces to create point combos before a timer bar runs out. The puzzles themselves are comprised of actual photos and increase in complexity as players move from one themed world, such as an island setting, to the next.

A number of power-ups are available, with players having the option to assign and use up to five per puzzle. These include items that automatically rotate all of the pieces so that they’re right-side-up; one that displays an outline of the pieces in the finished puzzle on the screen; another that joins together random pieces for the player at the outset; as well as those that extend the timer, freeze it, and so on. In order to aid players in solving the puzzles, the game displays an image of the finished result in the bottom corner of the play field at all times.

Each time the player wishes to attempt a puzzle, one heart is removed from their stockpile. When all of the hearts are exhausted, players must wait for at least one to refill in order to play again (each requires around 10 minutes to be restored) or purchase refills. These are sold at the rate of one heart for five coins. Coins are also used to purchase power-ups before attempting a puzzle. Players receive coins based on their performance, as well as experience points that count towards players leveling up. Leveling up provides players with coins, heart refills, and keys. Keys are required to unlock some puzzles and can be purchased with coins.

Players can add their friends in Puzzle Adventures in order to compared high scores. The game also supports posting announcements regarding players setting new high scores, leveling up, and so on to their Facebook Walls and those of their friends.

Puzzle Adventures is monetized via the purchase of additional coins, used to but keys, power-ups, and additional hearts, using Facebook Credits.

You can follow Puzzle Adventures’ progress using AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Feevo Blaze currently has 590,000 monthly active users and 120,000 daily active users.

Feevo Blaze challenges players to clear as many blocks as possible from an ever-filling game board in 60 seconds. In order to do this, players must match at least three same-colored blocks in any direction. Doing this causes them to disappear from the board and reward players with points. Combining four same-colored blocks in this fashion fuses them into one flaming block. When it’s combined with two blocks of the same color, they explode in a flash of lightning, clearing a entire row or rows, depending on the shape and orientation formed. When a flaming block is combined with three or more of the same color, it creates a bomb. When clicked, the bomb destroys an entire row in four directions. It’s also possible to form a bomb by combining five or more blocks of the same color at any time.

When blocks are cleared using lightning and explosions, it creates glowing balls that drop down the left and right sides of the screen. These bounce off bumpers, as in a pachinko machine, until they drop into troughs at the bottom of the screen. These spots have different point values, and players are rewarded depending on which ones the balls drop into. There are also coin switches the balls can hit, which reward players with bonus coins. Coins are generally awarded at the end of each game, and depend on the total points achieved by the player. Coins can be used to purchase power-ups, including ones that ignite random blocks at the beginning or the game, mix them up creating chain reactions, and so on.

Players earn experience points for each game, and these go towards leveling up. When they level up, players gain access to a wider selection of power-ups. These items can be equipped, up to several per game, and automatically deduct from the player’s coin total.

Players can invite their friends to play Feevo Blaze, which allows them to see each other’s high scores and serves as a way to multiply the number of coins players can win in weekly tournaments. This is in addition to other social features such as sending/receiving gifts and bragging about high scores using viral channels.

Feevo Blaze is monetized by players purchasing additional coins using Facebook Credits, as well as more energy, which is required in order to play at the rate of one energy unit per game. Energy replenishes itself at the rate of one unit every five minutes, should players not wish to purchase more. The game also allows them to purchase one- and seven-day unlimited energy using Facebook Credits.

You can follow Feevo Blaze’s progress using AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

CastleVille — Zynga’s newest Facebook game feels like FrontierVille, plays like CityVille, and has some of the best music we’ve ever heard in any game — social or console. Like Ravenskye City, the game started off a bit stingy with the energy gauge, which limits gameplay sessions to maybe 20 minutes once per day. It looks like Zynga has tweaked the amount of energy a player can earn by performing tasks like chopping down trees or constructing buildings, however, meaning we can now potentially play more times per day without getting out our wallets. The PvE could use some work as we waste a lot of the energy gauge beating on wolves and rats even after crafting special items that ostensibly kill them off more quickly.
Score: 8
Here’s the app.

Coco Girl — Metrogames second fashion title for Facebook puts a lot of emphasis on the daily outfits players choose for their avatars. It also features several mini-games that are incorporated into the daily quests that players complete to earn more virtual currency to spend on items. We’ve had more fun playing these mini-games, which include a hidden object game and a pipes puzzle, than we have had shopping for clothes in Coco Girl. Maybe if there weren’t so many restrictions on which types of clothes players could buy (Heart type, actual price, Facebook Credits-only, etc.), we’d pay more attention to the shopping part.
Score: 6
Here’s the app.

The Sims Social — EA’s Facebook version of its Sims series started off as a 10 in our minds, but now that the game is three months old, it’s lost some of that newness that lent the game such a broad appeal. Lately, our gameplay sessions consist of clicking through requests in our inbox and looking for new stuff to buy in the store, since we’ve maxed out both our skill levels on a variety of objects and our trait levels. Unless EA Playfish adds a significant game-changer in the next week or so (pets, the ability to have babies, group lots we can visit to do other stuff besides shop), we’ll probably shelve this to focus on newer games.
Score: 6
Here’s the app.

