Top 25 Facebook games - March 2012: Hidden objects find new fans

This month's best and brightest on Facebook mostly look familiar, with Zynga ruling most of the top 10. CityVille still remains the game to beat, despite the fact that the city-building game lost 900K players last month (ouch). The one newbie to the charts is Fruit Ninja Frenzy by Halfbrick, which grew by leaps and bounds in Februrary.

Hidden Chronicles, Zynga's hidden object game, continues to kick butt and take names, gaining 13 million players last month, giving the game a total of 32.7 million players, which beats out CastleVille and is pretty darn close to taking over Zynga Poker as well. This is a testament to just how much hidden object games (HOGs) resonate with the social gaming audience (Disney's Gardens of Time also gained an respectable 6.9 million last month) and it'll be interesting to see how the handful of just launched HOGs, including Disney's Blackwood & Bell Mysteries, will perform over the next four weeks.

Also, though month by month there don't seem to be any massive changes to this list, take a look at what was happening at Facebook this time last year (below). FarmVille was still #2 with 50 million players, compared to 28 million now (though Facebook adjusted how it counts players last year, which drastically lowered monthly numbers). Remember It Girl, Millionaire City and PetVille? And Zoo World? Those games have been MIA from the top charts for what seems like ages.

At this point last year, there was a lot of talk about how social games had reached its peak, but the variety of games that have started to appear on this top 25 list shows that, while the social gaming audience has grown tired of copycat 'Ville' games (to an extent), they're still more than ready to get their game on.

> Top 25 Facebook Games of March 2012 [Inside Social Games]