Startup Tingly Games fuses greeting cards and casual games

You can now surprise your grandma who just learned how to use “the Facebook” with an e-card that has Sudoku built into it.

Greeting Games, publisher Tingly Games’ new service, turns casual video games into virtual greeting cards. It’s available at greetinggames.com. It’s now in beta-testing and available to try for free until the end of the month. After that, Tingly will offer a subscription model and permit nonsubscribers to buy individual e-cards.

Greeting Games has a number of popular categories, such as “match-3 games, slicers, bubble shooters, and jigsaw puzzles,” according to a press release. Tingly developed the current selection, and no third-party titles have been announced yet. However, a company representative told GamesBeat that Tingly is “partnering with other game companies to allow those game companies to introduce their IP to consumers first through the brief greeting games in order to drive interest in the new full games.

“Tingly Games just can’t share any of those partnerships yet until the contracts are signed.”

The games are customizable; you can include your Facebook profile picture, adjust the difficulty, and create in-game messages. You could create a note that says “Finally!!!” when your grandma wins. Tingly plans to add more customization options, like different visual themes and additional occasions, in the coming months as it transitions the website from beta to full release.

The combination of game and e-card seems like it will be a great opportunity to bring friends and relatives into the rapidly growing fold of what Tingly claims are 700 million casual gamers in the world. “Company leaders Ard Bonewald and Mark Overmars saw that by creating an entirely new category, they could introduce people who are already predisposed to playing games to the casual games industry,” said the representative. “They also believe that, since so many people play casual games already, they will be allowing the senders of greeting games to impress the recipients with something wonderful to do with their greeting other than just reading a greeting!”

Engineers developed Greeting Games using entirely HTML5 in order to ensure compatibility with many mobile devices. Within a year, the service should roll out worldwide with localized versions for all languages.