Games · seven ways to waste an hour
Seven games.
No download.
Every game on this estate, in one place. All seven run entirely in the browser — no account, no install, nothing uploaded — and every board, piece and card is drawn by the page itself rather than loaded as a picture. Play against the machine or against somebody sitting beside you.
Pick a table
Chess
Against the computer, or across the table
Minimax with alpha–beta pruning to depth eight, twelve legends to beat and ten sets of pieces — with clocks, or across the table instead.
Checkers
Forced captures, kings, and a cruel endgame
Twelve opponents again, the capture rule enforced rather than suggested, and endgames that will not let a careless king wander.
Backgammon
The full table, doubling cube included
The bar, hits, forced dice, exact-and-overshoot bearing off, gammons and the doubling cube — all enforced, so a legal move is the only move.
Cards
Blackjack, solitaire and video poker
Blackjack with real basic-strategy advice, Klondike solitaire and three video-poker paytables. Every card is drawn in SVG by the page.
Tic-Tac-Toe
Thirty seconds, or as long as you like
Nine themes and three difficulties. On hard it cannot be beaten, which is the honest thing for this game to be. Two players, or the computer.
Joke Vault
8,610 jokes, and a meter to sort them
Twenty-four comic forms across forty-one categories, ranked by a meter that reads the English rather than counting the punctuation.
EZ Score
The score, with the betting line
Ten leagues, score and clock beside the spread, moneyline and total. UFC cards drawn whole, a schedule months ahead, the league table, off ESPN.