Pirates: Tides of Fortune from Israeli developer Plarium is a slick, polished new nautical-themed social game that takes its cues from more complex multiplayer strategy titles such as Kabam’s recently-closed Samurai Dynasty, Digital Chocolate’s Galaxy Life and Kixeye’s Backyard Monsters. The new English language version of the game launched as a 30-day exclusive to Google+ on January 11.

Early experiences in the game are taken up with a very lengthy tutorial that walks players through the building of their first buildings, what all the resources mean and the game’s technology researching mechanic. Rewards of the game’s premium “Rubies” currency are provided liberally throughout the course of these tutorial tasks and players are kept safe from attack during the tutorial period. An unfortunate flaw in the system, however, is that if the player completes a tutorial task before it has been formally offered as a “quest,” whether accidentally or deliberately, they are not given credit for having completed it and must do it again. If the task involved the spending of money or resources that the player now does not have, this may lead to protracted wait times or the spending of premium currency. It’s a small issue, but one which should be addressed to provide a slicker introductory gameplay experience — or to cater to those who wish to jump straight in to the meat of the game.

The game has very high production values. The artwork is detailed and well animated, and the majority of the tasks offered to the player are presented with full (though thankfully, given the questionable quality of the acting, optional) voiceovers. An unfortunate side effect of the detailed artwork on buildings is that it sometimes becomes difficult to distinguish buildings from one another without moving the mouse pointer over them, particularly if they are tightly packed together. The 45-degree isometric viewpoint also suffers from the usual problem that tall buildings can easily block out smaller buildings placed behind them, making them difficult to click on at times. Fortunately, as with most games of this type, it’s possible to move buildings once they have been built, meaning that such inconveniences can be avoided with a little rearrangement.

The game is strongly geared towards interaction with other players. Regular popups to invite friends remind players of the various benefits offered by having a large “crew” — the opportunity to claim loot from friends’ havens, the ability to recruit said friends as an army of undead pirates, and the ability to set up alliances. Alongside the usual friends mechanic, the game as a whole takes place in a large, persistent world populated by everyone else who is playing the game, or who has played it in the past. Glancing at the in-game map allows players to visit nearby players’ havens, set up trading agreements with them, scout their defenses or even attack them. Players are protected from attack until they reach level 9 partway through the tutorial, and attacking anyone over level 15 immediately surrenders a player’s “Novice” flag, indicating that they are ready and willing to engage in the full game.

Despite the few little interface niggles mentioned above, Pirates: Tides of Fortune is a polished game clearly ready for the prime time. Its complexity may put off more casual players used to simpler game mechanics, and the long tutorial may put off impatient gamers, but for those seeking a deep, complex and rewarding title in which they can play alongside a large and growing player community, Pirates: Tides of Fortune is a solid offering.

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While unlikely to enjoy universal appeal due to its complexity, Pirates: Tides of Fortune is well worth playing for its high production values and deep gameplay.

Galactic Allies is the latest offering from Australian development studio 3 Blokes, who were acquired by RockYou last June. 3 Blokes were brought on board to the RockYou family to produce Facebook-based strategy combat titles that would appeal to the core gamer market, as well as offer some competition to other combat-heavy games such as Zynga’s Empires and Allies.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Galactic Allies currently has 30,000 monthly active users and 1,000 daily active users.

Galactic Allies is, in 3 Blokes’ words, a casual take on the real-time strategy genre popular among core gamers, and an episodic story-based experience. Players follow an unfolding plot concerning humanity’s struggle against a mysterious alien race, and must gather allies from around the galaxy, build up their forces and engage in combat against both the computer-controlled enemies and other players.

Players control their fleet of ships in combat by clicking on them and directing them to attack specific enemies. Ships can be moved in formation or directed individually, allowing for either concerted efforts to attack strong enemies or splitting up to deal with lesser threats. Different styles of ships are better against certain other types in a “rock, paper, scissors” arrangement, and the key to success in combat lies both in understanding this system and keeping ships upgraded with the latest technology.

