Emoji Party — Charades for Apple TV and iPhone

Medium Media Kit

5 min readDec 31, 2015

What is Emoji Party?

Emoji Party is the ultimate party game for iPhone and Apple TV. 😜🎉

It’s charades made for the 21st century. Challenge your friends and family to guess emojis from over 10 different emoji themed decks (like Animals, Movies, TV Shows), from over a thousand emoji combinations.

Here’s how you play on iPhone — simply hold your phone up to your forehead and get your friends to guess the emoji or emoji combo before the time runs out. Tilt the phone forward when you’ve guessed correctly and tilt it back to pass.

When playing Emoji Party on Apple TV — turn your back to the TV and swipe right on the remote when you guess correctly and swipe left to pass.With Apple TV, apps are no longer individual, heads down, experiences. They can expand into a collective experience that everyone in a room enjoys simultaneously. We saw the exciting opportunity Apple TV provided, and designed Emoji Party with the goal of creating shared experiences amongst friends and loved ones.

We were inspired by the popular Emoji Challenge videos on Youtube, the board game Hedbanz and Ellen DeGeneres’s Heads Up app , as well as an emoji guessing games (aptly named Guess the Emoji).

Emoji Party was made by Tiny Hearts studio. We made it easier to step up your emoji game with Next Keyboard (a top selling keyboard app — #2 overall — that we launched in September) now we’re turning emojis into a game with Emoji Party!

And hey, who doesn’t love emojis? :)

Why did you make Emoji Party?

We spent a lot of time thinking about improving the emoji and keyboard experience while building Next Keyboard. Naturally, we started thinking about fun ways to use emojis in different types of apps.

The idea of making a party game interested us as a we’re part app studio and part game studio. We spent a year working on Next Keyboard which is more utilitarian and wanted to work on something a little more playful.

People were already playing silly adhoc games with emojis and putting them up on Youtube (search Emoji Challenge). We started thinking about ways to design a game around this existing behaviour. We were also inspired by the Hedbanz board game, Ellen’s Heads Up app, and games like Guess the Emoji.

We started out by developing the iPhone version of the game and showed it to a few friends. We knew as soon as the Apple TV was announced that it would make for a great extension and decided to rethink some of the mechanics for a more social living room gaming experience.

There’s been widespread complaint about technology isolating us. But at Tiny Hearts we really believe that technology has an equal ability to bring us closer together — even in the physical world through shared experiences. That’s what we tried to create with Emoji Party.

Launch Details

Release date — Thursday January 7, 2016 @ 9am EST
Price — 1.99 for iPhone + Apple TV (IAPs for additional packs)
iTunes Link — https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/emoji-party-ultimate-party/id1017988855?ls=1&mt=8
Apple TV — search for Emoji Party
Website — www.tinyhearts.com/emojiparty

Who Made Emoji Party?

We’re the team behind Tiny Hearts, an award winning product studio and makers of the top-selling apps like Next Keyboard (#2 overall app) Wake (the #1 iOS alarm clock according to Lifehacker), and Quick Fit (featured in an Apple Ad). We make our own apps and products for select clients.

@tinyheartsapps

www.tinyhearts.com