Games That Run in Your Browser

Why the old links stopped working

If you arrived looking for a game you used to play and found a grey rectangle where it should be, the reason is Flash, which reached end of life in December 2020 and was then taken out of the browsers themselves. What makes it confusing is that the links usually still work perfectly: the file is sitting on the server where it always was, it downloads in a fraction of a second, and there is simply nothing left in any browser that can open it. That is why you get a blank panel rather than an honest missing-page error. No amount of reloading, clearing the cache or switching browser brings it back, and no setting turns it on again. Nothing on this site needs a plugin, because these games are written in the language the browser already runs.

Built here, not collected

The portals this site replaces mostly worked by hosting other people’s files, which is the one thing done differently here. Each game is a single file with no libraries behind it, nothing fetched while you play and nothing embedded from anywhere else. The useful consequence is that once the page has loaded, the game keeps working with the connection off entirely, which matters more on a train than any feature list does. The cost is that nothing is kept: there is no login, no score sitting on a server and nothing written to your device, so a half-finished board does not survive a reload. That trade was made on purpose, and it is worth knowing before you are forty minutes into a grid.

Where the puzzles come from

They are not drawn from a stored library. Each one is generated in your own browser while the page loads, so two people opening the same address get different boards and a second visit is never a repeat. The dated pages are the same generators started from the day’s date instead of at random, which is how everyone playing on a Tuesday gets the same puzzle without a single one being stored anywhere.

Two rules hold across every generator here. A puzzle is only handed out after its solutions have been counted, and the count stops at two: if a second solution exists the board is thrown away rather than shipped with a note, because a grid with two answers will eventually tell a correct solver they are wrong. And difficulty is graded by the technique a puzzle forces you to use, never by how many squares are left blank, which is the usual shortcut and is simply not true – a thirty-clue grid that falls to plain scanning is easier than a thirty-four-clue one that needs a chain of deductions. Boards that are shuffled rather than generated get the same care: a sliding puzzle is scrambled by making legal moves, because exactly half of all arrangements of its tiles cannot be reached from the finished position at all, and a board dealt from the other half can be worked at for an hour and never come out.

Hints that are actually deductions

Where a game offers a hint, the hint is worked out from what is on the screen rather than read off an answer key held in reserve. If nothing can honestly be deduced from the position in front of you, the board says so instead of quietly filling in a square. It is a slower thing to build and it is the only version of a hint that teaches you anything.

Names that describe the mechanic

The games here carry flat descriptive names – code breaker, memory match, sliding puzzle – and that is deliberate rather than shy. The mechanics themselves are public property: the hidden-code game was played on paper as bulls and cows, and pairs needs nothing but an ordinary deck turned face down. Several of the boxed editions built on those mechanics carry names that are live trademarks, and a trademark covers the name, not the game underneath it. Borrowing one would be taking a name this site has no right to, and it would tell you less about what you are about to play than the plain description does.

On a phone, and without a mouse

Every board measures itself against the width of your screen rather than being drawn at a fixed size, so it fits a 320-pixel phone without pushing the page sideways, and the buttons are sized for a thumb rather than a pointer. All of it can be played from the keyboard alone – arrow keys to move around a grid, digits and Enter to act – with a focus outline you can actually see. Where a board marks a mistake it nearly always carries a second cue alongside the colour, since a cell that is only red is invisible to a red-green colour-blind player: the killer grid underlines a wrong digit, the code breaker outlines a refused row and draws a cross through a peg it has ruled out, and a mismatched pair of cards takes a dashed border. The one exception is the plain sudoku grid, where red carries no second mark because it says something weaker than wrong – the digit clashes with one already showing, which is a contradiction you can read off the row, column or box for yourself. Every page on this site apart from a handful of rules and reference pages carries a board of its own, so following a link from the ones above rarely costs you more than one click before you are playing again.