About the diary

Why a diary and not reviews

I started writing things down because I kept forgetting why I had deleted a game. I would install something, play it for a fortnight, remove it, and three months later reinstall the same thing having lost whatever conclusion I had reached the first time. So I began noting a line or two after each session — what I played, how long, whether I enjoyed it or was just filling time.

The notes turned out to be more useful than any single verdict, because they showed a shape. Games that felt brilliant on day one were often gone by day five. Games that irritated me at first sometimes became the thing I opened without thinking about it. You cannot see that in a first impression, and a first impression is what most coverage of small phone games amounts to.

So the entries here are diary entries. Each one covers a game I kept installed for at least two weeks, played in the gaps of an ordinary week rather than in a marathon, and wrote up afterwards from the running notes. If a game does not survive two weeks, it does not get an entry — I would rather publish six games I know well than sixty I glanced at.

How I play

On two phones, deliberately. The first is a budget handset from a few years ago with 3 GB of memory, the sort of device an enormous number of people are actually holding. The second is a mid-range phone from last year. Where a game behaves differently on the two, I say so, because "runs fine" is not a useful sentence if it only means "runs fine on new hardware".

I play in real conditions: on public transport, standing up, one-handed, with notifications arriving. A game that only works when you are sitting still in a quiet room with both thumbs free is a game with a limitation worth writing down.

What the five scores mean

I invented these five headings for my own notes and kept them because they answer the questions I actually have about a phone game. They are not the usual categories and they are not meant to be.

The overall score

The number at the top of each entry is my judgement, not the average of the five above. Sometimes one weak area sinks an otherwise decent game; sometimes a game gets away with a lot because the core loop is that good. I have kept the same rough scale since I started: seven means I enjoyed it and would tell a friend about it, eight means I kept playing after the entry was written, and anything below six does not get published because if I disliked a small free game that much, my time is better spent writing about one I did not.

What this site does not do

• No sponsored entries. Nobody has paid for anything on this site and nobody has been offered the chance to.
• No affiliate arrangements, referral codes, or links that earn me anything.
• No advertising on the site itself. The pages you are reading are plain HTML and one stylesheet.
• No press access, no early copies, no relationship with any studio. I install games the same way you do.
• No newsletter, no accounts, no comments section to moderate.

The site costs me a few euros a year to host and I would rather keep it that way than complicate it.

A note on what these games are

Everything I cover is a casual arcade or puzzle game, played for the sake of playing it. Cash does not enter these games and cash does not come out of them; their counters, meters and scores are internal to the software and convert into nothing outside it. Where a game funds itself with adverts, or sells optional cosmetics, I say so in plain terms in the entry. A game that worked any other way would simply never appear in this diary, because that is not the sort of thing this diary is about.

Corrections

I get things wrong. If a mechanic works differently from how I have described it, or a game has changed since I wrote about it, please tell me — details are on the contact page. I amend entries in place and note the change and its date at the foot of the entry rather than quietly editing.