Four games for virtual friends

— -- Here's a sampling of popular casual online social games, where to play them and how:

Text Whirl: A bit like Scrabble against the clock. You put together words from six scrambled letters for points. Available on Social Gaming Network (sgn.com) on Facebook and elsewhere.

Extras:Social Gaming Network's game bar on Facebook lets players know what other games their friends are playing on the network.

Dominoes: One of the classic games, along with Hearts, Spades, Sudoku, backgammon and chess, available on Mytopia.com.

Extras:Customizable avatars and virtual prizes.

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PathWords: A Tetris-like letter scramble in which you click on tiles to create words of three letters or more; the more letters, the higher your score.

Extras:Host company Zynga.com also has its own social bar that displays on social networks to let players know if friends are online and what they are playing.

Sketch-It!: One of the games on new Cafe.com, Sketch-It is a cross between Etch A Sketch and Charades. Players must get competitors to guess a secret word by drawing the object using a palate of colors.

Extras:Newcomers get 10,000 Cafe coins (virtual currency) to outfit their "MiniMe" or to use during games as "boosts."