Alongside combat and ship upgrading, players can also explore the galaxy, sending mining probes down to planet surfaces to collect resources. This provides players with soft currency, items for trade and experience points.

Social features for the game are varied. There’s the usual facility to visit friends’ bases and earn bonus energy, but there’s also a trading system where players can put various resources up for sale as well as create a “wish list” of items. Alongside this, players can compete against one another for ranking on the Combat Leaderboard in asynchronous combat — the computer takes control of a player’s fleet on their behalf when someone challenges them.

Monetization is handled through the sale of the game’s hard currency, Galactic Points. These are purchased using Facebook Credits and can be exchanged for additional soft currency, used to bribe enemies (effectively skipping combat sequences), used to acquire Research Keys (used for upgrading the player’s ships), exchanged for Energy (used for mining and other actions such as exploration) or used to purchase Power Cells (required to enter into combat sequences).

Galactic Allies launched into open beta last September. Its MAU figures have been declining over the course of the last month, but its DAU took a sharp upswing in early January 2012 that lasted almost an entire week.

“In general, the decline of Galactic Allies’ user base came as we paused our standard user acquisition efforts while in development on game changes,” explained RockYou’s senior vice president of publishing Josh Grant when we asked him about the fluctuating numbers. “Reduced acquisition efforts on top of natural attrition will find a game at lower user levels.”

There hasn’t been any official communication from RockYou on the game’s official Facebook page since November, but Grant attributes the increase in daily users this month to “exploratory testing of new features in the game,” meaning that new player acquisition had been opened up for a brief period.

Judging from comments left on the official page, the player community appears to be somewhat disgruntled with the relatively recent addition of the Power Cells mechanic, and some blame the decline of users on this along with what they see as a lack of communication with the developer.

“RockYou continues to be excited about our entry into the mid-core genre of social gaming,” says Grant in response. “We expect Galactic Allies to play a significant part in this channel. We are currently undergoing development changes that will drive a more robust combat and strategy game.”

Exactly what the future has in store for the game isn’t clear at this time, then, but despite the silence on the official channels, it sounds like RockYou and developer 3 Blokes have a long-term plan in mind for the game.

“At this time, 3 Blokes is solely focused on making a best of breed real time strategy game out of Galactic Allies,” explained Grant. He did not, however, elaborate on the specifics of exactly how this would be achieved.

Galaxy Life is a new space strategy combat game from Digital Chocolate. It launched on Facebook at the end of November 2011 and has seen steady growth in both MAU and DAU since then.

According to our traffic tracking application AppData, Galaxy Life currently has 290,000 daily active users and 1,500,000 monthly active users.

Gameplay in Galaxy Life revolves around the player acting as a protector for a band of small, cute creatures known as Starlings after their planet was destroyed. Tasks the player must take on include building up a base and its defenses; defending against attacks from rival players and enemy non-player characters; and attacking and looting rival bases.

The style of play is somewhat similar to Kixeye’s popular Backyard Monsters title. Players can upgrade buildings on their base, which in turn allows them to store more resources and currency, eventually enabling them to construct stronger and stronger fortifications. Like many other games of this type, the player is provided with a seven day grace period in which they cannot be attacked by other players, giving them a chance to thoroughly get to grips with the game mechanics and prepare their base for potential assault.

Social features in the game include a real-time chat facility, the opportunity to spy on or attack other players and the ability to form alliances with other players to cooperate. Posting game events to their Facebook wall allows players to share free resources and currency with friends, assisting with the viral promotion of the game.

Monetization comes through the sale of the game’s hard currency, known as Galaxy Chips. These can be spent on purchasing additional resources or soft currency, speeding up time-consuming construction projects, or on purchasing special “collection” items. The latter items, which can also be found by clearing debris from the play area and exploring, can be used to craft special weapons with which to assault other players’ bases, bonus experience point and coin packages and special decorative items.

So far, the AppData figures for Galaxy Life indicate strong, steady growth, with no signs of slowing down. Digital Chocolate CEO Trip Hawkins attributes the success of his company’s games, including Galaxy Life, to his belief in what he refers to as the “discovery business model,” offering a compelling experience to players for free with a robust monetization infrastructure underpinning it.

