I woke this morning in my palace and asked ordered my guard to get me two Steak and Egg Bagels from McDonalds. My stooge ran to the local shop and produced my meal.

As I consumed my breakfast I surveyed my empire. My land was technologically advanced but a liberal free trade system, and an apparent lack of concern for the environment, has left my nation rich but ravaged (think 1984).

I received a notification that my subjects were having tax problems. Many of my small shop owners can not compete with large corporations. In a moment of haste I decided to give the small shops a tax break. Tomorrow I will most likely burn their shops to the ground to teach them a lesson.

The premise behind the game Nations is simple: start a nation, answer some simple questions on how you want to run your nation, and thats it. Every day you will receive a problem that needs your guidance. You can either be a humble and gracious leader (wimp) or you can rule you subjects with an iron fist (the appreciate your guidance).

The way you answer your questions will shape and guide your nation. Give Nations a shot for a week and let me know what you think of it. If your nation is successful it will rise through the ranks and will be the most successful dictator leader on all of Facebook.

Sometimes I wonder about my life. I think to myself, “self, lets go do some good in the world.” I stand up, put my jacket on, and I get ready to solve the world’s problems. Then something happens, I open up my Facebook account and I find a game that completely eats away at my motivation.

You know the kind of games I am talking about. They are those simple games that you look at and say, “I could beat that game in five minutes.” Then you start to play, five minutes turns into ten, ten turns into fifteen and next thing you know you are fired because your boss saw you waste 35 minutes playing some Facebook game.

Well Facebook fans let me introduce you to the game that will potentially get you fired. I discovered Juggle Game about an hour and a half ago and now everyone in my office is trying to get the high score. The game is simple enough, to juggle a ball you hit either the right arrow key or left one. The longer you hold the key down the higher your character throws the ball.

The game is super fun and really addictive but it lacks a real social component. There is a scoreboard but thats really the only way you can tell your friends how great you are at juggling. I would like to see the game have some kind of juggle off, where I could juggle for a bit then my friend gets sent a challenge to beat my score.

All and all Juggle Game is one of those games that help you pass time until you can get home and play your PS3. If you get a good score at Juggle Ball let me know and I will try to beat it. Although I am not sure how you are going to show me your score, maybe invite me over to your computer and show me?

I like addicting games on Facebook. How else am I supposed to whitter away my bosses profit margins by waisting time? Most of the games I find on Facebook fail to offer the shear addictiveness of games found on Yahoo, but that changed this afternoon.

It is a cold and windy day here in DC and I was looking for something to do while I ate my 4th Chipotle Burrito of the week. Just then a dashing young man with no name through open my office door and pronounced, “You will play Herd-A-Word (HAW)!” Being a feebler man I agreed.

The man vanished and I was left with rice and steak on my shirt, and one addictive little Facebook application. HAW is an online game that challenges your vocabulary and your nerves, while reinforcing your beliefs that you should read more.

Basically all you have to do is line up orbs with letters to form words. There is a timer that counts down and reminds you why your failed 3rd grade spelling. You can then take your score and send it out to your friends and have them beat it. You can also take your longest word, Chrome for me, and send that out as a challenge to your friends.

HAW is proof that good ideas will bring users. This game is by far one of the most fun I have played in a long time. If you get a long word send it my way and give me a challenge. Chrome, man I am good.

I love a good video game. I love a good social game. When I came across Street Race, nay was hit by Street Race, I was pretty excited. My mind began to fill with simplistic thoughts of social vehicular racing.

Much to my dismay there is no street race in Street Race. In fact, there really isn’t much of a game. After installing the application I was greeted with multiple error messages and instantly informed I had loss two races.

Two races? I had only inputed my name, how odd. Fighting on, that’s what I do, I tried to purchase and ’supe’ up my vehicle. After plowing through more error messages like some blind driver in downtown DC, I was told I could only buy more parts for my tractor (named Jonny Dear) by inviting my friends.

Was that it? Was that the social aspect of this game? I could peddle my friends and subject them to this error ridden game for more parts for my tractor? I mean give me a global score, show me tracks I have won, give me something to boast to my friends about and show them that I am a better driver.

I really wanted this game to be cool. I wanted something I could enjoy playing and prove that I am better than my friends. The problem is that the ‘game section’ of this game is nothing more than randomly clicking buttons to train my tractor and the ’social’ part is just me pimping out my friends for more parts.

My biggest complaint is the ‘gas’ situation in this game. I would have said the game was playable if I could just purchase gas and keep playing, but I can’t. I either have to wait 2 hours or invite some of my friends to play. I have never been one to invite people to games because I dislike being invited to games. I know my friends are pimping me out for some token prize in a game.

I normally don’t say a game was a failure, but I can’t see how this game hit its intended targets. I could be wrong. If you are a big fan of Street Race let me know, perhaps I jumped the gun on this one. The game did have interesting screens to watch while random things were happening.

I am not a big fan of the “games on my page” application side of Facebook. I am also not a big fan of soccer, even with all my trips to Europe and me living in Mexico, I have never had a love for soccer. All of that going against it, I still liked a little application called Kick Ups.

