Welcome to Purple Pawn, covering games played around the world by billions of people every day.
02 May
Posted by Yehuda Berlinger as Card Games, CCGs, Classic Board Games, Electronic Games, Modern Board Games
Update: see 2011.
For the purposes of this list, I excluded arcade-like, mmo, social trading, trivia, quiz, and voting games.
Rank | Game | Publisher | Monthly Players | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Texas Hold’em Poker | Zynga | 28,873,620 | Still the number one for board or card games, but no longer anywhere near the top for popular games in general, having been passed by dozens of sim games, such as Farmville. |
2 | MindJolt Games | MindJolt | 13,030,699 | A collection of arcade, card, and word games. |
3 | Family Feud | iWin | 3,652,686 | Like many game show games, this is originally a parlor game. |
4 | Okey | Aylak | 2,470,997 | I think it’s Aylak, but I’m not sure. Okey is a Turkish tile game that looks a lot like Rummikub. |
5 | Farkle | Viral | 2,454,775 | |
6 | UNO | GameHouse | 2,285,294 | |
7 | Games | 2,052,575 | Credit for this package of arcade, card, and word games is not listed. | |
8 | Mahjongg Dimensions | Arkadium / MobScience | 1,439,060 | |
9 | Word Challenge | Electronic Arts | 1,250,150 | A word game. |
10 | 德州撲克 | Boyaa | 1,157,857 | A poker game. |
11 | Glamble Poker | Glamble Gaming Network | 1,128,676 | |
12 | 麻將─神來也麻將 | GodGame | 899,253 | A Mahjong game. |
13 | Warstorm | Challenge Games | 899,247 | A fantasy combat-themed collectible card game. |
14 | Scramble | Zynga | 866,178 | A word game. |
15 | Scrabble (US) | Electronic Arts | 863,316 | Both US and non-US versions of Scrabble now have more players than Lexulous, which has around 361,000. A shame, really. |
16 | Scrabble (non-US) | GameHouse | 706,011 | |
17 | Super Farkle | PlayDom | 705,886 | |
18 | Blackjack Madness | Product Madness | 637,857 | |
19 | Poker Palace | Playdom | 617,133 | |
20 | Farkle 2 | Totally Secret Games | 591,736 | I don’t have a home page for these guys. |
21 | Pathwords | Zynga | 558,470 | A word game. |
22 | Poker Rivals | Electronic Arts | 557,636 | |
23 | 6Waves Poker | 6 Waves | 524,345 | |
24 | Okey Oyna | Soft Reklam | 492,789 | Another version of Okey. |
25 | Mahjong | MegaZebra | 434,258 |
7 poker games, 2 game collections, 3 Farkle games, 3 Mahjong games, 2 Okey games, 6 word games, UNO, and a fantasy CCG. Still a whole lot of room for creativity here, guys.
Let’s compare this to last year’s list.
Last year there were almost no sim games, so board and card games were higher up in the rankings; this year you have to wade through hundreds of sim games to find other games (or filter). Last year there were no Asian companies; this year we have 5: 2 from Turkey, and 3 from the Far East. Last year the 25th most popular board or card game had 34,000 monthly users; this year it has 434,000, a more than ten-fold increase.
Gainers: Texas Hold’em has more than doubled its users, while UNO, Zebra Mahjong, and both Scrabbles have risen in popularity. Losers: Lexulous, Word Challenge, Poker Palace, Scramble, and Word Twist have all fallen greatly.
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These games all look really fun but they all have a short play through time. If Facebook really wants to put stock in the gaming market they should allow companies to make group games that you can play with your friends online or make new friends. As old as it makes me sound Social Media can’t take up much more of our time then it already has. They should invest more in areas that they don’t have a majority market in. Expanding their market to other fields will give them an opportunity to control the market for people’s leisure time, not just people’s “social leisure” time.