These are a Few of my Favorite Games...

I've written about our Friday Night games and assorted console RP games and the occasional Friday board game night at length (see the archives on the right). But I've only mentioned other games in passing, so I'd like to mention them again here... a few favorites, the ones I keep going back to.

I play a lot of facebook games, and I've tried dozens or even hundreds of them. But these are the ones I replay or continue to play, along with a few old standbys like The Dot Game and Scrabble.

• Frontierville - I've played Cafe World and Farmville and Yoville and Treasure Isle: The Adventure and Cityville. But the one Zynga game I reliably go back to is Frontierville. It's cute but not cutesy, and the Little-House-on-the-Prairie vibe just catches my interest more than the other games in Zynga's extensive stable.
• On that note, I'm enjoying Wild West Town, by ClipWire Games. It's different enough from the standard plant/build/harvest to hold my interest for now. Don't know about its staying power yet.
• Most games by Large Animal. I'm especially fond of What to Wear, Bananagrams, and Bumper Stars, and I'm a huge fan of their CD-and-download game Fashion Solitaire. I enjoy Office World, Spartacus and I've even taken a couple stabs at Lucky Strike Lanes. Since I don't do sports games of any type as a rule, bowling's a pretty big leap. And the Large Animals have the best, most responsive, friendliest tech support in the business.
• Wedding Street by Turpitude is a ton of fun. I tried it, thinking I would only play for a little bit; it's not usually my type of game. I like dress-up as much as the next girl - see What to Wear and Fashion Solitaire above - but this one has cake decorating and venue design and bouquet building as well. My girly side loves this game. Can't wait for the Invitation Design activity. There's a Romantic Dork hidden under all the Gamer Geek.

Then there are the downloadable giants here in Seattleish - Big Fish Games and PopCap Games. Some of these games are exclusive to the publisher and some are published by these houses but written by others.

• I like most of PopCap's titles, but my favorites are Dyno-Mite, Peggle and its add-ons and sequels, and like everyone else, Plants vs. Zombies. I even have the DS version of PvZ. Fun stuff.
• Big Fish to me has the best deals on games. I'm a member so I get pre-releases, and buy-six-get-one-free deals. I especially like Hidden Object and Adventure/Puzzle (remember Myst?) games:
• Any game by Gogii Games - We just played Empress of the Deep 2 and loved it (as we did the first one), and Twisted: A Haunted Carol was great. The mini-games are exceptional, especially the new spin on a match-three type in the bonus material in the EotD 2 game.
• Any game by Blue Tea - their Forgotten Riddles and Dark Parables and Enlightenus series, and several standalone games are great, and absolutely beautiful to look at.
• My Tribe - I love it and some of the puzzles are really fun. It's a city-builder.
• The Fiction Fixers series by Fugazo. Since these are based on classic children's stories (Oz and Wonderland thus far), we enjoy following up on our nighttime reading.

So that's it. There are a ton more that I play occasionally, or play with the kids, but these are my go-to titles when I want to exercise my Casual Gamer side as opposed to invoking my Gurl Gamer cred.