“New creations that have relevance will develop brand power at blinding speed,” said Hawkins, writing on his blog for Digital Chocolate in December. “As an illustration, when a great Digital Chocolate game like Tower Bloxx was only available on feature phones through the primitive merchandise systems known as the carrier decks, you could do a Google search for that game and would only get 10,000 page hits. Then we put out a free browser version of the game and later adapted it to Facebook and today it has over 2,900,000 page hits. That’s a brand. Our new game, Galaxy Life, is only a few days old and it has 270,000 page hits already.”

Risk: Factions is a new social game published by EA in collaboration with Hasbro, the rights holder to the Risk board game.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Risk: Factions currently has 30,000 monthly active users and 9,000 daily active users.

Risk: Factions was originally released as a standalone, downloadable title for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games consoles in 2010. A Windows PC version followed in early 2011, published through Valve’s Steam digital distribution network. The Facebook version is a fundamental re-imagining of the game for the social network, while maintaining many of the aspects which made the console version popular. Inside Social Games spoke to Spencer Brooks from EA regarding the move to Facebook earlier this week.

There are two main parts to Risk: Factions — base building and missions. Base building plays out similarly to established games in the same genre with an important distinction: many buildings have a practical game function beyond simply providing the player with an income stream. Specifically, many buildings train troops over time, which are the resource the player needs to complete the second part of the game: the missions. Without troops, a player won’t be able to play until their base has produced more, so in some senses, they act similarly to an energy bar.

Missions play out similarly to the board game version of Risk. Taking place on one of several maps, players take it in turns to deploy troops to various territories and then use them to attack enemy-held areas. Combat is resolved through dice throws, so there’s an element of random chance, though brute-forcing your way through with a large force gives a greater chance of success in the long term. Control of larger numbers of territories means the player has more troops to deploy at the start of their turn, and players can also collect cards to allow them to make use of special weapons.

Social features for the game include the ability to add friends as allies, allowing you to visit their base and “boost” a building’s production; compete against friends and random strangers in multiplayer matches; and send gifts to allies. Players also earn Skill Points by winning matches, which enables them to upgrade their faction’s technologies — and further factions can be unlocked through leveling up.

The game’s monetization is handled through the hard currency of Stars. These are purchased using Facebook Credits and offer walls. Stars can be used to purchase the special weapons used in a match — though these weapons still require the collection of cards to use — as well as special buildings for bases. There are also a number of booster items on offer, including the facility to immediately purchase extra troops for the “supply” from which a player’s forces are drawn during play. Production of troops from a base’s buildings can also be “rushed” using Stars, enabling quick production of troops for the player’s stockpile.

Risk: Factions is already a complete and satisfying game, offering some genuinely strategic gameplay alongside the more casual, light base building elements. Over time, the game will offer more maps on which players can battle — at this time, only three of the five factions’ worlds are represented, with only three out of what looks like a proposed five individual maps per world on offer for players to clash over. Further game modes, many of which are designed for quicker play, are also in the works. The game will also offer more in the way of premium items and special weapons to purchase over time, as the offerings in the store are currently quite limited.

You’ll be able to track Risk: Factions’ progress with AppData, our traffic tracking application for social games and developers.

Grave Maker is an upcoming social game for Facebook, iOS and Android, set to launch in February 2012 and currently undergoing beta testing on its own dedicated site. The game has been built entirely using YoYo Games’ own Game Maker product, and is intended at least in part as a demonstration of Game Maker’s application in making cross-platform social games as well as more traditional interactive entertainment.

The game casts players in the role of a graveyard keeper, and tasks them with defending the graveyard against frequent attacks from disgruntled locals. This is achieved by sending undead minions into battle to confront the locals, and gradually building up the graveyard with useful structures, crops and decorations.

