CityVille takes FarmVille's Facebook crown

(All rights reserved - Zynga)

Top Facebook game CityVille has reached a regular player base of 86.2 million as of January 4, using the New Year weekend to beat the previous Facebook record of 83.6 million set by Zynga stablemate FarmVille.

Those numbers poll the amount of monthly active users, as tracked by AppData.com, showing that despite FarmVille's lower crop of 58 million regulars it's still sitting behind CityVille as the social network's second biggest app.

Zynga, king of cross-promotion, sees its monopoly on Facebook's top five broken only by Phrases, a quote app from Takeoff Monkey, as Texas Hold'Em Poker and FrontierVille currently lie in fourth and fifth. Causes, the grassroots activism app, is just behind in sixth.