Teaching a Game Without Words
9 June 2026
Here is a problem we have been circling for a long time. A four-year-old opens Concentration for the first time. She cannot read, so a panel of instructions is just decoration. She has never played a matching game, so the rules are not obvious from looking. The usual industry answer is a tutorial: a sequence of pop-ups that block the screen, explain the game in sentences, and make you tap "Next" until they go away. We have never liked them. They are a wall between a child and the game, and they are the first thing an adult skips.
What a person actually does in that situation is point. So that is what our games do now. The first time you play, a friendly animated finger appears over the board and shows you the move. Not a recording of a move, either: the finger reads the actual game in front of you and points at something that genuinely works right now. Make a different move instead and it quietly re-aims at whatever the new best thing to do is. Once you have finished a single game, from any of ours, the finger never appears again.
Each game needed its own idea of what "show me" means. Concentration picks a card and taps it, then taps its match. Tic-Tac-Toe points at the strongest square available to you, which meant teaching the hint to think the way our computer opponent thinks. Word Search drags from the first letter of a word you haven't found to its last letter, tracing the shape of the answer. Puzzles picks up a piece you haven't placed yet and drags it to where it belongs, scrolling the tray along if that piece has drifted off the edge of the screen. Sudoku takes two steps, one tap on the cell and one on the number that goes in it, and the very first Sudoku anyone plays is a normal board with only five squares left blank, so the hint can walk you through all five and then the puzzle is finished and the training wheels are off.
Mazes was the interesting one. You play it by tilting your device, so there is no button to point at and nothing a finger could usefully do. Instead the game draws a glowing trail of dots along the shortest route from your marble to the exit, recalculated every time you move. It teaches the same thing the finger teaches, which is not "press this" but "here is where you are trying to get to", and it works no matter how you happen to be steering.
The rule we set for ourselves throughout was that a hint may suggest but never insist. Nothing blocks the screen. Nothing waits for you to comply. There is no "tap here to continue", no greyed-out board, and no way to get stuck inside the explanation. If a child ignores the finger entirely and starts poking at cards on the other side of the board, that is a perfectly good way to learn a matching game, and the game lets her.
That restraint is the whole point of the feature. A game should leave a child feeling more capable than when she opened it, and being marched through a set of instructions is not that feeling. It matters at the other end of the age range too: a grandparent trying Sudoku for the first time gets exactly the same gentle nudge and the same freedom to ignore it. Nobody is tested, nobody is hurried, and nobody has to ask for help to get started. That is the kind of beginning we want our games to have.