Gameplay blends several popular social and casual game styles together into one coherent experience. Sending minions into battle is somewhat similar to the “tower defense” genre, where enemy forces approach the player’s base along a predetermined path, and the player must deploy defenses (in this case, minions) to deal with them as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, the building and crop harvesting is similar to city-building and farming games, with actions taking time to perform, and crops ripening and spoiling over time. In an interesting twist, the player acquires new troops with which to defend their graveyard by planting them just like normal crops. Finally, the combat involves elements of role-playing and strategy combat games, with both player minions and enemies having varying strength levels, and some working better than others against one another.

Since the game is currently limited to a ten-level beta demo on its own website, social and monetization features have not yet been implemented, nor can it be tracked via our traffic tracking application AppData. Planned social features include a “fear factor” rating for players’ graveyards, where friends will be able to compare what is effectively the “net worth” of their land of horrors. There will also be the facility for players to send gifts to one another.

Meanwhile, monetization will be accomplished through use of the game’s hard currency of skulls. The current version doesn’t give any specific indication of what players can expect to purchase using skulls, but the placeholder menu promises “special items, structures and creatures.”

When the game launches in February, however, it will be simultaneously released on Facebook, iOS and Android. This is made possible by the  HTML5 and cross-platform export support found in YoYo Games’ newest Game Maker product, Game Maker Studio, set to release shortly after Grave Maker’s launch. Game Maker Studio’s export pipeline means that the game can be made once and easily deployed to multiple platforms rather than having to go through a lengthy and complex porting process. The multiplatform support also allows one game account to be used across all three versions, meaning a game can be started on Facebook and later picked up on the go via an iOS or Android portable device.

“Grave Maker is a huge project for YoYo Games and in many ways, it represents the culmination of everything we’ve been working towards with the Game Maker package,” says Stuart Poole, head of publishing at YoYo Games. “Grave Maker is every bit a modern social game, but its cross-platform abilities and the power of GameMaker’s HTML5 support means that the player gets the same gameplay experience across all three platforms, with the game in play accessible from any of them, at any time.”

2011 saw a growing diversity in social games with new genre and gameplay types emerging on Facebook, such as hidden object games, racing games, and strategy combat titles with real time multiplayer modes. Based on data collected from AppData, our data tracking service, here are the most popular genres for successful Facebook games this year.

Note: For the purposes of this report, “successful” is defined by games with over 100,000 monthly active users and current retention rates (daily active users as a percent of monthly active users) of 20% or higher. Because many Facebook games (especially those from top publishers) enjoy artificially high usage rates in their first three months, this list only includes games that were launched and reviewed by Inside Social Games between January and September 2011.

1) Arcade — 14.2 million MAU
Three games with the fast casual action of the arcade genre gained strong traffic in 2011: Wooga’s Diamond Dash (11,600,000 MAU), PlayQ’s HotShot (1.4 Million MAU), and GameHouse’s Collapse! Blast (1.2 million MAU). Notably, all three have similar gameplay of matching (or destroying) three like objects for points.

2) Word — 13.8 million MAU
Since launching in July, Words With Friends, Zynga’s Scrabble-like board game, has enjoyed consistently strong growth and engagement rates. It’s the only 2011 game in this genre to reach extremely large user numbers.

Words With Friends’ success is probably due both to its heavy resemblance to Scrabble and its cross-platform feature, which allows Facebook users to play with others both on desktop and mobile. Because Scrabble-type games typically focus on asynchronous play with simple graphics, they’re well-suited to the Facebook platform. Indeed, Electronic Arts’ official Scrabble game for Facebook attracts heavy engagement (if less users, with just 1 million MAU), as does Lexulous, an independently-produced Facebook game once called “Scrabulous” before Scrabble rights owners demanded a name change.

3) Casino — 13.24 million MAU
Led by Playtika’s Slotomania (5.5 million MAU), DoubleDown Interactive’s DoubleDown Casino (4.5 million MAU), and Buffalo Studios’ Bingo Blitz (2.8 million MAU), the gambling-themed casino genre games of 2011 attracted high traffic and heavy engagement. Notably, each of these games currently has very high DAU/MAU rates of over 30%. While the top spot in this genre remains Zynga’s Texas HoldEm Poker, Slotomania and DoubleDown now hold the second and third positions, supplanting other slot machine and card games with a gambling aspect.

