Three small games in one app, for when you don't want to scroll and don't want to think.
Most phone games want your full attention or your whole evening. The thing people reach for instead is a feed, which asks for neither and gives back about as much.
Tiny Pastimes sits in the gap. Three small games you can open for two minutes, put down in the middle, and come back to with nothing lost. No streaks, no timers, no score to protect. Nothing in the app is trying to get you to stay longer than you meant to.
Everything is hand-illustrated and everything is tactile. You pick things up, move them, and put them down. That is most of it.
Each one is a different kind of quiet. You do not have to finish any of them.
Put the little things where they want to go.
Pick a tray — nine pieces, sixteen, or thirty-six — and arrange its trinkets until everything has a place. A card asks for something gentle: put the two pink things together, give the music box some breathing room. Answer it, or ignore it and arrange the tray however you like.
There is a new tray each day. If you miss one, nothing happens. There is no catching up, because there is nothing to catch up to.
Mix something peculiar for whoever wanders up.
A guest walks up the path to your picnic table and asks for something. The basket opens and offers nine ingredients out of a pantry of ninety-nine. Drag two or three into the bowl, then do the actual work by hand: muddle it, stir it around the edge, then press and hold while the potion streams into the bottle.
Hand it across the table and see what they make of it. Every combination makes something. Get it right and the guest is delighted; get it wrong and they have their own opinion about it. Either way the recipe goes in the book.
Fix the thing someone couldn't bear to throw away.
A music box that stopped playing. A scarf coming apart. A storybook with a loose spine, a watering can, a chipped ceramic cup. Guests bring one small broken thing to the table and you repair it.
It is the slowest of the three and the one most about paying attention to a single object until it is whole again.
Tiny Pastimes is going through App Store review now. Android follows after that.
The art is the part people notice. The harder part was everything I had to leave out.
The habits I had from other apps kept pulling me toward streaks, daily goals, and a reason to come back tomorrow. All of them work, and all of them are the thing I was trying to build away from.
So the daily tray is deterministic and there is no catch-up. Miss a week and you have missed nothing. That sounds like a small decision and it changed most of the design.
A game for short attention has to survive being abandoned mid-move. Arrangements save on the device, the deck remembers where it was, and there is an undo.
The same reasoning covers reduced motion and optional sound and haptics. If any part of it demanded something from you, it would stop being the thing it is for.
Tiny Pastimes is the game side of the studio. The other two projects are built around cards and collecting.
See the other apps