Safe at your desk

Multiplayer jigsaws where several people drag pieces around the same table at once, mostly getting in each other's way.

Home of BombParty, where a bomb passes round the room and you type a word containing the given letters before it goes off.

Net art from 1995 that looks precisely like your computer failing. View the source: the mess on screen is hiding the actual work.

Drags the guts of a JPEG around with three sliders, producing the smeared colour blocks that only broken files make.

Bare-bones stacking practice with sprint, cheese race and replays, used by people who take block placement very seriously.

Straightforward celebrity photo blogging updated hourly, with none of the editorialising the rest of the genre insists on.

Japanese home cooking explained for people without a Japanese pantry, with substitutions that do not quietly ruin the dish.

Tells you which streaming service in your country actually has the film, and whether it is included or a rental.

The quiz platform from every classroom and every away-day, with a free tier and a room code that anybody can join in seconds.

Thousands of Japanese emoticons sorted by emotion, running from mild confusion all the way to full table flipping.

Dice-based territory conquest at a table of five strangers, where what happens in the chat matters more than the actual odds.

Space the letters of a word by eye, then see the typographer's answer laid over the top of yours. Reliably humbling.

A typing test built from book passages, with detailed statistics on which keys are quietly costing you whole seconds.

Teaches touch typing by generating fake words from the letters you keep fumbling, rather than making you copy out prose.

One golf hole a day, built to look trivial and then take nine attempts, with a score everybody can compare.

Baking recipes given by weight, with a hotline-grade troubleshooting blog attached. Where to go when a loaf has gone wrong.

Stick-figure RPG that has been landing daily jokes since 2003, wrapped around a combat and item system far deeper than the drawings imply.

The one most people name as the best tower defence: four tower types, hero units and levels that reward replanning.

Blocky arena shooter with skins, ranked play and lobbies that fill in under ten seconds at any hour.

Documentation of the vast Victorian asylums built to one architectural theory of curing madness, most now empty or demolished.

Anime and manga tracker with a friendly interface and a public API, run as an open-source project rather than an ad business.

A text-based village of kittens that grows into a civilisation over weeks, with a spreadsheet's soul and startling depth.

A tidy portal of casual browser games with an unusual amount of care given to which ones are actually finished.

Painting app with layers, symmetry and a genuinely good brush engine, loading instantly and uploading nothing anywhere.

The reference desk of internet culture, with sourced origins and dates for jokes you never knew had a paper trail.

Start with one enormous dot; every pass of the cursor splits it into four, until the pixels resolve into a picture.

What remains of the great Flash portal, plus a badge system that once made people finish games out of pure spite.

Hex-based territory war where every unit costs upkeep, so overextending will kill you considerably faster than the enemy does.

Jason Kottke has been posting the interesting bits of the web since 1998, with no algorithm involved at any point.

Class-based arena shooter with grenades and blocky maps, running smoothly on a work laptop that struggles with spreadsheets.

A voxel arena shooter that holds a high frame rate in a browser tab, with custom lobbies, a map editor and no install.

Retail history blog named after the ghost outline a shop sign leaves behind, mapping the slow decline of the American mall.

Tarot taught properly, with free card meanings, a clean illustrated deck and lessons that never ask you to believe anything.

Gossip written as media criticism, tracking how celebrity stories get placed and who stands to benefit from the placing.

Thousands of landing pages sorted by industry and style, which makes it the reference for anyone writing one.

Two decades of listening data turned into recommendations, similar-artist chains and neighbours with suspiciously identical taste.

Fitts, Hick, Jakob and the rest, each with a plain explanation and a poster you will end up printing out.

French satire named by scrambling Le Figaro, and taken seriously by French social media with depressing regularity.

The 1979 economics lesson still intact — buy lemons, read the forecast, set a price, discover the weather has opinions.

The Lenny face and its several hundred descendants, catalogued and one click away from your clipboard.

Turns a question into a link that mimes typing it into a search box, for colleagues who never quite learn.

Log films, rate them, and read reviews by people trying to be funny rather than professional. The social network cinema deserved.

Looks like a plain platformer until the floor vanishes, the ceiling drops and the exit walks away. Trolling you is the actual mechanic.

Photographs, manuscripts, sheet music and film from the largest library in the world, mostly free to reuse.

Thematic collections captured around elections, disasters and cultural moments, chosen by librarians rather than by a crawler.

Free chess with no adverts, no account required and an analysis engine better than the paid ones, funded entirely by donations.

Millions of chess tactics pulled from real games and served at exactly your rating, entirely free and with no account required.

Enter your birthday and watch a live tally of the heartbeats, blinks and steps you have got through so far.