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Playrix's Gardenscapes: New Acres is Facebook's game of the year

Social network also reveals most popular titles on new Instant Games and Gameroom platforms

Facebook has published its game of the year list for the most popular or impressive titles to use its various platforms for developers.

According to the social network's official blog, Gardenscapes: New Acres is the company's pick for best game of the year. The title was developed by Playrix and is a match-3 take on the hidden object series, in which players collect fruits and vegetables to earn stars that can be put towards renovating a stately garden.

Other notable picks amongst the web games available via Facebook were Playtika's Poker Heat, Oasis Games' Naruto Online, Volka's Taonga: The Island Farm, MutantBox's Liberators, EA's Bejeweled Stars, Youzu's League of Angels II, Double U Games' Take 5 Free Slots and Zynga's Slots: Wizard of Oz.

Facebook launched a number of new initiatives to reinvigorate its gaming platforms this year including Steam-style PC desktop app Facebook Gameroom and Instant Games, which mobile users can be play via Messenger or the news feed without needing to download or install each title.

These new tools received their own categories, with Nexon's Oz: Broken Kingdom, Critical Force's Critical Ops and Joycity's Game of Dice named as the best Gameroom titles. Meanwhile, Blackstorm's Everwing, Spil Games' Endless Lake and FRVR's Hex FRVR were crowned as the best Instant Games.

The social network also introduced Facebook Live this year, a livestreaming system that lets players broadcast gameplay from PC, mobile or console games directly to Facebook. Netmarble's Seven Knights, Zynga's Texas HoldEm Poker and Blizzard's Battle.net were named as the best three titles to use this new tech.

As always, the firm also honoured the games it deemed to make the best use of integrating Facebook into their social mechanics, with this year's winners including Jam City's Genies & Gems, King's Shuffle Cats and Creative Assembly's mobile strategy title Total War Battles: Kingdom.

Finally, Facebook also offered opinion on the best mobile games, naming Pokémon Go, Clash Royale and NetEase's Onmyouji as the top three. You can find out more about each game's achievements at the Facebook blog.

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James Batchelor

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James Batchelor is Editor-in-Chief at GamesIndustry.biz. He has been a B2B journalist since 2006, and an author since he knew what one was