Free decorating games

What makes a good decorating game

A decorating game hands you something plain, a room, a garden, a cake, five bare nails, and lets you make it look the way you want. You pick colours, patterns and pieces, drag them into place and step back to see the result. The pleasure is in the small choices and in the moment of the reveal.

The games on this page come at that from two sides. Some are free design tools with no score at all, where you save what you make and take a picture of it. Others bring an order or a client brief, a cake to match a painting or an egg to match a pattern card, and score how close you came and how quickly. They span the creative, cooking and fashion categories, and four of them belong to the seasonal Halloween, Christmas and Easter categories and appear only in their season.

Decorating games to start with

Room Designer is the open one: pick a room shape, choose from sixteen wallpapers and sixteen floors, and drag beds, sofas, shelves, lamps and plants onto a snapping grid, then switch to night to see the lamps glow while a cat, a dog or a rabbit wanders in. Garden Designer does the same outdoors: brush in lawn, paths and a pond, plant trees, roses and vegetables, then press play and watch the year turn from blossom to snow. Both save your work in the browser and let you take a picture of it.

Room Makeover adds clients. Each brings a picture-card brief, and you paint or paper the walls, lay a floor and furnish a little isometric room, scored on style, palette and the must-haves. Nail Art lets you file, polish, stamp and add gems and stickers to ten tiny nails, for a daily client, a queue of briefs or the Free Studio. Cake Craft is a patisserie over twenty days: bake the sponges, stack them square, smooth the frosting, trace the piping guide and set the berries before you ring the bell.

The seasonal ones appear with their categories. Monster Mansion, at Halloween, is a haunted house you build and decorate with cobwebs, candles and lanterns. At Christmas, Tree Trim has you hang ornaments on a springy tree without tipping it, and Cookie Decorator has you ice and pipe gingerbread to order. Egg Decorator, at Easter, asks you to dye and paint eggs to match a pattern card.

Dragging, tapping and saving your designs

Nearly everything here is done by dragging: a piece of furniture into the room, a plant onto the plot, an ornament onto a hook, a finger or the mouse across a cookie or a cake. In Room Designer and Room Makeover the arrow keys nudge the selected piece, and in Room Makeover and Garden Designer R turns it and Z undoes the last change. Number keys pick tools or brushes in most of the games, and M mutes.

All nine work on phones and tablets. On touch you drag pieces with a finger, pinch to zoom in Room Designer and Garden Designer, and in Nail Art you tap a nail to zoom right in and swipe to the next one. The free modes are a good place to begin, because nothing is scored: Room Designer and Garden Designer, the Free Studio in Nail Art and Room Makeover, the free-bake bench in Cake Craft and the Decorate mode in Tree Trim.

Frequently asked questions