4) Hidden Object — 10 million MAU
Disney Playdom’s time travel-themed Gardens of Time (8.3 million MAU) leads this genre, in which players must find valuable game objects cleverly hidden within a graphically dense image. Also gaining heavy traffic is Mystery Manor (1.7 million MAU), developed by Game Insight and published by 6waves Lolapps. Both were launched during March/April, reached a peak of users in September (17 million MAU and 3.75 million MAU, respectively), and have shed users since then, while still maintaining strong DAU/MAU rates. Gardens of Time and Mystery Manor both arrived on iPad this month, but it appears as thoughonly Gardens of Time features Facebook Connect — which could lead to an increase in traffic for the parent game as mobile logins are counted toward its MAU and DAU. Despite the early success of these two games, it’s notable that these were the only 2011 entries in the genre tracked by Inside Social Games throughout this year.

5) City-Building — 4.3 million MAU
A genre in which players get to customize, develop, and manage the economy, infrastructure, and social aspects of their own unique city, 2011 saw the successful launch of Wooga’s Magic Land (2.7 million MAU) followed by Disney Playdom’s Gnome Town 1.6 million MAU). It’s interesting that both games merge city building with a fantasy theme, as do two games launched after September — Zynga’s CastleVille and 6waves Lolapps’ Ravenskye City. This represents a new trend in city-building games, as compared to market leader Zynga’s CityVille (launched in 2010), which has a realistic, modern day city theme.

6) Role-Playing Games — 2.5 million MAU
In a role-playing game (RPG), players customize and enhance their own unique game character, and use it to progress through a series of game challenges and objectives, in a variety of environments and themes. Led by Digital Chocolate’s undead-themed Zombie Lane, the RPG genre added a number of new entries in 2011. The Vampire Diaries: Get Sucked In — based on the TV show of the same name — has 300,000 MAU, while the dungeon crawler-type Hello Adventure has about 100,000 MAU. This year saw the launch of over three dozen RPG games, most of which have lower traffic or engagement rates than these three. For instance, Zygna’s Mafia Wars 2 still has 6.1 million MAU, but less than 10% DAU/MAU, and EA Playfish’s The Sims Social, has 27.2 million MAU but less than 20% DAU/MAU (and trending downward), as does Coco Girl, a fashion-themed RPG (3 million MAU) launched in October. Zynga’s CastleVille, which launched late in 2011, has both strong city building elements (see above) and RPG features.

7) Strategy & Combat — 1.86 million MAU
Three entries in the military and battle-themed genre of strategy & combat maintain high engagement rates: Kixeye’s Battle Pirates (720,000 MAU) and War Commander (530,000 MAU), with Kabam’s Edgeworld between both with 610,000 MAU. Zynga’s Empires & Allies still maintains a large base of players (15.6 million MAU), as does Social Point’s Social Empires (4.9 million MAU), but have seen engagement rates fall below 20% DAU/MAU in December. Their overall size should also be considered as an indicator of the genre’s popularity, however, and we anticipate seeing more entries in strategy & combat throughout the end of the year and into 2012.

8) Game Show — 1.06 million MAU
Led by Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader (650,000 MAU) and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (410,000 MAU), game show-themed trivia games have over a million players on Facebook. Both are licensed from popular TV game show franchises. New entries in 2011 like Jeopardy! have gained smaller, but very engaged audiences. Three other 2011 game show games — Deal or No Deal, $100,000 Pyramid, and 1 vs 100 — have not done as well, however, which leads us to question just how easily a game show’s TV audience is translated to Facebook.

Going into 2012, we expect to see more entries in the casino, arcade, and strategy-combat categories as new developers experiment with the genres. Hidden object games may also see some growth in the new year as Zynga attempts to replicate the success of Garndes of Time with its own entry, Hidden Chronicles. In contrast, the city-building and RPG genres seem to be saturated, though it’s possible that a hybrid of the two genres — say, Zynga’s CastleVille — may still have room to grow.

