Playing on a phone or tablet

iPhone and iPad

It works, with one thing to check first. If you are on iOS 26.0 to 26.4, update to 26.5 or later. Those versions shipped a Safari bug that closes the tab after about a minute on games like this one. It is not something we can work around from inside the page, and Apple fixed it in 26.5.

Add the site to your home screen and it opens full screen, without the browser chrome, which is the closest thing to an app.

Android

Chrome on Android is the safest bet. Add to home screen works the same way there.

Playing without buttons

An on-screen joystick and A, B, X and Start appear once the game loads. Push the stick further to walk faster, hold B to run. On a naming or letter-writing screen the stick turns into arrows by itself, so each tap moves one space.

Turn the phone sideways for the rest of the pad: Y, L, Z, R and a D-pad fill the space either side of the game. The full map is on the controls page.

Your game and your town

Your disc image is cached in the browser on that device, so you load it once per phone, and it is never uploaded anywhere.

Your town is not stuck there. Sign in and cloud saves follow you across devices, so you can put an hour in on a laptop and carry on from the phone the same evening. You can also move a town in from Dolphin.