A game page loading on your phone tells you nothing about whether you can play it. Plenty of games render perfectly and then wait forever for a key press that a touchscreen cannot produce.
In our own catalogue, about a quarter of the games are keyboard-only. We track that as a flag and filter them out on touch devices, because shuffling a phone user into a WASD game is a dead end whose only escape is shuffling again.
What works on a touchscreen
- One-button games. Tap to jump, tap to shoot, tap to flip.
- Drag and aim games — pool, archery, catapults, golf.
- Puzzle, match and card games, which were designed for a pointer and translate perfectly.
- Games with on-screen controls drawn by the game itself, which many mobile-first developers include.
What does not
- Anything described with WASD or arrow keys, unless it also draws touch controls.
- Emulated console and DOS games. The emulator maps a physical keyboard and there is nothing to tap.
- Games needing simultaneous inputs, like moving and aiming at once.
- Two-player games sharing one keyboard, which are excellent on a laptop and impossible on a phone.
The detection problem
Detecting a touch device is less obvious than it looks. Checking only for a coarse pointer catches touchscreen laptops, which have a keyboard and are fine. We pair the pointer check with a width limit so a convertible laptop keeps the full catalogue while a phone gets the filtered one.
One deliberate exception: a shared link always opens the game it names, whatever device receives it. Filtering the shuffle pool is helpful. Filtering a link somebody sent you is just broken.
Landscape is worth trying
Many games assume a wide viewport and squash badly in portrait. Rotating the phone fixes more mobile complaints than anything else, and a lot of games only draw their touch controls once there is room for them.