Social Empires developer Social Point has rolled out its latest Facebook release, Men vs. Women. This strategy title pits members of the opposite sex against one another in a literal war to determine who will rule the world. It launched in late November.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Men vs. Women currently has 520,000 monthly active users and 110,000 daily active users.

Men vs. Women is a military strategy title inspired by Zynga’s Empires & Allies. It’s set in the future, where women (or men, if you decide to play as a woman) have taken over the Earth and forced men into slavery. A group of men decide to fight back to reclaim the planet, and do so by building bases, raising an army, and, ultimately, destroying women (or vice versa). It’s an out of the ordinary concept, for sure, but definitely takes a turn for the weird when an army of men — however cartoon-like — are depicted shooting an army of women.

In the game, players initially build their own military base, complete with training centers for troops, houses for workers, and buildings that produce offensive weapons such as tanks and attack helicopters. They’re also able to chop down trees, mine, and refine oil into fuel, all materials that are needed to build more of their war machine. Performing actions requires energy, which recharges over time or through micro-transactions, but rewards players with gold and experience points. When players accumulate enough experience points, they level up and have access to more items and deco to purchase, while also receiving the premium currency, dollars, and energy refills.

Once they’ve purchased/trained some troops and vehicles, they can engage in simple real-time strategy style combat by selecting their units and clicking on enemy troops/vehicles to attack. Players can also build defensive measures to help fend off attackers, even when they’re away from the game. After they reach a certain level, players can go on quests and seek out other players to do battle with.

Social features span the usual array of adding friends, sending/receiving gifts, and bragging about accomplishments via viral channels. Players can also visit their friends and collect bonuses once per day.

Social Point is monetizing Men vs. Women through the use of Facebook Credits to purchase additional premium currency, as well as premium some premium buildings, vehicles, units, and deco items.

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

Russian developer and publisher Nival is deepening its commitment to social and mobile gaming with an investment in Russian independent studio Bytex.

Nival, most famous for developing PC games and running the Russian free-to-play MMO portal zzima.com, is teaming with Bytex to help the smaller company co-publish a new HTML5-based collectible card game (CCG) on Facebook called Berzerk: The Cataclysm. While CCGs are typically played in real time, Berzerk: The Cataclysm is asynchronous, and has social features that allow players to showcase their card collections according to Bytex’s founder and CEO Dmitri Karasev.

What makes Berzerk: The Cataclysm and Bytex most attractive to Nival is that the game is built in HTML5, meaning it’s naturally cross platform on Facebook and mobile. This aligns with Nival’s long term game development goals and puts the developer in a space currently occupied by Zynga, Wooga and OMGPOP, which each have HTML5 games running on Facebook’s mobile platform.

“We’re focusing on cross-platform social strategy games,” Nival’s president Sergey Orlovskiy (pictured) tells us. “When we found out that [Bytex] wanted to go to the direction of making social CCGs, because of their experience we decided to invest. All of the games we’re doing right now — and we’re doing a bunch — all of them are socially connected and most of them will be cross platform.”

The partnership with Bytex is Nival’s second foray into Facebook games. Earlier this year Nival teamed with another independent Russian developer, KranX to publish Kings Bounty: Legions, a turn-based strategy game targeting hardcore gamers. While Nival is proud of the game, it has yet to hit its stride in terms of traffic. Since its release, King’s Bounty: Legions has risen to 20,000 MAU and 4,000 DAU according to AppData, but even Orlovskiy admits that the game performed below expectations initially.

“In terms of monetization, the [average revenue per user] is very good, but I would say that we’ve underestimated several things, and we’ve spent a lot of time improving the social and viral features of the game,” he explains. “We believed that the rarity of the deep, hardcore experience plus the quality of the game would create viral buzz even with a small audience, and that would make the game grow. Frankly, that didn’t happen. What we can see is that the combination of good viral mechanics built into the game, plus high quality gameplay, plus hardcore appeal works much, much better than [a game] without the viral mechanics.”

