) from last year, here’s how it went down in a nutshell: a developer built a wildly popular application called Scrabulous that was ultimately shutdown by the game’s license holders, only to be re-launched in a slightly different form – WordScraper. Meanwhile, thanks to further licensing issues, the original Scrabble game got split into two applications on Facebook – one from Electronic Arts for US and Canadian users, and one from GameHouse for everybody else.
In any event, all three of the games now enjoy a significant following on Facebook with hundreds of thousands of active users. And now, a new classic game is coming to Facebook, by way of GameHouse. UNO made its official debut this week on the social networking site, and early numbers suggest that it might be the next smash hit as far as classic game adaptations for Facebook go.
The application – which uses Flash – is an almost exact replication of the UNO game you probably know. The basic idea is to match a card in your hand by color or number to the top card on the draw pile. The first player to get rid of all of their cards wins. There’s also a very similar card game that goes by a different name and involves lots of alcohol, but I digress (hey, it’s Friday).
The UNO for Facebook game instantly matches you up with other players from across Facebook, making it quick and easy to get started in this rather addicting and pretty much mindless game. Considering that for the moment, UNO for Facebook doesn’t let you setup games with your friends – one of the reasons the Scrabble games have been so successful – the fact that it has already attracted more than 60,000 active players points to a rosy road ahead for the application, which plans to add friend functionality soon.
UNO’s developers shared their Facebook Insights stats with us to show the adoption so far, and as you can see, growth has been pretty much straight up since launch:
With much of the focus on Facebook as far as the platform is concerned moving to Facebook Connect and mobile applications, UNO is a reminder that there is still a big market for games inside of Facebook too. And for those that hold the rights to classic, well-known titles, it’s clearly an opportunity to give new life to those franchises.
