How small would you want your handheld? Miyoo Mini? RG Nano? Maybe a Funkey S if you’re feeling flippy. What if you could go smaller? Take out the emulation, take out all the excess, take out anything extra, and what are you left with? The Thumby. And in today’s case, the Thumby Color as well. These pocket-sized devices are cheap and cheerful gifts, but I want to take a look and show you what they’ve got cooking under their adorably tiny hoods.

It’s a dual review, but I also just love the concept enough that I’m happy to share these with you, especially since TinyCircuits, the maker of these devices, has been cooking up a lot of cool things.

Specs

Just to start things off, the Thumby is currently over on Amazon for just $30, while the Thumby Color is unavailable but was sold through Kickstarter for a starting price of $50. Once they finish fulfillment, I imagine it’ll go for sale between $50 and $60. Despite that, they’re both cool little devices that have these specs. 

Usability

I mean, let’s get this out of the way first. Both the Thumby and Thumby Color are novelty handhelds. The OG is the size of the top half of my thumb, and the Color isn’t much larger. If you’re intending to play on either device for more than 5-10 minutes at a time, I wouldn’t really recommend it. Which is probably a great add-on, cause the battery life on these things is a couple of hours each. So you could, in turn, have a pretty good amount of play sessions on these things before recharging their absolutely massive batteries. 

In terms of controls, they’ve both got tiny microswitch buttons. But where the Thumby holds a D-pad and two face buttons, the Color adds two shoulder buttons as well. All of which are equally clicky. Overall, I wouldn’t recommend trying to use the face of your thumb on either, but instead try to use your nails to control each device. Doing that made it a much better experience. But what are you actually gonna play?

The Games

Thumby

The original Thumby comes with 6 different games built in. Annelid, Saurrun, SpaceDebris, Tennis, Thumgeon, and TinyBlocks. And to run through what that means to you? Here’s the breakdown.

TinyBlocks is a tiny version of Tetris. It’s really difficult to see because everything is black on white, but if you squint hard enough, you can see where your blocks will drop. Saurrun is an infinite runner akin to the Google Dino game. All you need to do is press a button to jump. SpaceDebris is kind of like Asteroids, except the screen is so small you need to fly towards the asteroids in order to destroy them. Good luck.

Annelid is a tiny snake, go around with the d-pad to collect your cubes and get bigger. Tennis is… Tennis, except it’s really Pong. And Thumgeon is a tiny dungeon crawler where you actually need to interact with your surroundings as well as the menu in order to progress. I always thought I had good eyes, but every one of these games made me question that information.  

Thumby Color

The Color amps things up from 6 to 12 games, but some of them you’ll know what they are based just on the name, so that’ll help move things along just a little bit more. 2048 is…2048. 4Connect is Connect 4, believe it or not. Chess may or may not actually be Chess, but I’m too stupid to understand Chess. Solitaire is Solitaire, but I’m also too stupid to understand this one as well. And Sand is a game where you fill your world with Sand.

Stepping past the basic games, you’ve got a few more things of interest. Bust-A-Thumb is a Bust-A-Move clone where you have to shoot your balls to get matches and points. Monstra seems to be a boss fight game that reminds me a lot of Just One Boss over on the Pico-8 platform. Tiny Puzzle Attack is a puzzle game where your goal is to match colored blocks in the allotted moves you have remaining. Song of Morus is a front-running “shoot-em-up,” and Tagged seems to be a game where you have to tag the other person within your time limit. And Thumgeon 2 is an upgrade dungeon crawler over Thumgeon.

Oh, and how can I forget, this thing has a tiny version of Balatro titled Thumbatro. I may need to send this to Andrew to see how well he can play it. 

Game Thoughts

While the Thumby games are hard to play for a number of reasons, they’re great in theory and seem to be solid builds or recreations of other games, and I enjoy that. The Thumby color on the other hand, can do a lot more with its color display, and it shows. The games included are ones that I’d actually want to come back to and mess with, even if just for a little bit at a time. Overall, they’re really good as it stands.

More Games?

When it comes to adding games, the Thumby Color requires some external software that I imagine will get better with time as more people gather their Colors and start designing code for it. The OG Thumby has had plenty of time to cook and has an entire web page for interacting with the Thumby. 

Code.Thumby.US lets you add games into the 1.4mb of storage as well as use Micro Python for code editing. And even holds a tiny emulator to play your Thumby games somewhere bigger. But as for adding more games, you can click “Arcade” and just add what you want. From OutThumb to Thelda, to Pico-Pac, and even Thoom, there are a lot of extras you can add. Just be wary of duplicates and the amount of storage you’ve got.

Final Thoughts

Should you buy a Thumby or Thumby color for yourself to play on the go, or something similar? Probably not. They’re such tiny novelties that it can be a bit hard to use them in the first place. Do I think you should buy one? Just one. If you’re looking for an actually usable novelty, the Thumby Color is a pretty fun little option. It comes with a lanyard and is super easy to just pocket. Sure, it isn’t going to be as convenient as your phone or even something like an RG Nano, but the idea of having something with just a small selection of games is just a nice feeling to have. Even if you won’t use it.

For $30 and ~$50 respectively, they can be hard sells considering actual full-sized handhelds available. But just like the Arduboy FX, the Playdate, and Evercade handhelds I’ve looked at in the past, dedicated handheld experiences are a niche I’m happy to put my money into, regardless of whether they’re big enough for me to see in the morning. I say take a look and see if you can grab one. At the very least, they’re not the worst way to spend your money. That probably goes to buying a new in-box copy of Patapon for the PSP. Or like 8 McGriddles if you’re hungry.

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