How we test a game before it earns a sticker

2026-09-12 · craft

Every game in the floor has been through the same five passes. None of them require special equipment: a mid-range Android phone, a five-year-old laptop, and a stopwatch.

Pass one: cold start

Load the game with the browser cache cleared on 4G. If the first frame takes longer than two seconds, the game is re-filed with a note. This is the pass that removes most candidates from the front of any list.

Pass two: explain in ten seconds

The tester plays for ten seconds, stops, and says the goal out loud. If they hesitate, we do not blame the tester. We move the game to a shelf where a longer learning curve is actually part of the promise.

Pass three: lose on purpose

Deliberately losing tells you how a game behaves at its worst moment. Games that glitch on a loss, or freeze the restart button, are pulled until fixed.

Pass four: interrupt it

Play, then switch apps for thirty seconds, then come back. A game that returns you to the main menu has failed this pass; the fix is usually a paused state that survives the switch.

Pass five: the boring pass

Play the same board for ten minutes straight. Most games are excellent for three minutes and dull afterwards. We do not treat that as a flaw — we simply label it, because a game that is excellent for three minutes is exactly what the Kopitiam pack is for.

What we never do

We never score a game on originality, nostalgia or how much we personally liked the art. Those are conversation topics, not measurements.