Safe at your desk

Animated bar chart races, scrollytelling and story maps built from a spreadsheet without writing any code.

Nathan Yau's long-running blog on charts done well and badly, plus his own studies of how a day gets spent.

Paint with thick wet oils that pile up, smear and catch the light exactly like the real thing, entirely in a browser tab.

Books you a silent video call with a stranger who also needs to work, which turns out to be startlingly effective.

Variable font sandbox where you drag the axes and watch weight, width and optical size move in real time.

Suggests font pairings from a model trained on type, with locks so you can hold one face and reroll the other.

Three dishes a day and you name the country that cooks them, which teaches more about world cuisine than it means to.

Matches ingredients by shared aroma compounds, which is roughly how chocolate and blue cheese ended up on the same plate.

Plant a virtual tree that dies if you pick up your phone, which works on far more adults than anybody wants to admit.

City building from the Stone Age to the near future, with a tactical battle grid and guilds fighting over a shared continent.

Street-level archaeology of the city — old lamp posts, painted signs and vanished railways, walked and documented since 1999.

Six stills from one film, revealed one at a time. Getting it from the first frame is the only score really worth having.

Draw a track, then ride your own drawing on a BMX. Millions of user-made levels, most of them designed to be cruel.

Competitive FreeCell with timed deals and a global ranking, which should not work as a concept and completely does.

Answer vocabulary questions and the ad revenue goes to the UN World Food Programme. Running since 2007 and still counting grains.

A grid of small games and nothing else — no descriptions, no ratings, no explanation, exactly as it was in 2010.

Opens as a dismal educational maths game about a frog eating flies, and then keeps going somewhere else entirely. Say nothing more.

A search engine that strips every result down to plain HTML so it can be read on a genuinely ancient computer. Also very fast.

Every symbol, alphabet and text decoration you might want to paste somewhere, organised well enough to find one.

A million questions written and edited by volunteers since 1999, filed under categories nobody would ever think to commission.

A daily gleaning of curiosities, lateral puzzles and pleasing coincidences, kept up since 2005 without fuss.

Long-form expeditions into Japan's abandoned mines, hotels and theme parks, written by somebody who actually climbed in.

A hosting hub for hundreds of amateur incremental games, sorted and playable in the page. Where the genre does its experiments.

The French national library's digital collection — manuscripts, maps, newspapers and photographs, millions of items deep.

Part indie games host, part social network, where horror fan games and unfinished experiments live cheerfully side by side.

Conway's cellular automaton with a library of known patterns, still the clearest demonstration that rules alone make worlds.

A shelf of room-code party games — spy, drawing, word association, trivia — all free, all in one place, none needing an app.

Name the video game from a blurred cover, then a screenshot, then artwork. New puzzle daily and several modes to lose at.

The full arcade — hundreds of browser games sorted by type, all playable immediately with nothing to install.

A large casual portal aimed squarely at people who want a match-three game and no further conversation about it.

Seven levels of talking a language model into revealing a password it was told to protect. The best hands-on lesson in prompt injection going.

Hans Rosling's animated bubble chart of the world, still the fastest cure for being wrong about global development.

Broken telephone with drawings: a sentence becomes a picture becomes a sentence, and the album at the end is the whole payoff.

Top-down shooter with class loadouts and destructible cover, still busy years after everybody stopped writing about it.

An interactive world atlas you can scrub year by year from 3000 BC, watching every border redraw itself.

Twenty-odd fake hacking interfaces — agency mainframes, terminals, satellite maps — with buttons that fill progress bars.

Real-time fog-of-war conquest on a grid, one army tick every half second. Simple rules, brutal depth, matches under ten minutes.

Walks you through rebuilding classic algorithmic pieces — tiled lines, Joy Division, cubic disarray — one step at a time.

A genetic algorithm evolves two-dimensional cars across rough terrain while you watch generations fail forward.

A browsable restoration of the GeoCities neighbourhoods, so you can wander into Area51 or SunsetStrip the way people once did.

A free flight simulator in the browser using satellite terrain for the entire planet, with real air traffic overhead.

Geometry, algebra and calculus tools in one place, plus a huge shared library of constructions others have built.

A three-by-three grid of geographic categories where you name one country per cell and get scored on how obscure it was.

The game that made the genre: dropped into Street View, guess where on the globe you are. The free tier is thin these days.

A community-built geography quiz mixing street view, flags and country outlines, with private lobbies for a group of you.

Plain page of every emoji, grouped and clickable, for the machines that have no emoji keyboard worth using.

Climb a mountain of junk using nothing but a hammer, and lose an hour of progress to a single bad swing.

Directory of the emptied-out settlements of the American West, one short paragraph and one faded photograph at a time.