Casoual Games is an independent studio run by Casou, a French developer who designs, codes, draws and ships every game on this site. Casoual = Casou + casual. That was the whole naming meeting. It was short. Everyone agreed.
- Game design
- Casou
- Code
- Casou
- Art
- Casou
- Sound
- Casou
- QA
- also Casou
Why it exists
Because at some point every phone game asked for an account, a connection and three minutes of ads before a thirty-second round. Casoual was born out of an irritation, and of an older wish: games you understand in one sentence and still replay two hundred times.
Everything here is made by one person, which explains both the release rhythm and the complete absence of meetings. A game that is not fun within ten seconds is not published. A published game keeps getting fixed, because someone always ends up finding the bug the developer had not seen. Often the developer.
What playing here is like
A game opens in about a second, on the phone you already have. There is nothing to buy to keep playing, and no timer telling you to come back tomorrow. You stop when you feel like stopping, and everything is still there when you return.
Nothing requires an account. Leaderboards work with just a nickname, progress stays on your device, and every solo mode runs offline once loaded.
Things you will not find here
- No ad will ever cut into your game. One can show up between two games or levels, never two less than five minutes of play apart, and some games offer an optional ad in exchange for a hint. No banner squatting a corner of the screen, nothing mid-move, ever. The game in progress is sacred.
- No sign-up form ambushing you after level 3, no newsletter popup, no “create an account to save your progress”. Your progress saves itself. That is what computers are for.
- No gems, coins, energy or battle pass. If a game is fun, it does not need a second economy stapled to it.
- No notifications pretending to miss you. A game is a place you go, not a thing that chases you.
The Pause app
The games are also bundled into Pause, a free app for Android and iPhone: every game in one download, fully playable offline. The name says what it is for. A pause of two quiet minutes, in a plane, a metro, a waiting room, or anywhere else the internet gave up before you did. What is in it, and what is not.
Guides and rules
Alongside the games, the studio writes guides about the classic mechanics behind them: the rules of blackball and belote coinchée, the history of Snake, how nonograms and polyominoes work. Written in six languages, proofread, and updated when a rule changes. Enough to settle an argument at the end of a family dinner. And when the argument holds out, two tools settle it: the nonogram solver, which says whether the grid required guessing, and the belote move checker, which says whether you were allowed to play that card.
Where to start
Three games to get the idea in five minutes: a puzzle, a duel, a word game.
NonoGrids that never make you guess
PoolThe pub’s English pool, with the real rules
WordySix letters, a grid, and the word that was there all along
Contact
Questions, bug reports, ideas: casou@casoual.games. An actual human who reads all of it. The same one who does everything else, obviously.