Messaging app Telegram is expanding its features by introducing a gaming platform to the service. The games are powered by bots, that retrieve and present the options to the user.
At the moment, there are 30 games available for Telegram users. All of which can be played solo or invoked in groups to make things more interesting. The games are asynchronous, meaning that not everyone has to jump on at the same time to play them. Naturally, there is a leaderboard to keep track of scores.
Starting a game involves mentioning @gamee in a chat, and allowing the game menu to load before sending the message. This automatically invites everyone in the chat to play the game.
Interestingly, the games presented are not added to Telegram itself. Instead, they function as HTML5 pages that are retrieved as needed. According to the announcement, this is to keep the size of the app down. However, it may eat up some extra data allowances as the user will have to keep downloading the games whenever they want to play.
[Source: Telegram]
