Dilly Dally Games: a free online dominoes game that earns $16K a month

Dilly Dally Games sells a free online version of Mexican Train Dominoes to casual players, mainly women aged 65 and over, and it was bringing in $16K a month in ad revenue as founder Christian Tuskes reported in a May 2023 Starter Story interview.

How it started

The game began as coursework. In 2006, while employed full-time as a defense contractor and studying for a master's degree in computer science, Tuskes needed a final project that could outlive the degree. Around the same time he was meeting regularly with friends of his mother-in-law to play a dominoes game they had taught him and his wife: Mexican Train Dominoes. He built the game in Adobe Flash. Dilly Dally Games dates its start to November 2007.

The build itself was not the hard part. Tuskes already had the tools and the coding skills; the difficulty was fitting a game that occupies a lot of tabletop space onto a screen. He used a horizontal domino layout to maximise screen space rather than the circular spoke pattern the physical game uses, made design compromises, and shipped.

Distribution took longer to work out. The original plan was to sell software licences on eBay and ship the game on CD. Sales were lackluster, and the switch to an ad-supported web model followed. From there the business had what the founder describes as several launches rather than one: selling the game on CD, distributing the web version across gaming sites, launching on iOS, launching on Android, and finally launching the dedicated website. Each was a response to market conditions rather than a planned sequence. The world went mobile and Flash was not supported on the iPhone, so the game became an app. Later, targeted advertising was restricted on iOS, and the dedicated website was built to compensate for the drop in revenue there.

What it sells and how it charges

The product is a free online version of Mexican Train Dominoes, playable against three computer-generated players, with the option to invite friends. The site sets out the official rules: each round starts with a double, players build a personal train of tiles, there is a public Mexican Train open to everyone, tiles that cannot be played come from the boneyard, and an uncovered double leaves a train open until another player covers it. The site's navigation also points to a blog and a shop.

On pricing, the official site as fetched on 2026-09-30 shows no prices and there is no pricing page: the pitch on the homepage is simply to play with official rules for free. The founder states the game is free on every platform — web, the App Store (iOS), Google Play, and the Amazon Appstore — and the business model is listed as ads, sponsorships and affiliate.

How it got its first players, and what kept growth going

The CD-on-eBay approach was the first attempt at customers and it did not work. The ad-supported web model did: "After lackluster sales, I switched to an ad-supported web-based model, which made all the difference."

Two channels did the heavy lifting after that. In late 2019 Tuskes went all-in on Facebook ads, planning to spend 100% of the previous month's revenue on advertising. He hired someone to make three short ad videos for the iOS version. Over the next eight months, daily active users went from roughly 2,000 to 15,000, at a total spend of $78k. He called it "the ultimate gamble" — at worst it would settle whether Facebook ads worked.

The ad spend was not sustainable, so the second channel was SEO with an emphasis on content marketing and writing. Tuskes is a coder and did not enjoy writing, so he outsourced it to a copywriter and website consultant, Justin Harter, who got the site onto the first page of search results for some key search terms within six months. Ad operations were also outsourced, to Freestar, after a "set it and forget it" approach left revenue on the table. At the time of the interview, the top acquisition channels were Direct and Organic Search.

The numbers

Figure	What the founder reported in May 2023
Revenue	$16K a month, from ad revenue; he also described making between $16-17k/mo depending on seasonality and other market conditions
Team	1 founder, 0 employees
Users	Over 10k daily active users combined across all platforms
Top countries	United States, followed by Canada and the United Kingdom as distant second and third
Session length	Generally 30-60 minutes
Base	San Diego, CA, USA

These are the figures as stated in that interview, not current numbers. On start-up cost, the founder gave no cash figure: all that was needed was a computer, software, the skills to code, and time, and he counted them as free because he already had them.

How $16K a month compares in mobile apps and games

The comparison below uses 1M.chat's analysis of 1,997 businesses with founder-reported revenue in Starter Story interviews from 2015 to 2026. It is a self-selected sample of founders who chose to be interviewed, not a random sample of all businesses; the method is described on the 1M.chat method page.

	Dilly Dally Games (founder-reported, May 2023)	Mobile apps & games category, per 1M.chat's analysis of founder-reported cases
Monthly revenue	$16K	$17K median across 37 businesses with founder-reported revenue
Team	1 founder, 0 employees	Median of 1 employee; 60% started by one founder
Growth channels	Facebook ads, then SEO and content marketing; top channels Direct and Organic Search	Organic social media 58%, paid ads 42%, SEO and organic search 31%, communities 31% (of the 26 businesses with channel information)
Share at $1M a year or more	Not stated	19%

On that basis 1M.chat's analysis puts this business close to the category median for monthly revenue. The channel mix is the more distinctive part: paid ads and SEO both sit inside the common patterns for the category, but the business ran them in sequence and at very different intensities rather than in parallel. Category figures are available on the mobile apps and games page.

What a founder can take from this

Pick something people already search for. Tuskes looks for games that are well known, free of copyright and trademark problems, and underrepresented online. Familiarity does part of the marketing for you, and existing demand is easier to reach than demand you have to create.

Ship before it feels finished. His version of this is the "assassin test": imagine you have 24 hours to release or else, and watch how quickly the feature list shrinks. You can add things later; the point is to get the product out.

Budget for marketing as seriously as for building. His warning is the Field of Dreams trap — building it does not mean they will come. Plan for marketing to take time, effort and some money, and treat it as ongoing work rather than a launch-day task.

When you find a channel that works, test it hard enough to get a real answer. Spending 100% of one month's revenue on ads was deliberate: it produced a clear verdict on whether Facebook ads worked for this product, and the result was usable knowledge either way.

Outsource what you cannot do or do not want to do. Content writing went to a copywriter, ad operations went to a specialist. The money is in the parts of the business you are actually good at.

Sources

Revenue, team and start-cost figures are what the founder reported at the interview date, not current figures and not a prediction of what you will earn. Product and pricing facts come from the business's own website as checked on 30 September 2026. Method & sources · Disclosure