The game is simple: see how many times you can hit a soccer ball (or a banana or a picture of your best friend) before it hits the ground.

Sounds simple enough, but like trying to stay balanced on a moving subway train, the action is pretty difficult. I try this every morning on the way to work and tend to fall on my fellow metroriders.

The game has all the bells and whistles we have come to expect from Facebook game. There are invite your friends and leader boards and global domination scores. Ok, I made that last one up.

My only suggestion before starting this game is that you make sure you have a mouse attached to your computer. I have been trying to play this with the tac pad on my laptop and am pretty sure I have carpel tunnel syndrome now.

Now if I can just get my hands working properly I can get back to some real work.

I found my old favorite tic-tac-toe killer, the dot game, on Facebook. I used to play this in elementary school on paper when I was bored in class, and now students can play online in class when they’re bored! What a time we live in!

The dot game is a simple two-player game in which there is a grid of dots, and players take turns drawing lines. If you finish a box, you claim the box as your own and get an extra turn. The player with the most completed boxes at the end wins.

The application lets you challenge your friends as well as find other players who are online to play against. There seems to generally be enough users to find a game, although it’s no Scrabulous.

It’s probably the best paper game ever made, so give it a shot and hone your dot game skills.

- Jonathan Kleiman runs the law blog legalintellects.com and professional network Probook

I recently stumbled upon a fantastic Facebook application that is essentially a full-featured arcade that doesn’t take quarters! Of course, on Facebook, the dirty equivalent to a quarter is usually the requirement to spam friends with ads for the application, which is not required of the user here!

There are tons of games on the application (1,500) and they’re as easy to use and access as any other flash game online. They’ve got the classics like pac-man and some great super-mario games, and you don’t need to do anything remotely spammy to play!

I suppose the benefit of having your flash-arcade-of-choice on Facebook is the ability to see what games your friends are playing, to invite them to play the same game as you, and to compare scores after.

Think of it as an addictinggames.com on Facebook with the added benefit of social interaction. People can also rate and comment games, making it easy for the most playable games to rise to the top, while a base of 1,500 games is enough to keep anybody busy for quite some time.

I definitely recommend this application if you’re bored. Let me know if you find a diamond-in-the-rough game I missed!

- Jonathan Kleiman runs a Canadian Professional Network called Probook and a law blog called LegalIntellects.com

I’m not a big application adder on Facebook but I have to tell you I’m loving Blackjack. At first I was annoyed because in order to get cash to play you have to harass your friends and send them invitations but got over it because Blackjack is awesome!

Here’s how it works. You send it out to 20 people and you get $200 ($10 for every invite) and then if they add the application you get $500 for a possible total of $10000 per day. I hate sending applications to friends because I know I don’t like getting them myself. Is it horrible of me that I sent it to people on my list I don’t like that much?

Anyway great application for Blackjack fans. You choose one of many tables with various buy-in amounts and then play with other facebookers. There’s also a chat feature so you can talk with the other players. During my first game there were some pretty “interesting” conversations going on. Quite off topic and fun.

There’s also a great set of instructions if you don’t know how to play.

All it’s really missing now is a way to make actual money. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Leora Zellman writes a million blogs and is also a channel editor at b5media

This morning I spent some time playing the “Who Has The Biggest Brain” game. This is definitely one of the more entertaining games on Facebook. The application enables you to give your brain a solid workout. It tests you on a number of things including basic math, memory, analytics and others. I started playing it this morning after five hours of sleep and the game said I had the brain the same size as a goat. Goats are kind of intelligent … right?

By the afternoon after a nice lunch and a couple of tries, my brain mass had moved up to that of a neanderthal. Neaderthals were the most intelligent species 350,000 years ago so that has to mean something. While I may not be a master of this game it is fun to play. Another cool part is that you can compare your results with that of your friends. Unfortunately none of my friends had played this yet so I’m not sure how they fared.

If you want to test out your brain against your friends, go grab the “Who has the Biggest Brain application.

Having an app “go viral” is the dream of every budding Facebook developer. Frustrated by the lack of interest in his existing suite of applications, one such developer is giving his putative user base one last chance. His latest app is a game whereby his users trick their friends into revealing which app ideas would launch him into the big league.

Amir Michail, creator of such well-meaning but long-winded gems as “what have my friends told everyone I’m good at” and “my friend said I’m like which fictional character”, hopes that Mindrosia will finally provide him with a selection of truly viral ideas - along with empirical evidence that users will be drawn in by them.

To play the game, a user must create or reuse a “deceptive notification message” that purports to come from a more useful application, then send it to a gullible friend in the hope that they will fall for the fictional application’s promises. The original user will receive a point if the message convinced the friend to sign up despite the deliberately obscure description provided on Mindrosia’s sign-up page; and a bonus point is awarded if the idea was theirs in the first place.

Responding to criticism that users are being fooled into adding his app, Amir counters that “people may accept some deception if it would lead to better apps” in the future. Of course, he’s right when he says users are tricking their friends rather than the app sending notifications without authority.

But Amir hints that he would be happy to drop this controversial method of idea-generation if only we could help make his other apps widely used.

In one discussion board post, he lists some of his existing apps then pleads for help: “can you see why they are not popular?”