As everyone knows, Facebook (News - Alert) serves a lot of different needs for a lot of different users. There are the more practical and serious uses, such as what was unveiled when the social networking company rolled out additional practices to help avoid suicides. There are also more upbeat seasonal uses such as Wal-Mart's gift suggestion application. 

Still other users are huge fans of Facebook's wide variety of free-to-play games. Until very recently the most popular of these games was CityVille, but a new report shows that Gardens of Time recently passed it in the rankings.

Gardens of Time's hook seems good enough, as players are supposed to get into a time machine and travel around finding items. They must do this at the same time they are “battling the forces of evil.” Among the top games of 2011, the rest of the top five were all sim-city type games. The Sims Social and CityVille took the second and third spots in Facebook's top games of 2011.

Zynga (News - Alert) has a very good representation on Facebook as well as a long history of having the most popular games on the site. FarmVille was the leading game for quite some time, before CityVille was released in November of 2010 and quickly passed it. Zynga is so popular that it was able to recently go public with an IPO that raked in somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion. The company also had four total games in Facebook's top ten.

Indiana Jones Adventure World finished in the fifth spot, Words With Friends was sixth and and Empires & Allies was eighth. Zynga Poker was also the top Facebook Poker game, with DoubleDown Casino, Bingo Blitz, Slotomania-Slot Machines, and Diamond Dash all making the list for best casino themed games on the social networking site.

All of these games are free-to-play, but where the companies make their money is by getting Facebook users to purchase in-game add-ons that some find too valuable to pass up. Facebook continues to add more games every day and says that its gaming system is one of its more lucrative sections of the site.