9 things kids actually built this month — sorted by age

A snapshot from the last four weeks. Real prompts, typed (sometimes with help) by real kids, who later played the result enough times to leave a footprint in our analytics. Names are the auto-generated pseudonyms each game gets at creation — zippy-fox, brave-otter, etc — because we don't publish real kid names anywhere.

I picked these to span the age range we serve (four to ten) and to show the genuinely wide variation in what a kid will make when you give them a blank prompt box and no rules.

Ages 4–5: the dictation era

1. zippy-fox, age 4 — "sushi falls down and a hungry shark eats it"

Three-dimensional puzzle in a four-word sentence. A sushi roll falls from the top of the screen and a shark sprite at the bottom can be moved left and right to catch it. Each caught roll plays a satisfying chomp sound; missed ones bounce off the ocean floor and disappear. Forty-two plays in three weeks. The kid's mum reported he made his grandfather watch him play it on FaceTime for "the whole call." We believe her.

2. cosy-panda, age 5 — "a butterfly flying through flowers but it's calm"

The first prompt I have ever seen explicitly request calm as a feel. The AI delivered: pastel flowers drift past, the butterfly responds to gentle taps, there's no score, no fail state, no music change. It is, essentially, an interactive screen saver. Played for an hour the first afternoon. The kid's dad described it as "the first thing she's played that didn't end with her getting frustrated."

Ages 6–7: the iteration era

3. brave-otter, age 6 — "a maze where a kitten collects stars and the maze gets harder every time"

What's notable is the every time clause — the kid had already understood, by age six, that good games have levels. The result has three difficulty tiers, with maze size and obstacle count escalating. She iterated four times in the first session, asking for "make it harder again" until the AI essentially gave up and the maze became visually chaotic. The chaos version is the one her friends play.

4. zippy-fox, age 7 (a different one) — "a quiz game about dinosaurs for someone who doesn't know much about dinosaurs"

Educational without being broccoli. Twelve multiple-choice questions, each with a small dinosaur illustration. The "for someone who doesn't know much" framing was a stroke of accidental genius — it kept the difficulty appropriate without the AI getting too clever. The kid played it through with his five-year-old brother, who eventually started getting the answers right by sound recognition alone. Replayed twenty-three times in the family.

5. fluffy-otter, age 7 — "flappy bird but the bird is a slice of pizza"

Pattern 2 from the prompt-patterns guide, in the wild. A pepperoni slice flaps through gaps between cheese-coloured pipes. The kid's dad mentioned, casually, that this was the most-played game in their house for two weeks running, and that he himself has set the high score. Apparently it has a hidden tomato-bonus mechanic that wasn't in the original prompt; the AI invented it. Nobody is sure why.

Ages 8–10: the design-thinking era

6. sharp-fox, age 8 — "a card matching game but the cards run away when you try to flip them"

Genuinely original game design from an eight-year-old. The cards move, slowly, when the cursor approaches; you have to predict their trajectory and time your click. It is much harder than it sounds. The kid's mum says he was bragging about his clear time at school and several classmates asked their parents to download "the running cards game."

7. brave-panda, age 9 — "a 3-level platformer where the boss at the end is a giant tomato that splits into smaller tomatoes when you hit it"

This kid has internalised game-design vocabulary at a level that is suspicious for a nine-year-old. 3-level platformer, boss, splits into smaller — he's clearly absorbed it from playing other games, but the synthesis is his. Three actual levels (forest, cave, kitchen), increasingly difficult enemies, a final boss that does indeed split into smaller tomatoes on hit. Took two iterations to land. His record clear time, as of yesterday, is 3 minutes 41 seconds. He emails it to his cousins on a weekly leaderboard he runs informally.

8. sleepy-fox, age 9 — "a typing game where you defend your castle by typing the words flying at you"

An ad-hoc Mavis Beacon. The kid's mum, a former teacher, was thrilled. The kid was less thrilled when he realised he had built an educational tool by accident, but kept playing it anyway because the words got harder and the castle was on fire. Has since requested "a maths version" that we have not made yet because we are nervous about endorsing too much of this trajectory before he turns ten.

9. jumpy-otter, age 10 — "a game where you have to choose what to say in a conversation and the other character reacts differently"

A ten-year-old built a dialogue-tree narrative game. The conversation tree is small (twelve nodes, six endings) but it is, formally, a visual novel. The kid's dad says she wants to make the next one "branching more, like a real story, where the choices you make at the start change what you can say at the end." We are bracing for the moment a child here builds a Tolkien-comparable epic.

Patterns we noticed

The peak originality age is 6–8. Younger kids tend to remix what they already know (a dinosaur game, a maze, a butterfly). Older kids tend to imitate genres they've seen (platformer, RPG, visual novel). The 6–8 window is where kids invent things adults haven't seen — the maze that gets harder every time, the cards that run away, the conversation tree.

The most-played games are not the best-designed. They're the silliest. Pizza Flappy outranks the Tomato Boss by play count by roughly 3×, and neither is even close to the Sushi Shark, which is the highest-played game on the platform from the kid who can't yet type. Funny beats clever, every time.

Iteration matters more than initial prompt quality. Every game on this list was improved by at least one follow-up tweak. The kids who iterate end up with games that get played; the kids who don't iterate make one game and lose interest within a session.

— Louis. All games linked above are real and playable. Names are pseudonyms generated at game-creation time.