Most popular Facebook games: From Texas HoldEm To Words With Friends

[Every other week, Gamasutra examines the most popular Facebook games according to monthly active users, looking at the top titles and developers on the social network to see who's attracting or losing players.] Facebook's App Leaderboard's games category remains virtually unchanged for the past two weeks, at least for the top ten most popular titles on the social network, but of the games have seen significant changes in their user counts, losing or gaining millions of players. Zynga's CityVille, while still the biggest Facebook game in terms of audience, still lost 500,000 monthly users in the past 2 weeks, and is down to 49.1 million total. The developer's CastleVille took an even bigger hit and shed 3.6 million players, now down to 33.5 million total. The social gaming giant also took the #3 and #4 spots. FarmVille has 1 million less users and 32.9 million total, but Texas HoldEm Poker gained 1.2 million card players, and is now up to 30.1 million total. At #5, The Sims Social by Electronic Arts and Playdom lost 2 million users in the past 14 days, and is down to 23.5 million total. Zynga's puzzle game Words With Friends at #6, on the other hand, has about 1.5 million new players and 17.1 million total. Zynga's Empires & Allies is steady at 14.2 million users at the #7 spot, followed by Wooga's Diamond Dash (600,000 new users; 12.7 million total), King.com's Bubble Witch Saga (900,000 new users; 11.3 million total), and Tetris Online's Tetris Battle (1 million new users, 11.3 million total). You can see the full list of the top 20 Facebook games along with exact monthly active user counts below: All charts and data are courtesy of Facebook application metrics and trends site AppData.