Hometown: Stories Played Together is now available on iOS and Android. The free game splits play between a city planner and a neighborhood explorer, carries no ads or in-app purchases, and cannot be played alone.
Atlanta, Georgia, United States, 31st Oct 2026 – Hometown Games has released Hometown: Stories Played Together, a free city-building game for iOS and Android in which neither player can advance without the other. The game is designed for two people on opposite sides of a generation gap, such as a grandparent and a grandchild, and its districts are modeled on the kinds of places many families once called home: Chinese heritage landmarks, European canal towns, harbor waterfronts and mountain settlements.
The release arrives as more families treat video games as something to do together rather than apart. According to the Entertainment Software Association’s 2025 Essential Facts report, 82% of parents who play video games also play with their children, and 52% do so at least once a week. Most mobile titles, however, are still built for one person on one screen. Hometown Games has taken the opposite approach and made two-player play the only way through the game.
Older adults are a growing part of that picture. AARP research published in 2023 found that 45% of Americans age 50 and older play video games, a group of about 52.4 million people. Smartphones are their most-used gaming device, named by 84% of those players, and when they play with someone else, children and grandchildren are their most common partners.
One City, Two Roles
Each session divides the work between two roles. One player acts as the planner, deciding how resources are spent, what gets built and how districts are laid out. The other acts as the explorer, walking the neighborhoods, meeting characters and uncovering the stories tied to each location.
The two roles depend on each other. Construction opens new areas to explore, and what the explorer finds shapes what the planner builds next. There is no solo mode.
Sessions run over local Wi-Fi, with both players connected to the same network on their own devices. According to the company, players can start a session without creating an account or buying a subscription.
The local-network setup also shapes where the game is played. Because both devices must be on the same Wi-Fi network, the two players are usually in the same home and often in the same room. That puts the experience closer to a board game at the kitchen table than to a typical online multiplayer title, where players are separated by distance and connected only through headsets.
Built Around Places
The districts in the game draw on four broad settings: Chinese heritage landmarks, European canal towns, harbor waterfronts and mountain settlements. These environments are more than backdrops. They supply the characters, stories and activities the explorer encounters, and those discoveries inform how the planner develops the city.
As a result, each district serves two purposes at once. For the planner, a neighborhood is a set of decisions about construction and layout. For the explorer, it is a place with people and history to uncover. The two perspectives meet in the same shared city, and moving forward requires both.
What the Game Leaves Out
Hometown: Stories Played Together contains no advertisements, in-app purchases, competitive leaderboards or countdown timers, and players are not penalized for pausing a session. The studio describes these omissions as part of a deliberate design approach for shared play across age groups, where sessions are expected to start and stop around family schedules.
Those choices set the game apart from common practice in mobile gaming, where free titles typically earn revenue through advertising, in-app purchases or both, and where timers and daily rewards are widely used to bring players back. In a game meant for a grandparent and a young child, leaving those elements out also removes purchase prompts and competitive rankings that can be confusing or unwelcome in a family setting.
The company says children’s privacy was considered throughout development. Its privacy policy, which describes how data is collected and handled, is published on the Hometown Games website.
A Founder Who Writes About Family
Hometown Games was founded by Winston Zee, a former international lawyer and author based in Los Angeles. Mr. Zee’s books, including Mom’s Story and My Po Po, My Hero, center on family memory and the relationships between generations, themes that carry directly into the game. “Po Po” is the Cantonese term for a maternal grandmother.
According to the company, the game is aimed in particular at younger members of diaspora families who have grown up hearing about the cities their parents or grandparents came from. The two-player structure is intended to let an older player share memories of those places while a younger player handles the device, with both contributing to the same city.
During internal testing, the company observed sessions in which grandparents and grandchildren played together. According to Hometown Games, participants regularly stepped outside the game to talk about family history, geography and their own memories of the places shown on screen.
Availability
Hometown: Stories Played Together is available now as a free download on the Apple App Store and Google Play. A session requires two compatible iOS or Android devices connected to the same Wi-Fi network, one for each player. More information is available at www.hometowngames.app.
About Hometown Games
Hometown Games, the game studio of HOMETOWN STORIES, INC., is an independent developer of two-player mobile games built for families to play together. Its first title, Hometown: Stories Played Together, combines city building with neighborhood exploration and settings drawn from cultural landmarks around the world. The game contains no advertisements, in-app purchases or competitive rankings. For more information, visit www.hometowngames.app.
Media Contact
Organization: Hometown Games
Contact Person: Christian J Botella
Website: https://hometowngames.app/
Email:
info@hometowngames.app
Address: 3355 Lenox Rd NE Suite 750
City: Atlanta
State: Georgia
Country: United States
Release id: 50034
View source version on King Newswire:
Hometown Games Releases Two-Player Mobile Game That Pairs Grandparents and Grandchildren to Explore Heritage Cities
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