Star Arcade Oy is a Finnish company that produces real-time multi-player mobile games, which run on a variety on platforms on top its own social gaming platform. This allows it to connect players together across Windows Phone, Symbian, iOS, Android, Blackberry, MeeGo, and Facebook. 

Star Arcade's social gaming platform includes a number of features including virtual items and themes, in-game chat, player following system, rematch system, guest play (no registration needed), enhanced Facebook log-in, achievements, and, in-app shop; all of which should appeal to seasoned social gamers.

The titles available for Windows Phone include CrazyGardens, TicTacToe, Diamonds Capture, and Diamonds Paradise. Additional release should arrive in the new future as Star Arcade continues to expand.

TicTacToe is an implementation of the classic noughts and crosses game, played on a large grid, on which you must place five symbols in a line, in order to defeat your human opponent. CrazyGardens sees you planting flowers (and other plants) against an opponent, in which the overall aim is to plant four flowers in a row vertically or horizontally three times.

In Diamonds Capture you move tiles to capture three-in-a-row diamonds of the same type, with the overall aim being to capture more of the board than your opponent. Diamond Paradise, which has the same aim as Diamonds Capture, but has a hexagon grid layout where you highlight lines of the same type diamonds to capture an area.

The games are all online multi-player only; there are no stand alone single player versions. When you play you and your opponent only have a limited amount of time to make a move (shown with a countdown clock bar), which keeps game play ticking along nicely. All of the games have power-ups that liven up game play. In some cases these will appear as part of the game, but it is also possible to buy them through in-app purchases. 

What really stands out about the Star Arcade titles is the ease with which you'll find a human opponent to play against. Any gamer will tell you that it's more fun to play against a fellow human, not matter how clever the in-built AI of a game might be. Star Arcade's platform will automatically match you up with an opponent as soon as you hit the play button. It's a process that usually takes about 15 seconds, and, because the platform is mobile platform agnostic, there never seems to be a shortage of opponents. That's because there is a much larger pools of players to draw from than is usually the case with non-Xbox Live Windows Phone titles.

CrazyGardens, TicTacToe, Diamonds Capture, and Diamonds Paradise can all be downloaded from the Windows Phone Marketplace. There is an ad-supported trial (free) version for each of the titles, but you can also opt to upgrade the full version (£1.49 / $1.99 / €1.99) for any of the games for ad-free game play.