It all started in a dimly lit Chicagoan pizza place, where I sat awaiting my order. I was spacing out, dying of boredom, when a blinding phone screen was shoved in front of my face. “Hey Kevin, check this game out!” Once my eyes adjusted, I saw an 8-bit stack of brightly colored floors on which bizarrely dressed characters wandered aimlessly about. Desperate for entertainment, I grudgingly risked 160 megabytes of cellular data in the app store and hit the “download” button. I opened the app, and after completing the tutorial, I set out to accustom myself to the unfamiliar mechanics of Tiny Tower. Before I knew it, my pizza arrived, a glorious thin-crust barbecue chicken, but I could not take my eyes off this newfound world.
Six hundred days later, my first tower hit one hundred fifty floors, ninety-three of them commercial, generating over three thousand coins every minute, with the rest housing two hundred eighty mostly happy bitizens. I maxed out my elevator, had 5 golden tickets to my (user)name, and was ready to rebuild. Now pushing seven hundred days in-game, I’m constructing my fourth tower, just over halfway to fifty floors, racking up golden tickets like there’s no tomorrow (I’m currently at 14 for those of you wondering).
The beauty of Tiny Tower lies in its playstyle. It’s classified an idle game, but it doesn’t fall into the same bore that I find in every other of its class. Most people associate idle games with repetitive actions that eventually devolve into mindless management and collection (take Tap Titans, for example). In attempts to branch out to games with more content, they turn to Clash of Clans, Boom Beach, and the like, but oftentimes they quickly find themselves unable to commit the daily hours required to play the game with utmost efficiency, and instead eventually abandon them in frustration. I speak from experience; I’ve experimented with countless mobile games trying to find the perfect balance between idle and content-rich, even 
cycling through the three other games mentioned here for my fair share of time. In the end, I’m sure that Nimblebit’s Tiny Tower draws the absolute best from both worlds. There’s really no time commitment involved—at a minimum, you can just check your tower once a day for a few minutes to collect your daily rewards and stock your floors, and you’d still be doing just fine! But if you really want to, you can spend hours delving into its features, fulfilling quests, collecting VIPs, customizing your tower, ensuring that it’s running at peak performance.
So, how exactly do I play Tiny Tower?
If I’ve confused you with some terminology in my odd flex of Tiny Tower credentials, please, allow me to explain. There are essentially five resources in Tiny Tower.
Coins
- Main currency of the game
- Earned from your commercial floors and the rent your bitizens pay
- Spent stocking your commercial floors and buying new floors
Bux
- Auxiliary currency
- Essentially Nimblebit’s outlet for in-app purchases, but they’re
- extremely easy to get for free
- Earned through monetary purchase, watching ads by choice (free), completing quests (free), and your daily fireworks (free)
- Spent purchasing coins, rushing stocks and construction, purchasing cosmetic upgrades, and upgrading the speed of your elevator.
Floors
- Residential
- Houses five bitizens
- Commercial
- Creative
- Recreation
- Food
- Service
Retail
- Hires three bitizens to stock three items
- Yields a coin bonus and 36 coins per minute when fully stocked
- Can be upgraded with bux to hold more stock quantity
- Coin bonus increases and the floor remains stocked for longer, but coins per minute stays the same
- I personally upgrade each floor to level three because the first two upgrades are relatively cheap in terms of the free bux you can earn regularly
Bitizens
- Residents of your Tiny Tower
- A bitizen’s name, birthday, skills, and dream job are randomly generated when they move into your tower
- Interestingly enough, you are awarded 5 bux on each bitizen’s birthday, while the bitizen gets nothing
- Skills denote 5 numbers between 0 and 9, inclusive, one for each commercial floor time
- Higher skill numbers are generally more desired, because they increase the rent that the bitizen pays each day and discounts the stock of his/her item
- Bitizens with skill levels of all 9s are deemed golden bitizens, or “gold bitz” for short
- Dream job is likely the most valuable attribute. If you can, you should always hire a bitizen to his/her dream job
- This triples his/her rent and doubles his/her stock
- You can also dress up your bitizen in one of nearly a hundred costumes, either to denote their occupation on a certain floor or just for fun!
And finally… golden tickets! 
