Half the game is played on a phone

ManageFC is a browser game, and browsers live on phones. A game you play a few days at a time fits naturally into a few spare minutes on the bus or between meetings — which means a large share of our players see the game on a small screen. In September 2026 we decided to treat the phone as half of the game, not an afterthought.

The menu you could not escape

It started with a bug that was embarrassing in its simplicity. On a phone, the game's main menu could open and then not close: there was no close button, tapping outside did nothing, and a bar at the bottom of the screen sat on top of it. We added a clear close button, made tapping outside close the menu, moved the menu below the beta banner, and turned the menu button itself into a close button while the menu is open.

A standard, not a feeling

Fixing one bug is easy. Making sure the next page does not have a similar one needs a standard. We wrote down what "works on a phone" means for ManageFC, in numbers:

• Readable text: nothing smaller than 13 pixels.
• Tappable buttons: every button and link at least 44 pixels tall — the size of a fingertip.
• No sideways scrolling: nothing wider than the screen.
• Nothing cut off in silence: if a list is wider than the screen, it scrolls visibly, with a hint that there is more.

Then we checked the eighteen most-used pages of the game against those rules at two common phone widths, and fixed every failure.

Two versions where it helps

Some screens simply do not fit on a phone the way they do on a desktop. A league table with ten columns is a good example. Rather than shrinking everything, a few pages now have a phone layout of their own: cards instead of wide tables, the most important columns first, and the rest one tap away.

Every update, every page

The standard only works if it is checked every time, so it became part of our routine. Before an update reaches the game, the game pages are tested at phone widths; the public website pages — the guide, the wiki, the screens tour and now this blog — are checked for anything wider than the screen. A page that fails is fixed before it goes live.

What it means for you

The whole game, from founding your club to playing a match live, works on a phone. If you find a screen where something is too small to read or too small to tap, tell us — on a phone, a few pixels are the difference between a good evening and a frustrating one.

Next in the diary: we redesigned the whole game — then rolled it back.