In this article
A Telegram game is a web page that opens inside the chat. Nothing is installed, the score comes back as a leaderboard attached to the message, and the whole thing lives and dies with the conversation it was posted in.
That arrangement, first built for games in 2016, is the same one every Mini App uses today. Understanding it here is what makes the rest of that world legible — including the parts of it worth being careful about.
What you will be able to do
- check_circle Start a game in any chat and challenge the people in it.
- check_circle Explain what happens between tapping Play and the game appearing.
- check_circle Tell what the developer of a game or Mini App can see about you.
- check_circle Recognise which requests from a Mini App are normal and which are not.
The leaderboard is part of the message, not part of the game — which is why it updates for everyone in the chat at once.
sports_esports What happens when you tap Play
You summon a game by typing a game bot's username in any chat. The bot answers with a card — a title, a picture and a Play button — posted as a normal message that everyone in the chat can see and use.
Tapping Play asks Telegram for a one-time address. Telegram returns it, opens a web view over the chat, and the game loads from the developer's own servers. From that moment you are looking at a web page, not at Telegram.
When the round ends, the game reports your score back and Telegram rewrites the original message with the new standings. The board belongs to that message, so the same game posted in two groups keeps two separate rivalries.
Games, Mini Apps and what to trust
They all open the same way, which is precisely the problem. Four things that open in that web view, and how far each one's normal behaviour extends.
sports_esports An ordinary game
public A Mini App doing real work
key It asks to connect a wallet
warning It asks for a Telegram code or password
The whole rule: treat what opens in the web view as a website, because that is what it is.
settings Starting one
- Type a game bot's username in a chat Begin with @ and the name in any conversation or group. A card appears above the keyboard.
- Pick a game from the list The bot offers what it hosts. Selecting one posts it into the chat as a message.
- Tap Play The web view opens over the chat and the game loads.
- Finish, and let it close Your score is written back to the message, and everyone in the chat sees the board update.
- Swipe back to the conversation The chat is still where you left it. Nothing was installed and nothing is running.
public Why this small feature mattered
The games platform proved a point that seemed minor at the time: a full interactive application could run inside a conversation, be shared as a message, and write results back into the chat, without anyone leaving or installing anything.
Everything built on Telegram since has used that shape. Shops, tools, ticketing, the entire wave of tap-to-play apps and the wallets attached to them are the same web view with the same handshake, doing more. The caution at the end of the panels above comes from the same place: the mechanism is neutral, and its trustworthiness is entirely the trustworthiness of whoever wrote the page.
This page is the ancestor and how it works from the outside. The curriculum step is the modern version from the inside: the SDK a Mini App is built with, how it authenticates a user to its own backend, and where the boundaries between the app and the client actually sit.
At a glance
- 1Play in a chat
Start a game and challenge the people in it.
- 2It is a web page
The game opens a developer's page inside Telegram.
- 3What they see
Your name and score; never give codes or recovery phrases.
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