Type Town: City Building Game for Kids

How to Play Type Town (Team Typing Game)

One person opens a room. That can be a teacher, a parent or a kid. The game gives the room a 6-digit code, a QR code and a link. Everyone else opens this page on their own laptop or Chromebook, types the code and picks a nickname. The game sorts players into 2, 3 or 4 teams (Blue, Orange, Green and Pink) and keeps them balanced as people arrive. The host can drag a name to another team before the game starts.

1. Open a room. The host chooses the number of teams, the land size, the time (5, 8 or 10 minutes) and the grade level of the sentences.
2. Join. Players type the 6-digit code and a nickname. A room holds up to 30 players.
3. Type. After a short 3-second countdown, each player gets a sentence at the bottom of the screen. Type it and the coins go into your team's vault.
4. Build. Pick a building from the list on the left, then click an empty lot on your team's land. The coins come out of the shared vault.
5. Ribbon cutting. When the clock hits zero, building stops. Every team's city is scored, and the results show where each point came from.

Nobody waits for a turn. Every player on a team types their own sentence at the same time, and every player can build. You can see where your teammates are pointing on the map, which helps a team agree on where the park goes. Talking it over matters, because coins still sitting in the vault when the buzzer sounds count for nothing.

Sentences get longer as you go. Everyone starts at Tier 1. After every 2 sentences that earn coins, you move up a tier, all the way to Tier 5. A sentence that earns 0 does not move you up, but it never moves you down either. The game also avoids handing you a sentence you saw in your last 10.

The grade setting picks the sentence bank for the whole room. K–1 sentences are all lowercase with no punctuation ("the sun is up"). Grade 2–3 adds capitals and periods. Grade 4–5 and Grade 6–8 bring longer words about bridges, libraries, transit and city planning, so older kids are typing about the same kind of town they are building.

How Typing Earns Coins: Words × Accuracy

Each finished sentence pays words × accuracy, rounded to a whole coin. A 10-word sentence typed at 100% pays 10 coins. The same sentence at 95% pays 10 coins too (9.5 rounds up), and at 92% it pays 9. Longer sentences pay more, which is why reaching a higher tier matters.

Accuracy is counted letter by letter, spaces and punctuation included. It is the number of characters you got right divided by the length of the sentence plus every wrong key you erased with Backspace. Fixing a typo is a good habit, but the wrong key still counts against you. A typo you leave in costs about the same. The sentence is sent automatically as soon as you type its last character.

• The 90% rule. Below 90% accuracy, a sentence earns 0 coins. On a 40-character sentence, five wrong keys are enough to drop under the line. Slow and careful beats fast and messy.
• The speed check. Typing faster than 20 characters per second on a sentence (about 240 words per minute) also earns 0. No child types that fast, so the check only stops copy-paste tricks and scripts.
• Your team's vault. Coins go straight into the shared vault, and a feed on the screen shows who typed what. The vault is the only money the team has.

A House costs 20 coins. At Tier 1 that is about five or six short sentences. By Tier 4 or Tier 5, two sentences can pay for it. That is the real lesson inside the game: accuracy first, then length, and speed only once the first two are steady. Kids who want to measure their own speed outside a team game can take a one-minute typing test for kids and come back to beat their old number.

Buildings, Neighbors and City Score

The building side is what makes Type Town a city building game for kids and not just a typing drill. Every building costs coins from the vault and adds city points. Points are always a little higher than the price, so spending is never a loss. Saving up for something big is a choice the team has to make together.

Land size. Each team builds on a square of lots: Small is 8 × 8, Medium is 12 × 12 and Large is 16 × 16. The game picks the size from how many players each team has (up to 3 per team gets Small, up to 7 gets Medium, more gets Large), and the host can change it. If a team runs out of room, it can buy more land.

Neighbor combos. Two different buildings that touch side by side earn a bonus. Corners touching do not count, and each pair of buildings is counted once. Two buildings of the same kind earn nothing for touching, and pairs not on this list earn nothing either.

Variety. A town with different kinds of buildings scores extra: 2 kinds +20, 3 kinds +45, 4 kinds +80, and all 5 kinds +120. A city made only of Houses misses all of that.

The inspector. Once or twice a game, at a surprise moment between a quarter and four fifths of the way through, an airship floats in with one rule and pays every city that meets it on the spot. There are nine possible rules: +50 for 3 or more Parks, +40 for having a School, +60 for having a Tower, +40 for 5 or more Houses, +50 for 4 or more kinds of buildings, +40 for any city that expanded its land, +10 for each House next to a Park (up to +60), +60 to the city with the most Shops and +60 to the city with the most buildings. Lucky points stay small: a city's inspector points can never go above 10% of the points it already has from buildings, combos and variety.

The final score. City score = buildings + neighbor combos + variety + inspector. If teams have different numbers of players, each score is then multiplied by the size of the largest team divided by the size of that team. A team of 4 against a team of 6 gets ×1.5, so 400 points becomes 600, and the smaller team still has a fair chance.

Town Building Game for the Classroom

Type Town was made as a typing game for the classroom. Open the room on the teacher computer and put that screen on the projector. Leave the "I'm playing too" switch off. When the game starts, the projector turns into a big-screen view with the room code, the timer, every team's city growing live side by side, and each team's score and vault. Nobody's sentences appear on the big screen, so a child's typos are never shown to the class.

• Fit it to the lesson. 5 minutes works as a warm-up, 8 minutes is the default, and 10 minutes gives teams time to plan a bigger city.
• Match the grade. Pick K–1, Grade 2–3, Grade 4–5 or Grade 6–8. One room uses one sentence bank, and every bank starts short and grows longer.
• Keep teams fair. The game balances teams automatically. You can drag a name to swap teams, remove a player, and press End game now if the bell is about to ring.
• Play again. After the results, one click starts another round with the same code and the same teams. Players who left drop out.

Kids type their own sentences on their own screens and share one vault, so a fast typist cannot carry the whole team. A careful typist who never drops below 90% is just as useful. The results screen shows a podium model of each city, a bar for each team that splits the score into buildings, combos, variety and inspector, and three MVP awards: most words typed, best accuracy (for players with at least 5 sentences) and most things built. Those bars make a good talking point after the game. Did the winning team build more, or did it place its parks better?

This town building game for kids needs a real keyboard, so laptops and Chromebooks are the right devices. For a quicker round where every child races alone on the same code, try our multiplayer typing race, which uses the same room-code joining.

Play With Friends at Home

At home, open a room on one laptop and turn on "I'm playing too" so the host gets a team and a nickname. Send the link to friends or cousins, or let siblings join on a second laptop. The Start button unlocks once there are at least as many players as teams, so two kids can play Blue against Orange, and three kids can play two against one. The smaller side's score is scaled up to keep it fair.

The whole room shares one grade setting. When an older and a younger child play together, choose the younger child's grade, or put them on the same team so the older one builds while the younger one types. Each player keeps their own tier, so a beginner still gets short sentences while a stronger typist moves on to long ones.

For kids who are still finding the letters on the keyboard, an online tag game for kids with single letters is a gentler start before sentences.