Orlovskiy is happy to use Kings Bounty: Legions as a learning experience, and it hasn’t reduced his confidence that social games will be an important part of Nival’s offerings in the future. Facebook-only development, however, is not a viable strategy for Nival as user acquisition and marketing costs are far higher on the platform for new companies. Orlovskiy says that the amount of advertising and filtering required to create a dedicated player base of hardcore users would be unfeasible, even though these players tend to produce much higher APRU than casual ones.

Orlovskiy goes on to say that the still-emerging mobile platform presents more opportunity and a more natural platform for strategy games thanks to touch interfaces. Mobile development is also being pushed forward as developers find better ways to incorporate social features thanks to Facebook Connect and the emergence of true mobile social gaming networks.

“Since the whole industry is moving from web to mobile, the same needs to happen to us,” Orlovskiy says. “It’s inevitable that evolution will take us in this direction, the same way that games evolved from an offline to an online experience.”

Nival opened a studio in Kiev specializing in social and mobile development this September.

Woodland Heroes from rookie Facebook developer Row Sham Bow combines cutesy anthropomorphic animals with a strategy game akin to the classic Battleship board game. The game officially launched late last month.

According to our traffic tracking service, AppData, Woodland Heroes currently enjoys 130,000 monthly active users and 10,000 daily active users.

Woodland Heroes casts players in the role of a male or female raccoon person that must do battle with the evil Bear King’s army to make the forest safe again for all animals. The core gameplay loop has players building combat units out of a workshop and then leading these units into turn-based battles to earn resources to spend on building more combat units. New unit types unlock as the player levels up and the difficultly of battles increases as the player progresses through the main story toward a boss fight with the Bear King. An energy gauge restricts gameplay sessions by depleting each time the player moves a unit across the world map or each time the player attacks an enemy during the combat phase.

Combat is carried out between machines places along grids of squares with each machine occupying more than one square in various configurations of squares. The player can see where they’ve placed their own units, but cannot see where on the opposing grid the enemy has placed theirs. In order to find and destroy units, players select squares of the grid to target with their machines at the beginning of their turn.

If the player has successfully targeted a square containing an enemy unit, that square reveals some battle damage, hinting at the machine’s actual location. Once the player has struck a majority of squares that contain an enemy unit, the entire unit is revealed and can be destroyed once all of its squares are hit. An additional “hint” element comes in the form of a enemy unit list that the player can view to determine how many and what configuration of squares on which the enemy units are placed. Players can repair their own units that take damage during combat using either Facebook Credits or coins, the game’s soft currency. Once destroyed, a player completely loses that unit and must rebuilt it from the workshop during the non-combat phase of the game.

Social features include the standard gifting and Wall-posting functions of most social games. The most compelling feature, however, is the Visit ability where players can fight any of their friends’ impending battles with the Bear King’s armies. The catch is, the guest player can only use one unit to take out the enemy — but the combat doesn’t cost the guest player any energy. If successful, the player can choose to take a reward of in-game currency or leave behind a marker that gives their friend a combat advantage for that battle when they choose to play it. There is no player versus player mode planned for the game that we know of.

Woodland Heroes monetizes primarily through the sale of energy — which can only be gifted by friends or bought with Facebook Credits. Special combat units can also be purchased with Credits and certain units can only be repaired during the combat phase using Credits while other units can be repaired using coins, the game’s soft currency.

Speaking to Inside Social Games, Row Sham Bow CEO Phil Holt says the game isn’t finished “by a long stretch.”

“We launched with a small set of features expecting to deal with initial performance problems that most new games face,” he tells us. “This team has a lot of experience with supporting live features and live games, so I think we were well prepared for launch. We’re continuing to address the first-time user experience flow to optimize for retention. This is our current area of focus.”

Row Sham Bow formed in Orlando, Florida from a team of ex-EA Tiburon developers. The studio secured a $3 million first round of funding from Intersouth Partners.

You can follow Woodland Heroes’ progress on Facebook using AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

Developed by Hungarian studio THX Games PLC, Triviador is a unique mix of strategy and trivia game presented like the classic board game Risk. It supports up to three simultaneous players in real-time matches.

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.