What Tagot is
Tagot is a tangram game. You are shown the outline of a shape — a cat, a boat, a running figure — and you have seven flat pieces to fill it with. Every piece has to be used, none of them may overlap, and there is exactly one way the outline works out. That is the entire game.
It is BettaDev's own first release, scoped, designed, built and submitted inside the studio. There is no account, no sign-in, no leaderboard and no timer counting down in the corner.
A puzzle sits there until you solve it or you leave it. Nothing in the app is built to make that decision on your behalf. The one rule everything else was measured against
The brief
The studio wanted a first release that could be judged honestly: small enough to finish properly, complete enough to submit to the App Store, and specific enough that the design decisions in it would actually be visible to anyone who looked. A tangram game turned out to fit exactly.
The puzzle itself is two hundred years old and completely solved — there was no game design to invent. That was the point. It moves the entire question onto the part that is normally hardest to demonstrate: what a thing feels like to hold, how it behaves when you are wrong, and what it declines to do to you in order to keep you playing.
The constraint that shaped everything: no servers. No account to create, no progress to sync, nothing to breach. It rules out several obvious features and it makes one promise the app can actually keep.
Design decisions
Four calls that a different studio would reasonably have made differently. Each one costs something measurable, which is what makes it a decision rather than a preference.
No timer, anywhere
Not on the puzzle, not on a daily streak, not as a score multiplier. A tangram is a thinking puzzle, and a clock converts thinking into panic — it reliably raises session counts and just as reliably makes the thing worse to actually use.
The cost is real: no timer means no leaderboard, and no leaderboard means one of the cheapest retention mechanisms in mobile games was unavailable from the first day.
No account, so no server
Progress, stars and settings live on the device. There is nothing to sign into, which means there is nothing to be locked out of, nothing to breach and no privacy policy section that has to describe what happens to your data on someone else's machine.
The cost lands on the player: delete the app without a backup and the progress goes with it. That trade is stated plainly inside the app and in the privacy appendix rather than discovered later.
Pieces snap before they are perfect
A piece drops into place once it is close enough, rather than requiring an exact position. The puzzle is meant to be the shape, never the last two pixels of a drag on a surface being touched by a finger the size of the piece itself.
Tuning the tolerance is most of the work: too tight and the app feels broken, too loose and pieces fall into slots you did not mean.
Advertising that cannot see the game
Tagot is free and carries AdMob, but nothing about play leaves the device — not which puzzles were solved, not how long they took, not how often the app is opened. The ad SDK receives the standard advertising data and no game telemetry at all, because none is collected.
It gives up the targeting signal that would raise the revenue per user, and in exchange the privacy claim stays a fact rather than a phrasing.
How tangram works
The tangram is a dissection puzzle first documented in China in the early 1800s, and it spread through Europe and America within a few years of that. A square is cut into seven pieces — traditionally called tans:
- Two large triangles — each a quarter of the original square.
- One medium triangle — half the area of a large one.
- Two small triangles — half the area of the medium one again.
- One square, the same area as the medium triangle.
- One parallelogram, also that same area.
Three rules make it a puzzle rather than a pile of shapes: use all seven, let none of them overlap, and let none of them stick out past the outline. Pieces may be rotated freely. The parallelogram is the awkward one — it is the only piece that is not symmetric, so it has a left-handed and a right-handed form, and a silhouette will often only accept one of them. If a puzzle is one stubborn gap away from finished, the parallelogram is usually what needs flipping.
A practical trick: place the two large triangles first. They take up half the area of the whole square between them, so once they are down the shape of what is left is usually obvious.
Playing Tagot
Drag a piece to move it. Rotate it with a two-finger twist, or tap it and use the rotate control. Pieces snap once they are close enough to a correct position, so you are never fighting the last two pixels of a placement.
Solving a puzzle awards stars, and stars are what unlock later puzzle packs. There is no lives system, no energy meter and nothing that stops you playing until tomorrow. If you want to sit with one silhouette for an hour, the app has no opinion about it.
Offline, and what it keeps
Tagot needs no connection to play. Puzzles, art and logic all ship inside the app, so it works on a plane, on the underground, and in a country where you would rather not turn data roaming on.
Your game progress, star ratings, tan balance and settings are stored on your device only. They are never sent to BettaDev, because there is no BettaDev server for them to be sent to. The practical consequence is worth knowing: if you delete the app, that progress goes with it unless your iPhone backup happens to include it. There is no "restore from account", because there is no account.
The full breakdown, in the form Apple and Google require, is in the privacy policy appendix.
Why there are ads
Tagot is free, and it is paid for by advertising through Google AdMob. On first launch you are shown Google's own consent form, where you choose whether ads are personalised. Declining is a real choice and the game does not behave differently afterwards — you still see ads, they are simply generic ones chosen without using your advertising identifier.
Nothing you do inside the game is sent to advertisers. Which puzzles you solved, how long you took, how many stars you have — none of that leaves the device. What AdMob receives is the standard advertising data described in section 5.3 of the privacy policy.
Version history
| Version | Released | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0 | 2026 | First release — puzzle packs, star progression, offline play. |
Questions
I reinstalled and my stars are gone
Progress lives on the device and nowhere else, so a reinstall starts fresh unless an iPhone backup restored the app's data along with it. There is no account to sign back into. It is the trade-off for an app that collects nothing.
Can I remove the ads?
Not yet. If enough people ask for a paid ad-free unlock it will get built — say so and it goes on the list.
A puzzle looks impossible
Check the parallelogram first: it is the one piece that has to be flipped rather than only rotated, and it is behind most stuck puzzles. Then try placing the two large triangles before anything else.
Is it suitable for children?
Tagot is rated 4+ and has no chat, no user content and no purchases. It is not enrolled in Apple's Kids Category or Google Play's Families programme, and it does carry advertising, so it is not built to the additional rules those programmes require.
Android version?
Not today. It is written in React Native, so the port is realistic rather than hypothetical — it is a question of when, not whether.
Something wrong?
A real person reads every message — the same person who designed and wrote the app. Include your iPhone model, iOS version and the app version and it gets fixed much faster.