There seem to be a lot of free gambling related games on Facebook this days and even more games that require the player to check in at regular times and click on things to earn points. Somehow the new Golden Nugget Casino game on Facebook manages to combine the worst of features of each of those as well as the continued offer of posting notices to annoy your friends.

Now, let me explain — I haven’t just read about the game. I’ve been playing it. Like I played Yoville and Farmville and one of the many aquarium games and the garden game. Eventually the continued mouse movement to click all of these aggravated an already sensitive nerve and they literally became a pain in the neck. But because the Golden Nugget game involves setting up your own casino, I decided to give it a try.

You’ll start out with a very basic casino floor and enough money to buy a few games, like slot machines, to furnish your casino. Now, here’s the first problem. You purchase a game and set it up, at which point it runs for a specific time before you can collect your money. While the game is running, there isn’t much to do except visit friend’s casinos, but I’ll get to that in a bit. First let’s look at run times. The amount of time a game has to run before you can collect varies greatly from 30 seconds for a slot machine to a day for a poker table. Others run 2 hours or 4 hours. But if you aren’t there to collect your earnings when the game finishes running, you lose some of the profit. With the 30 second slots, you’ll spend a lot of time clicking and clicking on Facebook without getting much else done. But set up a longer game and you’ll have to remember to keep going back to Facebook to see if it’s time to collect. And if it pays off when you’re sleeping or on the drive home, well, you’ll lose some profit. Of course, this being Facebook, you really don’t have any opportunity to set up your own schedule.

So, running the casino is basically a click and earn points type of game. You’ll be promoted to send annoying notices to all your friends about the game and you are able to redecorate the casino with your profits. You can even expand the casino. But all of this requires that you spend days actively playing the game to advance levels and earn profit. There even adding an bank where you can use your credit card and spend real money to add things to your virtual, not real money, casino. Yep, you spend money to get, umm, pixels.

So, what do you do while waiting for the tables to earn money? Well, you can visit friend’s casinos, or Ace’s Casino since he’s always there, and play games. Until you run out of chips. Then, well, you have a problem. Because when you run out of chips, you can’t use your profit to buy more. You have to wait for friends to send them to. So, if you don’t have friends on Facebook who play the game and are willing to send you chips, you don’t get new chips. Which means you can’t actually play casino games themselves unless you bug friends to play the game and send you chips.

Run out of chips and what to play video poker or slots? Well, may I suggest that you leave Facebook and check out many of the online casinos on the web. Many of them even offer a practice play option where they’ll give you as many pretend chips as you want to play the games and you don’t have to bug any of your friends. When you’re done playing, just exit the casino and it’ll be there when you want to go back. No need to check in all day long to make sure it’s still operating. Oh, and if you want to spend real money at a real online casino, guess what — you can win real money. Money, not pixels. Thanks to Facebook, real gambling actually becomes a better value for your dollar than pretend gambling.