How to Play Games in Telegram: Mini Apps, Chat Games and Dice
To play a game in Telegram, open the game's bot and tap the button that launches it: Play, Open or Launch app. The game then runs inside Telegram itself, so you don't install anything or sign up separately. Group games work the same way, and the simplest ones are emoji you send into any chat.
Our catalog lists 215 games, 143 of them in English. The examples below are all from that list, and the rules differ more than you'd think between the kinds of game.
The three kinds of Telegram games
Telegram opened its gaming platform on October 3, 2016, with small HTML5 games that bots post into chats. In April 2022 bots got Web Apps, now called Mini Apps, and the developer docs point game makers there for anything bigger. The animated dice need no bot at all.
Mini Apps are what most people mean by Telegram games today. They're full games on their own screen, opened from a bot: RPGs, farms, clickers, card games. Of our 143 English games, 121 are built this way. Madhouse, a multiplayer RPG with boss floors and clans, is a typical one.
Chat games never leave the conversation. You send messages and press buttons in the bot's chat, and the game answers there. That pace fits slow games you check a few times a day, like Holop, a medieval idle strategy.
The third kind lives inside ordinary conversations. A bot can drop a game into any chat as a message with a Play button, and everyone in that chat can open it. The animated emoji games, from the die to the slot machine, belong here too, except that Telegram itself animates them and picks the result.
Starting a Mini App game
Search for the game's bot, open the chat and look for one of three things: a Launch app button when you open the bot's info page, a button attached to the welcome message, or the menu button to the left of the message field. Any of them opens the game over the chat. Links shared by friends and in ads usually open the game directly.
On first launch you see a short notice with the bot's name. The game receives your public profile (name, username, language, photo) and nothing from your chats. Mini Apps can't read your messages. Our guide to bot and Mini App safety goes through the permissions in detail.
Since November 17, 2024 a Mini App can go fullscreen, including in landscape, and you can add one to the home screen of your phone so it starts like a normal app. Not every game has these. The developer decides.
How do you play a Telegram game with friends in a group?
With the old HTML5 games, inline mode does the work. In any group, type the bot's username followed by a space, for example @gamebot, and Telegram shows a list of its games above the keyboard. Choose a game, and it gets posted to the group as a message. Anyone in the group can press Play, and the bot keeps a score table for that message, so the group sees who is ahead. Telegram's 2016 announcement suggested trying exactly this with @gamee in a group.
Mini App games rarely use the group at all. Most of them have an invite link inside the game, and many put the leaderboard there too, rather than in the group. For something that needs the group itself, there are chat bots made for it, such as DonutBanana, an anonymous Truth or Dare. We keep separate lists of games for two and games for groups and friends.
How do the dice, darts and slot machine emoji work?
Send one of these emoji on its own, as the only thing in the message: dice, darts, basketball, football, bowling or slot machine. Instead of a static emoji, Telegram plays a short animation and stops on a result. The result is a random value generated on Telegram's server, not on your phone, out of reach of anyone in the chat.
Dice, darts and bowling give a value from 1 to 6, basketball and football from 1 to 5, and the slot machine from 1 to 64, where each number stands for one combination of the three reels. The values are visible to bots too, which is why some group bots build whole games on them, for example a round where the higher throw wins.
Nobody bets on these throws and nobody gets paid. If a bot adds money to them, that's a separate game with its own rules.
Do Telegram games cost money?
You can start most of them for free. The developers earn on extras. Inside Telegram, digital purchases in bots and Mini Apps have to be paid in Telegram Stars, Telegram's own currency; the Bot API documentation states that no other currency or crypto is allowed for digital goods. You buy Stars through the usual Apple or Google in-app purchase, or through the official @PremiumBot, and spend them in the game.
That rule covers items, boosts, extra lives and the like. Games that promise you can withdraw money or tokens work outside it. We'd read their terms twice before paying anything in. Games of that kind are collected in our play-to-earn category.
Can you play Telegram games on a computer?
Mini Apps run in the desktop apps and in Telegram Web as well, and Telegram's guidance to game developers asks for pages that work across all of its apps and platforms. A game laid out for portrait phones still shows up as a tall, narrow window on a monitor, and controls meant for a thumb can feel clumsy with a mouse.
There are no home screen shortcuts on a computer, so you come back through the bot's chat or a pinned link.
Finding games worth your time
Telegram search has an Apps tab. Games you've opened before show up there, and Telegram promotes a selection to everybody. Game platforms like PlayDeck and Gamee bundle many small games in one place. For a five-minute break they're what we open.
For a specific genre, browsing by category is quicker. Popular ones in English are clickers, RPGs, strategy and arcade games; each listing opens the bot in Telegram with one tap. For the basics of how bots work, see our explainer on Telegram bots.