Nowadays, games found in various entertainment facilities, gambling halls, arcades, and sporting events can be played using your own laptop or PC.

At the comfort of your own home, you can play free online games and battle against friends, relatives, and people from other countries.

Skill-based games are currently among the most popular in the online gaming industry. These games test a player’s eye-hand coordination, mental, logical, and strategic abilities.

Online skill-based games are like battlefields because each player is scored based on how well they perform (e.g. how fast they completed the stage) in the game.  They are ranked depending on how high they scored. In social networking websites, you’ll see your scores and ranking together with your friends who are playing the same game.

Free games are offered by social networking websites and online gaming portals. That is why these games are enjoyed by people of all ages. Age doesn’t matter in the online battlefield, only your score does.

These are some of the games enjoyed by online skill-based gamers:

• Puzzle games are problem-solving games which challenge a player’s logic and strategy (e.g. hidden objects game, Sudoku, crossword puzzle).
• Word games test a player’s vocabulary.
• Card games are patterned after the famous French deck games (e.g. solitaire, poker, blackjack).
• Sports games are patterned after the famous sporting games that people love (e.g. basketball, golf, chess).
• Trivia games test a player’s knowledge about various subject areas such as history, mathematics, science, literature and more.
• Strategy games test a player’s decision making skills.

These new battlefields were made possible by various online gaming portals and social networking sites such as Facebook. In a research released by The Nielsen Company, 22.7% of internet time is used for browsing through social networking sites and 10.2% is spent on online games.