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 4 of 6
Sixteen questions sort you into one of Pew's nine American political groups, with a decade of real survey data behind every one.
Puts your face on billboards, banknotes and museum walls using several hundred templates. Aggressively 2009.
- 2 min
Airtight's glitch lab, stacking VHS tracking errors, pixel sorting and RGB shift over a photo, a clip or your webcam.
- 2 min
- Desktop
A Japanese platform hosting tens of thousands of illustrator-made avatar makers, each one in a completely different style.
Names a pixel size and asks you to drag a box exactly that big. Nobody is as good at this as they assume.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Feed it a photograph and it hands back a pixel-art version, with block size and palette entirely under your control.
Type in the thing you are stressed about, watch it shrink into a distant star over sixty seconds, then close the tab.
Type a phrase and watch every film clip in which somebody says it, cut back to back until the words stop meaning anything.
- 2 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
A noughts-and-crosses grid where every square needs a Pokemon matching two criteria at once, scored on how obscure your picks were.
A British gossip newsletter of blind items and pop trivia, running since 2000 and still legally very careful.
- 2 min
- Not at work
Age pyramids for any country from 1950 to 2100, which settles most demographic arguments in a single shape.
A shelf of harmless fake screens — cracked display, virus alert, retro desktop — meant for a colleague's unattended laptop.
- 2 min
- Desktop
A fake desktop of virus warnings, satellite feeds and password crackers, all keyboard-mashable in full screen.
- 2 min
- Desktop
A free browser extension from the EFF that learns which trackers follow you from site to site and blocks them, with no lists to manage.
- 2 min
- Desktop
The colour-word interference test as the real psychology experiment rather than a quiz-site imitation, with your data at the end.
- 2 min
- Desktop
The Only Connect connecting wall in thousands of user-made versions: sixteen clues, four groups, two and a half minutes.
Guided meditation for people who have never meditated, starting at two minutes and never once mentioning chakras.
- 2 min
- Sound on
Four keys drive the four thigh and calf muscles of one Olympic sprinter, and none of them cooperate. The original rage game.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Steady feed of new illusions with the comments doing the debunking, which is usually half of the entertainment.
A community-maintained open database of internet radio streams with no company behind it, which is why the odd little stations survive there.
- 2 min
- Sound on
Pick a country and a decade on a world map and hear what people there were actually listening to, curated by humans since 1900.
- 2 min
- Sound on
Two floppy archers, one bow each, and physics that decides the winner considerably more often than aim does.
- 2 min
Every train on the British network with the signalling data attached: which loop it was held in, where it lost four minutes and why.
A hundred yes-or-no questions about things you may have done, counted downward from 100. A student rite of passage since the 1980s.
- 2 min
- Not at work
Two-button duel on a rooftop where recoil, rather than aim, decides which of you falls off the building first.
Conservation campaign for a cephalopod that lives in trees, used for over twenty years to teach children about checking sources.
- 2 min
Drag one slider from quantum foam to the cosmic web, with every object in between labelled at its true size.
- 2 min
Find one to twenty-five scattered across a grid, in order, against the clock. The standard peripheral-vision and attention drill.
- 2 min
Rough sketch in, finished image out, with the result following your actual lines rather than politely ignoring them.
- 2 min
One piano, several people, one link — everybody's keys light up in a different colour and it descends into noise fast.
- 2 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
A daily high-resolution photograph from the early twentieth century, usually with commenters identifying the buildings.
- 2 min
Ragdoll obstacle course whose entire design goal is taking your stickman apart in an inventive new way each level.
- 2 min
Enter any two articles and get every shortest path of links between them, drawn as a graph you can drag.
- 2 min
- Desktop
The custom emoji every workplace eventually accumulates, downloadable as a pack. The party parrot is in there.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Roll a ball down an endless neon slope at rising speed until the geometry wins, which it always eventually does.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Three-minute kart deathmatches with weapon crates and absolutely no patience for anything resembling a racing line.
Two-legged football played with a single key, in which the physics engine scores most of the actual goals.
- 2 min
Klondike that loads in under a second, with nothing on the page except green baize and the cards.
- 2 min
Grid sequencer with a marimba and a drum kit, tuned so that anything you tap sounds passable, then shared as a link.
- 2 min
- Sound on
The South Park character maker that has been running since 1999 and still gets updated with props from new episodes.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Ride a lift from the ground to geostationary orbit, passing every layer of atmosphere and satellite on the way.
- 2 min
Code typing drills across a dozen languages, where the indentation is handled for you and the punctuation certainly is not.
- 2 min
- Desktop
NASA's tracker for when the space station is visible from where you live, with sighting alerts by email.
- 2 min
Constructive journalism collected from other outlets into one free feed, so somebody else does all the sifting.
Compare image codecs side by side with a draggable split, and see precisely what each quality setting costs you.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Search results passed through without the tracking, plus an option to open any result through a proxy so the site never sees your address.
Swing a stick figure between grapple points using one button, then trust momentum to carry the mistake.
- 2 min
A word search with a theme you have to deduce first, and one spangram threading corner to corner through the grid.
- 2 min
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.