Time you have
A minute
Single-round games and one-shot toys. Long enough to be satisfying, short enough that walking away costs nothing.
252 sites · page 1 of 6
The original tile-merging game, written in a weekend and responsible for an enormous amount of lost 2014.
Straightforward pool on a proper physics table, against an opponent who punishes a lazy break immediately.
- 2 min
Miniclip's pool game, still the default way to lose imaginary money to a stranger in another country at half past two.
- 2 min
Hand-picked, highly rated films that were never blockbusters, filterable by mood and by where you can currently stream them.
- 2 min
Click targets as they pop up and get scored in targets per second. Shooter players use it to warm up before a session.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Vast crowd-sourced recipe database where the comments are the actual feature — thousands of people telling you what to change.
- 2 min
Type the name of any app and get a crowd-ranked list of alternatives, filtered by platform, price and whether the project is open source.
Fingerprints your browser and compares it against a research dataset of hundreds of thousands of others. The verdict is usually: unique.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Type your address and spin the globe back 750 million years to see where that ground sat, and which ocean was sitting on top of it.
- 2 min
AniList's seasonal grid: everything airing this season in one scroll, sortable by popularity, score or start date.
- 2 min
Every knot worth knowing, animated frame by frame so you can scrub back and forth until your hands finally get it.
Takes a permanent snapshot of a page on demand, including ones the Wayback Machine will not capture. Useful when a page is about to change.
- 2 min
Generates a genuinely handsome natal chart and flags the rarer patterns, with celebrity charts on hand to compare against.
One song revealed a single instrument at a time, six guesses, one puzzle a day. Needs headphones and a decent musical memory.
- 2 min
- Sound on
One-button basketball in which the players, the ball and the court are all changed at random between points, deliberately.
- 2 min
Two-on-two street basketball stripped back to dunking, blocking and a shot meter you will consistently misjudge.
- 2 min
Thousands of recipes in metric with honest timings and star ratings left by people who genuinely cooked the thing.
- 2 min
Sculpt a glossy blob with sliders for noise, light and iridescence, then leave it rotating and admire your handiwork.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Tens of thousands of riddles, brain teasers and lateral thinking problems submitted by users since 1999.
A search engine built on its own independent index with no profiling of searchers, and filters that let anyone re-rank results by their own rules.
People staple bread to trees and photograph it. There is no deeper explanation available and no sign of it stopping.
- 2 min
A breathing bubble with adjustable pace, sitting on a page that mercifully does not require the app to work.
A free endpoint that returns one cat fact per request, which is how every cat-facts prank bot ever built gets built.
- 2 min
Anime avatar makers with genuinely good line art, including versions that output something usable as a profile picture.
Chess tactics training with a rating that goes down, plus an endgame trainer that reveals exactly how much you do not know.
- 2 min
The default chess address for most of the planet, with a bot for every skill level and puzzles that will quietly humble you.
- 2 min
Five photographs, one question each: what year was this taken? Points scale with how close you land, and the cars always give it away.
Renders every road in any city as white lines on black and nothing else, which turns an ordinary street plan into unexpectedly good art.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Sixty seconds to forge the Mona Lisa with a mouse, then a pixel-by-pixel score telling you exactly how badly it went.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Fill-in-the-blank sentences mined from real corpora, aimed squarely at people who have outgrown the beginner apps.
NASA ephemeris data, brutal one-line notifications and a design language everyone copied. Astrology delivered entirely deadpan.
Palette generator trained on photographs and films, so the colours it suggests look like they came from somewhere real.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Sixteen words, four hidden groups, four mistakes allowed. The traps are the entire point and they are very carefully set.
- 2 min
Chrome, flames and bevelled gradients — the 2003 logo generator, still online and still producing exactly that.
- 2 min
- Desktop
The EFF's test showing how uniquely identifiable your browser is from fonts, plugins and screen size alone. Most people are one in millions.
- 2 min
- Desktop
A few hundred browser escape rooms in one filtered shelf, all running in the tab with nothing to install and nothing to buy.
- 2 min
Frogger with better manners: hop a chicken across roads, rivers and railway lines until the inevitable lorry.
- 2 min
Where every cruise ship in the world currently is, with deck plans and itineraries attached, for reasons entirely your own.
Fast browser shooter with no account and no download: click, spawn, and get eliminated by somebody considerably better.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Alarming research site about a chemical found in tumours, acid rain and every reservoir on earth. The chemical is water.
- 2 min
Turns any image into one-bit dithered grain, with a choice of classic algorithms and a two-colour palette picker.
- 2 min
Dithering aimed squarely at the chunky, ugly end of the spectrum, with palettes lifted from old hardware.
- 2 min
Do Nothing
AltFA timer that counts how long you manage to do nothing at all. Move the mouse, press a key, or scroll and it starts again from zero.
A 1996 US presidential campaign website, still up, still exactly as it was. An accidental museum of early political web design.
- 2 min
An interface that forbids clicking entirely and makes you navigate by hovering, which is far stranger than it sounds.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Draw and guess with a room code, or play solo against the clock on the evenings when nobody answers the group chat.
- 2 min
One button, one endless right angle, one car sliding off the edge of the world. The purest possible drifting game.
Precise Hindu calendar giving tithi, nakshatra and auspicious timings for any date and location. Astronomically rigorous throughout.
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
A minute: questions
How many sites are in the a minute list?
252 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off. 6 of them are AltF originals that run right here.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
247 of the 252 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
190 of 252 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 250 are safe for work and 233 work with the sound off.