What I Learned Designing a Game for My 70-Year-Old Mother
I'm an information security professional by day. Last year I set out to build a match-3 game my mother Evelyn — who turned seventy this year — could truly enjoy. I assumed the hard part would be the game engine. I was wrong. The hard part was unlearning every assumption I had about players. These are my honest notes, for anyone building or choosing software for older adults.
Touch targets: bigger than you think, then bigger
Design guidelines say interactive elements should be at least 44–48 pixels. Watching my mother play taught me that for older hands the comfortable number is closer to 60. Fingertips flatten with age, fine motor precision drops, and a mis-tap that a younger player wouldn't notice reads to a senior as "I did it wrong." I redesigned the boards so tiles stay chunky even on phone screens — and the later levels cap the grid size rather than shrink the tiles.
Color alone is never enough
Roughly one in ten older players has some degree of color vision deficiency, and nearly all have reduced contrast sensitivity. Every fruit in ChillBrain differs in three ways at once: the emoji shape, the color, and a distinct pastel background behind each type. Nobody has to distinguish red from green under poor light to play.
Time pressure is a different game
Add a countdown to a puzzle and you haven't made it harder — you've made it a reflex game, which is a different genre that punishes exactly the players I built this for. Removing timers entirely was the single best decision in the project. Difficulty instead comes from move budgets and bigger boards, which reward thinking — something seniors are excellent at when you stop rushing them.
Never punish; redirect
Early playtests: when a swap didn't produce a match, the game buzzed and the tiles shook. My mother apologized to the game. That horrified me into a rule: every message is either neutral or encouraging. Failing a level says "So close!" and offers help. There is no losing streak counter. Confidence, once dented, takes weeks to rebuild in a player who already suspects technology "isn't for them."
Sound is confirmation, not decoration
Younger players treat sound as atmosphere. Older players use it as feedback: the pop that confirms a match landed, the swoosh that says something bigger happened, a warm voice saying "That's a four match!" Between reduced tactile feedback on glass screens and reduced confidence, audio confirmation carries real usability weight. (We also learned the voice must be a natural one — the robotic default voices on many devices tested terribly.)
The difficulty curve must be measured, not felt
Developers are catastrophically bad judges of their own game's difficulty. Our levels felt "fine" to me and were mathematically impossible past level 25 — we discovered this only by simulating thousands of playthroughs of a basic player and measuring win rates per level, then retuning every goal against those numbers. If you build games: simulate your floor player, not your ceiling player.
What seniors taught me that no guideline mentions
- They read everything. Younger players skip text; my mother reads every word on screen. Every label had to earn its place.
- They remember kindness. The dedication screen — "This game is dedicated to Evelyn" — is, per her friends, the feature. Software that feels made for someone gets forgiven for everything else.
- They are loyal players. Once the game earned trust, my mother played every single day — more consistently than any younger tester. Design for the daily return: gentle gifts, streaks, no guilt for missed days.
ChillBrain is free to play at chilldaemon.com/chillbrain. If you're building something similar and want to compare notes, write to me — this niche needs more builders taking it seriously.