About

A collection of 35 games that run straight in your browser.
Follow a link and it opens right there. Nothing to download, nothing to sign up for, nothing to wait for.

The boards here are different

One thing sets this site apart from the rest: it never deals a board you cannot solve.

Pick up a sudoku app and you will find boards mixed in that have two answers.
Play minesweeper and you reach a point at the end where you must guess between two squares.
In solitaire, two or three deals in every ten simply cannot be won.
Lose one of those and it was the board's fault, not yours — but you have no way of knowing that.

Here, a machine solves every board before it is dealt.

  • Sudoku — counted for a single answer before it goes out.
  • Minesweeper — checked to solve to the end using only the methods a person uses. There is nowhere to guess.
  • Nonogram — only puzzles that solve by reading one line at a time are dealt.
  • Klondike, FreeCell, Spider, Pyramid, Golf, TriPeaks, Yukon — checked to be winnable

to the end. If you are stuck, there is a move you have not seen.

Anything that fails is thrown away and rebuilt. So if you get stuck, it is not the board's fault.

What is here

13 card games, 14 puzzles, plus janggi, go, five-in-a-row, reversi, yut and Hangul typing.
You can see them all under Games.

Each game comes with two kinds of explanation. There is a How to play inside the game,
for a quick read mid-game, and a separate full guide for people who want to learn from scratch.
The full guide carries real screenshots of the game in every section.
It is written so a child can read it and sit straight down to play.

You can use this with an easy mind

  • No installation, no sign-up. Follow a link and it opens.
  • It works offline. Open it once and it keeps working on the underground.
  • You are not tracked. No analytics, no ads, no third-party collection.

Two things that need the internet

Every single-player game runs entirely on your device. Two things do need the internet,
and they handle the minimum temporary information required to work at all.

  • Janggi online play — temporary connection details are used only while two players are being joined.

When the game ends, the room disappears.

  • Sending feedback to the maintainer — what you send is kept for 30 days and then deleted.

Apart from those two, nothing leaves your device.
The host this site sits on (Cloudflare) may keep access logs — IP address, time of access and the like.
That is true of any website, and we do not collect any of it ourselves.

How it is built

One person builds this. Four things are kept to.

Dependencies do not grow.
Building this site takes exactly one thing: node. The markdown renderer, the screenshot tool
and the test harness were all written here. Depend on nobody and nobody else's troubles reach you.

Rules are kept apart from the screen.
Each game's rules live in one copy inside engine.js, and the screen and the tests both use that copy.
The moment the rules exist in two copies, they can no longer be maintained.

If an explanation disagrees with the rules, a test fails.
Every line of in-game explanation has a check beside it that actually runs the thing described.
Write "kings clear on their own" and then change the rule, and the test breaks on the spot.
There are 2318 tests, and they run on every push.

Half-finished things are not shipped.
Spider's four-suit game is not here yet, because the current solver cannot confirm it is winnable to the end.
Not shipping what has not been verified is this site's promise.

What has changed

Updates records what changed, when, and how.
Not only the things that went well — the mistakes and their fixes are written down just the same.