The notebook
The word "free" in an app store does a lot of heavy lifting. It can mean the whole game is free. It can also mean the first twenty minutes are free and after that a seven-year-old will be asked, every few minutes, to please ask a grown-up for their card.
Both say Free. So the word is useless on its own, and what follows is what to check instead. Six questions, two minutes, before you hand the tablet over.
Not "will my child spend money" — can they. Open the shop and look for a price in your own currency. If there is a coin pack, a gem pack, a battle pass or a subscription, the game has a till, and sooner or later your child will find it.
This is the single most important check and the fastest. Everything else is comfort; this one is your bank account.
Almost every game has coins, gems or stars. The question is what happens when they hit zero. If playing earns them back at a reasonable rate, fine: that is a game economy. If the only realistic way back is buying them, the currency is not a currency — it is a countdown to a purchase.
Test it: spend everything on purpose, then play three or four rounds and see how much comes back.
Energy systems exist for one reason: to make waiting annoying enough that paying feels reasonable. In a children's game they are worse than annoying, because a child does not experience "come back in twenty minutes" as a limit — they experience it as a door slammed shut, and they will ask you to open it.
A game with no energy, no lives and no daily cap can be closed by a child without drama. That is not a small thing; it is most of what makes screen time bearable at home.
Ads themselves are not the enemy — they are how a genuinely free game pays for itself. What matters is what happens when a small finger taps one. If the ad opens a store page outside the game, one stray tap is all it takes.
And check whether they are optional. An ad the child *chooses* to watch in exchange for something is a fair deal they understand. An ad that appears mid-play, unannounced, is an ambush. Watch a round and see which kind it is.
Name, email, phone, birthday, photo, a Google or Facebook login. Every field is data leaving your house, and almost none of it is needed to kick a ball. The good sign is a game that asks for a nickname and nothing else — and better still if that nickname is filtered so a child cannot accidentally publish their real name.
This is the one parents ask about most, and the answer is rarely a clean yes or no. There are three levels: free text (anything can be typed, and moderation always arrives after the fact), filtered text (better, still leaky), and closed phrases (the player picks from a fixed list, and nothing else can ever be sent).
Only the third is safe by construction rather than by supervision. If a game has voice chat, treat it as free text with the volume up.
It would be strange to publish this list and not run it on ourselves, so: Toy Soccer Cup has no real-money purchases of any kind — there is no till to find. Coins are earned by playing, and roughly half the shop is bought with coins rather than ads. There is no energy, no lives and no waiting. There is no sign-up: a nickname, filtered, and nothing else. And there is no free-text chat — players communicate with a closed list of preset phrases, translated into eight languages.
And the awkward one: yes, we show ads. That is how the game pays for itself without charging a child. They are optional and rewarded — you choose to watch one in exchange for something — and when an ad fails to load, the game offers the coin route instead rather than blocking you. That is the honest trade, and we would rather write it down than let you find it.
Run the six checks on us the same way you would on anyone else. The game is here, it opens in a browser, and there is nothing to install.
