Playdate, the console with a crank

Playdate is a handheld console by Panic, the Portland software company, designed with Teenage Engineering. Pre-orders opened in July 2021, the first 20,000 units sold out in 17 minutes and shipping began on 18 April 2022. It’s yellow, measures 76 × 74 mm and fits in the palm of your hand.

A screen that doesn’t glow

Its screen is a 2.7-inch, 400 × 240 one-bit Sharp Memory LCD: pure black and white, no greys and no backlight. In good light it reads like paper. Inside there’s an ARM Cortex-M7 processor at 168 MHz, 16 MB of RAM, 4 GB of storage and Wi-Fi. The battery gives around 8 hours of play.

The crank

As well as the D-pad and the A and B buttons, it has a folding crank on the side and an accelerometer. The crank is what makes it unique: some games use it to fish, to move time or to pedal, and others ignore it. When a game gets it right, there’s nothing like it.

Games by the season

Playdate doesn’t sell cartridges. Season 1 came with the console: 24 games delivered two a week for 12 weeks. Season 2 ran from May to July 2025, with 12 games plus Blippo+, for $39. And on 8 October 2026 Season 3 began: 8 games for $39, two a week, all available by 29 October.

There’s also Catalog, its indie game store, open since March 2023: by April 2024 it had sold more than 150,000 games. The SDK for programming in Lua or C is free, and Pulp lets you make simple games in the browser.

Four to start with

• Mars After Midnight, by Lucas Pope, the creator of Papers, Please.
• Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure, by uvula.
• Zipper, by Bennett Foddy.
• Casual Birder, by Diego Garcia.

Price and how to buy it

It has cost $229 on play.date since March 2025: it launched at $179 and went up to $199 in 2023. There’s no official euro price; you pay in dollars, with tax and shipping on top. Panic charged a surcharge for US tariffs and refunded it in August 2026. It also sells refurbished units at $179. When we checked, it was listed as sold out.

Our verdict

It isn’t for anyone after power or a huge library. It’s for anyone who misses being surprised by a console. In design, in ideas and in how it publishes games, Playdate is the closest thing to the Game Boy in years: a small screen and a lot of imagination.