Web first, store second
Every game is a website before it's an app. The Android build loads that same site, which means the phone and the browser are never out of sync and most improvements skip the review queue entirely.
About
A studio the size of a kitchen table.
We build software the way you'd build furniture in a small workshop: one piece at a time, by hand, and you can see the joins.
The short version
FounderPanda started because of a question that wouldn't go away: why do word games, the most social thing you can do with a language, end up being played alone?
The answer, mostly, is that multiplayer is hard and puzzles are easy. A daily word can be a static file. A live opponent needs matchmaking, a live connection, a fair way to end a round when someone closes the app, and a hundred small decisions about what happens when two people are one letter away at the same moment. Most studios weigh that and build the static file.
We built the other thing first. Kelime Tahmin launched with six modes, five of them involving other people, and a platform underneath that can carry the next game too.
What we believe about small software
Fewer decisions beat more features
Every option you put in front of someone is a small tax. A game that opens straight into a round will be played more than a game that opens into a menu, even if the menu is better designed. We spend most of our effort on removing steps rather than adding rooms.
The first thirty seconds are the whole product
If a person has to create an account before they can find out whether they like something, most of them never find out. Our games let you play immediately and ask for nothing until you have a reason to give it. Progress you care about is the only good argument for making an account, so we wait until you have some.
Software should be honest about what it keeps
We collect what a game needs to run and say so in plain language. There is no analytics profile being assembled in the background, no data sold on, and account deletion is two taps inside the app rather than a form you have to find. We'd rather explain our data practices in a paragraph than a legal appendix.
Slow is fine, unfinished is not
We ship less often than we'd like and later than we planned. What we try never to do is release something half-built and label it a beta. If it's out, it works.
How we work
One codebase, two front doors.
Live where it matters
Duels, arenas and private rooms run on live connections rather than polling, so two players see the same board state at the same moment — including the awkward moments, like someone leaving mid-round.
Configured, not hard-coded
Word lists, difficulty, ad placement, notification copy and language all live in settings rather than in the code. Tuning the game doesn't require shipping the game.
So far
A short history.
We started this year. There isn't much history yet, which is part of the appeal.
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Early 2026
The question
A prototype of a two-player word duel, built to find out whether the format was actually fun with someone else on the other side. It was.
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Mid 2026
The platform
Live matches, arenas, private rooms, leagues, friends and notifications — the parts that are hard to add later, built before the parts that are easy.
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August 2026
Kelime Tahmin on Android
First public release, in Turkish, free with ads. Play by typing a name; no account required.
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Next
An English edition
Word Guess: the same game, a different language, and a word list we're still arguing about.
The name
Why a panda?
Pandas are famously bad at scale. They eat one thing, they live in one place, they do very little quickly, and they've been doing it successfully for a very long time.
That felt closer to how we wanted to work than anything with a rocket in it. We're not trying to grow into a hundred people or launch a game a quarter. We're trying to make a small number of things that hold up, and to still be doing it in ten years.
The black-and-white tiles came from the same place — they were already sitting there in the game.
Say hello
Questions, ideas, or a bug you can reproduce.
We're a small team and one address reaches all of us.