Though a dashing young fellow, Charles Merrin is an industry veteran in casual games, having worked at Real Games, TikGames, and Trymedia.

Along with Anatoly Tikhman, Charles just recently started a new social games company, Playteau. We spoke with Charles about his new gig at Playteau, their first Facebook game Fortune Stones, and his predictions on social games in the future.

Download game companies are not the only ones getting in the Christmas spirit this year (for a list of all the big Christmas sales, see today’s Steals & Deals).

Facebook games have Yule-time spirit as well. Inside Social Games has a great wrap-up of a bunch of games with Christmas related events and items for you to check out.

Gamezebo Rating:

Galaxy X takes a familiar formula found in many traditional PC games and reworks it for the Facebook crowd complete with a campaign and thrilling online modes.

Millions of players are likely familiar with the popular Worms series of games from Team 17, and that’s what it seems the developers of Galaxy X, StudioEX are capitalizing on with the many ideas and features found in Galaxy X.

They said it could never be done. They were wrong.

As reported this morning by Inside Social Games, CityVille has surpassed FarmVille as the number one game on Facebook. In just 20 days, CityVille has reached 60,000 monthly average users (MAUs), surpassing FarmVille’s current 56,000 MAUs. In daily average users (DAUs), which is not as impressively big a number but is more relevant to the business, CityVille has hit 16,778,004 DAUs, compared to FarmVille’s 13,357,004 (Appdata).

So, how did this happen?