If you're a fan of more than one of Zynga's games on Facebook, you're likely familiar with the bar that runs across the top of each game's page, offering quick links to other Zynga games that you've played. Normally, this bar is completely ignorable, as you've likely already bookmarked your favorite Facebook games and wouldn't need to look up to this bar to switch between them, but as the folks at CEGamers have discovered, sometimes that bar is definitely worth looking at.
While it looks to have been removed now, earlier today, the Bubble Safari game logo in this "zBar" was replaced with an icon for something called "Thrones of Avalon," including a suit of impressive armor, as you can see below. Clicking on the 25 icon in the top right sent gamers to Bubble Safari (this number is supposed to notify players of how many outstanding requests they currently have in other Zynga games), but clicking on the image itself brought up the image at the top of this post, which appears to be a preview image for this supposed Thrones of Avalon Facebook game.
Via this preview image, we're told that "survival unites" and "greed divides" before being asked "How will you guide your kingdom?" For the record, clicking on "More Info" simply transforms that box into one that says "Coming Soon." Of course, this leads us to some speculation. Is Thrones of Avalon a real Facebook game that's currently in development, or are these images simply what remains of a scrapped project? We could even go so far as to speculate that the game could have been inspired by Marion Zimmer Bradley / Diana L Paxon's "Avalon" series of novels, as the fonts between these books and the preview image above are virtually identical, and the setting for the Avalon books concerns a British female on the throne.
Whatever the case, this is definitely an interesting bit of news, and we've reached out to Zynga for comment. Stay tuned for more.
What do you think of the general concept behind Thrones of Avalon? Do you think Zynga just accidentally revealed a new game, or do you think these were working images that we were never supposed to see? Speculate with us in the comments!