These are essentially the end-game currency, the most valuable of all. They can be either won from the hourly raffle, which picks 10-12 winners from a pool of a few thousand entrants every hour, or earned from rebuilding your tower, the conversion being one for every 50 floors of your tower. They can be spent to upgrade either a residential or commercial floor. Upgrading a residential floor will max out the skills of each bitizen living in that floor, but more commonly, upgrading a commercial floor will instantly upgrade it to level 10 and provide free and instant stocking. Amazing!
The most amazing feeling…
You opening the game to see a gold gift box pop up in the bottom left corner, and you feel a rush of adrenaline. You click it, and…
Winning the raffle is rare, but it actually happens more often than you think!
The game as a whole
For me, Tiny Tower is a game of optimization. Optimization, huh. Now while this word may induce PTSD from old math days, it is exactly what makes the game so satisfying. There are endless ways to improve your tower, and I’ve only grazed the surface with this little crash course. If you’d like to learn more, there are avid communities all over Discord and Reddit, with each member willing to help. So head over to your phone’s app store and hit that “download” button. After all, it’s free!
This is such an interesting post! I like how you researched and found other examples of “idle games.”
Oh my gosh! I honestly can’t believe how long ago it was when you first convinced me to (re)download this game at the start of this school year. Ever since then, I can say that I’ve mostly positive experiences from the game. This only issue is, just like many other idle games, is it’s SO ADDICTING. Once you start, it’s really hard to stop and you just want to keep going back, every second of every moment to collect those coins, read up on BitBook (the social media aspect in Tiny Tower), and keep on grinding those bux. Anyways, 1000% agree with everything you’ve said here and I also highly back up this review!
I am so glad to see someone share my interest in the wonder of a game that is tiny tower. I have been playing this game ever since I was a young lad and it was only recently when I fell out of touch with Tiny Tower. It used to be so addicting but I feel as now the developers are running out of enjoyable content so once again this game has become a repetitive nightmare. Also I am pretty sure that there is a way to cheat the game by advancing your clock on your phone, so as I stayed loyal, many of the other players chose to cheat and it sucked some of the fun out for me.
I for one have always played idle games to pass the time, for example the new one that just came out on coolmathgames labeled Idle Dice. But man did this post take me back to a time where I would cultivate my little tower and truly become attached to the residents of it. I thought this short tutorial of Tiny Tower was a nice change of pace from my normal reading, and truly a blast from the past, thank you for this!
Ahaha, I remember in sophomore year when I downloaded Tiny Tower. We were in Honors Biology and everyday, I would show you my Tiny Tower updates. It sounds weird but I feel like Tiny Tower is what really set off our friendship. We became closer through this app because we were friends on it. Everyday, I would visit your tower and you would visit mine because we wanted to make more bux. But the worst thing happened. I don’t know if you remember, but my Tiny Tower data got deleted. I was devastated. All my hard work, gathering up the coins and bux, providing a happy life for my Bitizens, upgrading my tower, was gone. I remember walking with you down the stairs, wailing because my levels were all gone. I wasted so much time on the app because it was so addicting, just for all the data to be deleted. From then, I never had the motivation to play the game again because I knew my new tower would never be as good as my old one.
I watch you play Tiny Tower everyday in physics, so naturally I had to read your post to learn what the rave is all about. I really enjoyed how you differentiated Tiny Tower from other idle games (I’ve heard a lot of people playing Clash of Clans and never really understood that type). Your guide to playing Tiny Tower was really helpful and I got looped into your excitement for the game! The rules seem simple enough but, as you said, really let you spend as little or as much time as you want. As someone who’s not big on games, but still looking for the perfect app to have in reserve for times of boredom, Tiny Tower seems like the game for me. In fact, I’m heading to the app store to give it a try right now.
Tiny Tower was the corner stone of my childhood–I knew all the rudimentary hacks, exploits, and glitches to get more bux–so I knew I had to read this post. And I wasn’t disappointed. The way you described your exposure to and emmersion into the game was incredbily captivating and truly reminded me what it was first like to play the game. Tiny Tower, as you explain, is incredibly simple and easy to grasp, yet the simplicity acts as a blank slate for endless possibilities. It’s good to see that, after all these years, the integrity of the game has remained intact. Thanks for the trip down memory lane–I might just go redownload it again.