City of Wonder Halloween Items: Have Dracula scare your villagers

While City of Wonder may not immediately jump out as a game that should be celebrating Halloween, the folks at Playdom have thrown caution (and perhaps realism) to the wind, releasing a whole Transylvanian set of items (comprised of spooky free gifts), along with some basic Halloween or otherwise terrifying new decorations and buildings to scare your villagers this holiday.

For a complete rundown of the available items, meet us after the break.

For starters, there are three limited edition buildings / decorations available to purchase from the in-game Bulletin that appears when you first launch the game. These items are a Headless Rider decoration, an Insane Asylum building and a Witch's Hut. The prices on these items range from 25-35 Gold, so I hope you have enough saved up to afford them.

Meanwhile, if you'd like to create your over version of Transylvania in your world, you can do so by constructing the Dracula's Castle marvel. You will need to have learned Religion and Masonry to begin construction on the project, and once the base is placed, you'll need 12 friends to help you build it. If you don't want to wait, you can also purchase the Castle for 40 Gold.

Other Dracula items are those that you can receive as gifts from friends. This event appears to be set up to allow one themed item to be present on the game's free gifts menu at a time, with the current offering being the Sanctuary of Dracula (apparently even evil beings need a place to relax). This building adds 10 culture and 100 Happiness Points to your town.

Finally, the in-game store also offers some Halloween items, like a Halloween Party, Candy Shop, and Graveyard. With items like these all costing varying amounts of coins, it guarantees that all users can get in on the fun, even if they don't want to shell out Gold or wait for friends to send them items.

Playdom plans to shutter Super Farkle on Dec. 31

Anyone who logs in to Super Farkle will be greeted with a message telling them that the game will be closing down for good on December 31, 2010. This brings the total number of Playdom games to close down within three months to four, with Fanglies, Big City Life, and Treetopia 4 Comments. Super Farkle was not a huge hit for Playdom; at its peak it hit just over 1 million monthly actives but has fallen down to around 177,000 monthly players. The game was a cute rendition of the popular dice game Farkle, and used the same cute little critters as Fanglies.

Should we be concerned for Playdom? We don't think so; it appears that they're just culling out the games that aren't bringing in enough revenue to justify spending maintenance time on them. With huge hits like Social City and City of Wonder (not to mention being acquired by Disney) the company isn't going anywhere anytime soon. These game closures do say a lot for the state of social games though. If you don't have an enormous hit, perhaps creating games on Facebook isn't viable long term. We hate to see the on ramp for indie developers and startups who don't have the staff and cash to put a ton of production quality into their games, because big companies are closing down games that look and play very good.

If you want to give Super Farkle a try before it goes away forever, you can still do so.