Project Makeover’s Cliques offers unusually deep mechanics for a club feature in the casual market. Along with standards like leaderboards and gifting lives, Cliques embraces Project Makeover’s custom design mechanics by letting members share and like images of their designs, view each other’s Player Profiles, and visit each other’s studios where they can react with emojis.
Gardenscapes’ Secret Ingredient, a mini-game with merge gameplay, is the latest example of Playrix using mini-games to introduce mechanics from other genres. Prior to its release in Gardenscapes, Secret Ingredient first appeared as Austin’s Childhood in Homescapes, where it has already had multiple iterations. Because Playrix reuses mini-games across multiple apps, it’s able to invest in developing unusually robust mechanics for each mini-game.
Lily’s Garden’s Lunar Season is one of the first battle passes we’ve seen in the casual market that includes time-sensitive rewards. In the premium pass, reaching certain tiers within a time limit doubles the tier’s rewards. In the free pass, failing to reach certain tiers in time forfeits the tier’s rewards. Each timer only begins when players reach the preceding tier, which keeps players from falling too far behind.
Solitaire Cruise Tripeaks’ The Snowy Stir uses lite custom design elements to give its board game a sense of progression. As players collect resources from spaces, they earn decorations for a winter scene in the center of the board. Though players can’t choose these decorations, the board game offers a small amount of agency by letting players choose the result of wild dice rolls.
This month’s Casual Report focuses solely on teardowns of innovative feature and event releases in the casual market. At the end of this month, you will also receive a Recap Report that examines major trends across markets from 2022 as well as areas of opportunity for 2023.
My Singing Monsters’ Anniversary Month offers an unusually large amount of new content generated by the player community, including monsters, skins, decorations, and profile titles. The app is able to offer so much community-generated content in part because it has a whimsical theme and a core loop focused on custom design mechanics, both of which allow for a lot of flexibility in content designs.