Triviador — While waiting around for EA Playfish to launch Risk: Factions, we tried out another Risk-style board game for Facebook called Triviador. This title turned out to be more like a game show because of the trivia emphasis, but the conquer-the-map gameplay is still very compelling especially with the grave-sounding voice over and rousing battle music. Though most of the trivia questions are based on number answers (e.g. “What year did X happen?” “How many X in a Y?” etc.), Triviador has a pretty transparent system for determining which player wins ties or wins in the case where both answered the question incorrectly.
Score: 7
Here’s the app.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Bubble Atlantis currently has 1 million monthly active users and 230,000 daily active users.

Similar to Bubble Speed from GameDuell, which we recently covered, Atlantis is a match-3 style puzzle game set underwater. Players fire multicolored bubbles up the screen at a stack of existing bubbles that is growing ever closer. When a bubble hits two or more of the same color, they disappear and players earn points. Causing a section of bubbles that has others attached to it to fall starts a chain reaction, clearing more of the screen. If the bubbles reach the bottom of the screen, the game ends and players lose one life. If players run out of lives, they must purchase addition lives or wait for them to be refilled over time before playing another level.

Unlike Bubble Speed, in which rounds are timed, the levels in Bubble Atlantis are stand-alone. Players get up to three stars for their performance on the levels, including how quickly they complete it and the score they achieve. Bubble Atlantis uses a world map divided into multiple areas, each containing several levels. Levels can’t be played until the previous one has been beaten.

Bubble Atlantis also features power-ups, which include bombs that destroy multiple bubbles and a stopwatch that freezes the downward progression of bubbles. These cost the player coins, the soft currency used by the game, each time they’re used.

Players can brag about their high scores via viral channels, as well as add their friends to the game so they can compare scores on a real-time leaderboard. MindJolt is monetizing Bubble Atlantis with lives and premium power-ups, as well as through its soft currency, which can be used to buy standard power-ups.

You can follow Bubble Atlantis’s progress using AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Triviador currently has 110,000 monthly active users and 20,000 daily active users.

In Triviador, three live players compete to take over the world, one country at a time. It begins with a conquest phase, for which the game asks all three players a series of four trivia questions. These are used to divide up the four soldiers available for that round. The questions are based around amounts and years, allowing players to enter their own answers. Once time’s up, all three players’ answers are shown, and the soldiers up for grabs are divided based on who’s answer was closest to the correct one.

Once the soldiers are assigned, players are given the opportunity to place theirs on the map, one per country, until all have been used. At this point, war mode begins. In this mode, players are asked to choose the soldier or castle belonging to an opponent in a space adjacent to their own soldiers or castle. When a target is selected, a battle begins. The fighting takes the form of a multiple choice trivia question. The player with the correct answer wins the country. If both players answer correctly, another question is asked. Players not involved in battle are allowed to rate the quality of the questions. If a player chooses to attack another’s castle, the defender has three chances to answer correctly. If they should fail, they’re counted out of the game and can watch as the two other players finish. A real-time chat feature is present during gameplay but can be disabled.

A variety of power-ups, which eliminate a certain number of incorrect answers, and so on, are available for use in the war mode. These must be unlocked via leveling up. Players level up by winning, and by completing missions, the more basic of which involve simply using the requested power-up once, or winning a certain number of games. Players also receive achievements for performing well, along with gold, the game’s soft currency.

Players can add their friends and play with them in private matches. Other social features include a global leaderboard, friend leaderboard, and a scoreboard displaying the current point total for all participating countries. Players are able to set their home country from the game’s menu in order to participate in this ranking. Bragging about wins via viral channels is also supported.

Triviador is monetized through the purchase of soft currency, which players can spend on power-ups. More adventures (plays of the game) can also be purchased, although they are automatically regenerated every day.

THX Games PLC has discussed a number of planned improvements to the game on its Wall, including a feature that will allow players to submit their own trivia questions for consideration and more detailed player statistics. The developer has also pledged to regularly add its own new trivia to a database which currently includes more than 10,000 questions.

You can follow Triviador’s progress using AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Bubble Speed currently has 1.5 million monthly active users and 280,000 daily active users.

Bubble Speed has players launching bubbles of various colors upwards into a mass of multicolored bubbles which are slowly moving towards the bottom of the screen. Bubbles can be fired directly or banked off of the walls of the “well.” When the fired bubble sticks to at least two more of the same color, they pop, awarding points to the player. Any bubbles “hanging” from the popped bubbles fall off the screen, with players receiving points for them, as well.

Players have 60 seconds to pop as many bubbles as possible. The game offers boosts (power-ups) to aid them, including bombs, point multipliers, added time, and line-clearers. These appear in colored bubbles and are activated if matched.

When the timer runs out, the game tallies the player’s score and rewards them with gems if they’ve managed a new high score or passed the high score of a friend. Gems are used to purchase boosts. On occasion, the game will reward players with free boosts, which are stored in a stockpile for later use. Up to four boosts can be used per game; three can be purchased, while a fourth must be requested from a friend.

Social features include bragging about new high scores and passing friends’ high scores via viral channels, as well as requesting boosts from friends. The game features a weekly drawing for free gems that players are entered into once their group of friends has amassed more than a specific number of points for that week. Player scores and those of their friends are displayed in a real-time scoreboard during gameplay and in-between games.

Bubble Speed is monetized by players spending Facebook Credits on additional gems. They are available in bundles of 25, 250, 1000, and 2000 for 5, 30, 120, and 199 Facebook Credits, respectively. Boosts cost between 15 and 35 gems per use.

You can follow Bubble Speed’s progress using AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.