The idea
A feed, not a menu
Reel Games borrows one thing from short-form video: the vertical swipe. Everything else about it is built to get you into a game faster and keep you there.
- Snake
- Flying Bird
- Asteroids
- Cyber Runner
- Bat
- Pinball
- Alien Invasion
- Brick Breaker
- Froggy
- Pong
- Maze Chase
- Elephant Jump
- Rabbit Sphere
- Darts
- Cup Pong
- Bowling
- Pool
- Pond
- Canabalt
- Block Cutter
- Springing
- Shuffling
- 2048
- Hangman
- Anagram
- Matching
- Prism
- Connections
- Sudoku
- Tetris
- Simon
- Anagram Pro
- Tic Tac Toe
- Checkers
- Connect 4
- Block Drop
- Minesweeper
- Hanoi
- Rhythm Hero
- Maze 3D
- Swap
- Battleship
- Chess
- Lumio
- Figure
- Gorilla
- Shape Buster
The difference
What a menu costs you
Choosing is not free. On a five minute break, the time spent deciding what to play is time not spent playing.
Open the app
With a menu:A grid of icons, a splash screen, maybe an ad
With the feed:A game, already running
Decide what to play
With a menu:Scroll a catalog, read names, weigh options
With the feed:Play the one in front of you, or swipe
Move to something else
With a menu:Quit, go back, load the menu, pick, load the game
With the feed:One swipe
Go back to a favorite
With a menu:Same trip through the menu again
With the feed:Swipe the other way
Watch it
Twenty seconds of the real thing
Actual gameplay from the app, not a mockup. Every screen in the reel is a game in the library.
Four consequences
What follows from building it this way
Discovery is the gesture
You find your next game the same way you find your next video: by swiping past the one you are done with. Nothing about that has to be taught.
No loading between games
Games start immediately because they are small and already on the device. The swipe is the whole transition.
The feed works offline
A video feed stops dead without a connection. This one does not, because there is nothing to stream: the games are on your phone.
Retrying costs nothing
When a round ends you go straight back to the start. No ad, no interstitial, no countdown before you can try again.
What you get
The library behind the feed
The feed is only useful if the next game is worth swiping to. 47 games ship in the app across three categories, and every one of them is listed here: arcade rounds, logic puzzles and word boards, and board games against a computer that plays to win.
You start with 12 of them free, with no credit card. Reel Games Pro opens the complete library and every game added afterwards, from $9.99 a year with a 3-day free trial. New games are added regularly, and a Pro subscription includes them at no extra cost.
Global leaderboards run across the collection, so a score set in a tunnel with no signal syncs up the next time you are online and takes its place on the board.