Playing Tiny Tower in 2024

Do you remember Tiny Tower? It was a business management game developed by Nimblebit and was released all the way back in 2011. The goal was pretty simple: build the tallest tower and make money. It was a very straightforward game where your only interactions with it were restocking stores and using the elevator, but back in the day, that was enough to get 10 million downloads by 2012.

Nowadays, things are very, very different. And I’ll explain why.

Now, Tiny Tower wasn’t always around. Back in 2015, Mobage shut down Tiny Tower for both Apple and Android devices. However, it wouldn’t be gone for long, as the game came back the next year with a lot of upgrades. It came with new floors, cosmetic items to customise your “bitizens” and tower, the ability to trade bitizens with friends, and rebuild your tower in exchange for Golden Tickets (GTs) for every 50 floors or through a raffle.

This is where things get very, very weird.

The premium currency, Bux, was made much easier to obtain in larger quantities and in cheaper manners, such as through ads or events. Nowadays, people are aiming to earn Golden Tickets, which allow you to upgrade a floor to its maximum level and will stay with you permanently. Even if you use them to upgrade a floor, you can take it back by deleting it. So the best strategy to earn GTs is to rebuild every 50 floors. Sounds like it’ll take a while, right? Well, only the first time. Every Golden Ticket earned adds a coin multiplier to your elevator rides. With enough GTs and a special buff that further multiplies the coin count, weeks can be cut down to days, hours, or even minutes. I’ve seen people with thousands of GTs and barely any reason to spend them… all without spending a single cent. It doesn’t even matter what shops you get; you can do all this just by elevator rides.

Please note that I haven’t mentioned anything about outright buying GTs with real money. That’s because you typically need a lot of time and luck to earn them. Now, there are events that make earning them faster if you shell out some cash, but they can be done by just playing frequently. That doesn’t mean, though, that there aren’t some really tempting purchases. The VIP Packages, the month-long passes, lucky wheels, dice rolls, the daily rewards, holiday events… there’s a lot that encourages you to spend some money to make the game less time-consuming to play.

And you’ll have plenty of time because there are a bunch of long-term goals. There’s stuff like the research tree and landmarks that provide permanent bonuses once completed, but are expensive to even start. There’s also the player's home, which is meant to be a Bux sink since to even start it is 25,000 Bux, and that’s not including furniture and decoration, all of which need a pile of Bux. Then we have legendary bitizens, which also provide bonuses, but you need complete sets, and you can only get them randomly in loot boxes (well, they’re more like crates) or with a bunch of keys.

It’s a lot, and Tiny Tower has changed over the years, but it’s still familiar in many ways. While there are more active games on the app store that are definitely worth playing, I still find myself enjoying it, naming all my shops with dumb or referential names and ensuring every bitizen has their dream job. And hey, the community around this game is really friendly, always there to help you out… and also help you cheat the system.

Seriously, there’s a bot that is approved by the developers that subverts quite a few things. Add DYN0 to your friends list and send any bitizen to them. Wait 30 minutes, and you should get that bitizen back with nine in all stats. All for a measly five Bux compared to the 199 you need to increase those stats by one.

So yeah, that’s modern Tiny Tower. It’s definitely a different beast compared to the classic version I played all those years ago. It can be overwhelming diving back into it, but it’s still something I try to play every day to see how tall my tower can become (without ruining my phone).

I think the new menu UI sucks, though. That is… definitely a decision made by people.