Pick up laundry, drink coffee, clean furniture, repeat, repeat, repeat...
So what is the game about? House cleaning. Lots and lots of repetitious house cleaning.
When you start each level, there will be several items of furniture outlined in red, plus items of red-outlined clothing scattered around the rooms of the house. Your aim is to click on everything red to clean or pick it up, transforming the house into a perfect state of order before the end of the time limit. On your side is the coffee pot, which will speed you up considerably. On the side of chaos are the inhabitants of the house, all of whom will wander around messing things up.
This is a casual time management game, like Cake Mania, in which you'll click on item after item to get all your tasks done within the time limit. Usually, I'm in favour of the genre, and people who also enjoy these sorts of speed-click games might get up to an hour's decent fun out of Nanny Mania. After that it's all negative.
It's just too shallow and repetitive. There are no upgrades to buy to improve your skills, the house and its layout remains the same for the entire game, each level will start with the same furniture dirty, and nothing you do influences any of the actions of the mess-makers. In short, it's a recipe for every level feeling exactly the same.The couple will have more children, and they'll muck up different items as they grow, but generally you'll work out an order to click through the house very early on, and you'll stick with it for the rest of the game because there's no reason to change. So in the end it feels like you're playing the same level in the same way over and over and over again.
If Nanny Mania was trying to simulate the never-ending drudgery of cleaning a house you share with total slobs then it succeeded - you may find yourself turning to real housework to end the monotony.