Why Twenty-Five
A two-person team made twenty-five small games instead of one large one. Here is why that was the right answer to the question we were actually asking.
Before we built anything, we spent several weeks arguing about how many games to make. The discussion eventually produced a number — twenty-five — but the path to that number was instructive, and the arguments against bigger and smaller numbers are worth laying out.
The case against one big game
The most natural thing a two-person team might do with limited resources is make one game and make it well. There is a strong argument for this: depth beats breadth, players who love a game will come back to it, and one polished experience is more memorable than a dozen rough ones. We considered it seriously. We ultimately rejected it for three reasons.
First, we did not know which one game to make. Our tastes diverge — one of us leans toward puzzle games, the other toward action games — and we could not agree on a single design direction that would satisfy both. A catalogue, it turned out, was not a compromise. It was a better answer to the actual question we were trying to answer: what is a good browser game?
Second, one game is a single point of failure. If it is not good, the project has nothing. Twenty-five games means that if twelve of them are mediocre and two of them are genuinely excellent, the project still has value. The portfolio absorbs risk in a way a single game cannot.
Third, and perhaps most important, twenty-five small games taught us more than one large one would have. Each game forced us to solve a different design problem — physics in Maze Spin, audio synthesis in Sound Match, grid generation in Path Find. The learning compounds across a catalogue in a way it does not within a single project. After twenty-five games, we know how to build browser games. After one game, we would know how to build that one game.
The case against more than twenty-five
If twenty-five is good, why not fifty? The honest answer is that we ran the numbers and twenty-five was the largest number we believed we could execute at consistent quality with the time and people we had. Quality is a hard ceiling to argue against. A catalogue of fifty games, twelve of which are visibly broken or boring, is worse than a catalogue of twenty-five games that all work and some of which are excellent. We set twenty-five as the target, built them in order from most to least confident, and stopped when we ran out of ideas we genuinely believed in.
There is also a diminishing-returns argument from the reader's side. A person who arrives at Hage Game and finds twenty-five games of varied types has more than enough to find something they like. A person who finds fifty games has a harder selection problem, not a better one. Discovery is a cost, and past a certain catalogue size, the cost of finding the good games outweighs the benefit of having more games available.
The structure of the twenty-five
We sorted the twenty-five by our own confidence, which correlated loosely with quality: the games we were most confident about ended up with higher editor scores. The top ten (all rated 4.0 or above) are the ones we would recommend to a friend with no further explanation. The middle ten (3.7 to 3.9) are solid and each teaches something, but they would not be our first pitch. The bottom five (3.5 to 3.6) exist because they are genuinely different from everything else in the catalogue — one-tap games, minesweeper, drawing puzzles — and a catalogue that omits them has a visible gap. None of them are bad. They are just not our best work.
That self-assessment is, we think, the most honest thing we can offer a reader. We know which games are excellent and which are merely fine. We have said so in every review, and we say so again here. If you have limited time, start with the top ten and stop when you find one you want to keep playing.
Published · 14 May 2026 · Written and signed by Bill