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 5 of 6
The endless runner that ate mobile gaming, in a browser tab with the trains, the hoverboards and the shouting guard intact.
- 2 min
Drop fruit into a box, merge matching pairs and watch the pile creep towards the line. Physics does the rest of the work.
Tick off what is genuinely in your cupboards and it ranks the recipes you can make right now, with nothing missing.
- 2 min
Name something you liked and it returns things with the same texture, spanning films, books, music and games at once.
- 2 min
A collaborative database of example sentences translated across languages, better than any dictionary for context.
Non-commercial web search indexing only pages carrying no ads or trackers at all. A very small and very different internet.
Sprint away from a large monkey along a crumbling temple path, dying at the same badly signposted corner every time.
- 2 min
Graded summaries of the terms you agreed to without reading, with the specific alarming clause quoted. Volunteer-run since 2012.
Converts an uploaded photograph into ASCII, HTML or coloured text art, with the character density under your control.
- 2 min
- Desktop
A personality test that assigns you one of forty-odd animals, with write-ups considerably sharper than the premise deserves.
Spawns browser windows that dance around the screen and refuse to sit still, harmless but genuinely infuriating.
- 2 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
One large red button and a clear instruction not to press it. It gets increasingly personal about the fact that you keep pressing it.
British satire in short bitter columns, mostly concerning the middle classes and the people who irritate them.
Bisect angles, find midpoints and judge parallels by eye, then get told in pixels precisely how wrong you were.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Good news redrawn as illustrations by a designer who got tired of doomscrolling and built the feed he wanted instead.
One cat looking at a monitor showing a cat looking at a monitor, several thousand cats deep and still accepting submissions.
- 2 min
Every possible page of text that could ever exist, already written, sitting at a findable address.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Scroll the length of an absurdly elongated shiba inu, with checkpoints and a leaderboard for the truly committed.
A student sold a million pixels of advertising at a dollar each in 2005. The mosaic is still up, and most of the links now go nowhere.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Ten thousand sheep drawn by anonymous online workers paid two cents each, displayed together as one enormous grid.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Australian satire in short sharp headlines, which is roughly the national attention span for domestic politics.
Scroll outwards from a human to the observable universe, with each step making the previous one look absurd.
- 2 min
Millions of uploaded Minecraft skins plus an editor, which is the closest thing that game has ever had to a fashion scene.
- 2 min
- Desktop
The Void
AltFType anything at all and watch it drift upward and dissolve. Nothing is stored, nothing is sent, nothing can be recovered.
- 2 min
Nearly a trillion saved web pages. Paste any address, pick a year, and see what was there — the single most important archive online.
- 2 min
Race from one Wikipedia article to another using only links, against a clock and other people online.
- 2 min
- Desktop
A painting that zooms into itself forever, assembled by a dozen artists so carefully that the seams never quite show.
- 2 min
World clocks, time-zone converters, sunrise and moon times, calendars and countdowns, all on one long-running and reliably accurate site.
A daily five-minute roundup of tech, science and programming news, with every issue also readable on the website.
Tap any key in rhythm and it plays the next chunk of Clair de Lune, so timing is the only skill actually required.
- 2 min
- Sound on
Guess the country from a treemap of what it exports, which turns out to be an oddly precise national fingerprint.
- 2 min
Bounces a sentence between English and Japanese until the two versions agree, which they rarely do politely.
Get from one country to another by naming every country in between, with the shortest workable route scoring best.
- 2 min
Drops you into a field recording from a forest somewhere on earth, tells you which forest, then offers you another.
- 2 min
- Sound on
Fly down a rotating tunnel of coloured obstacles quickly enough that your eyes take over the steering from your brain.
- 2 min
Races you against real people typing the same passage, which is the only known method of making a typing test tense.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Typing practice on real open-source code, complete with the brackets and semicolons that ruin everyone's average.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Uno against bots or friends, with the draw-four arguments fully intact and no cards to lose under the sofa.
- 2 min
High-resolution photographs from a huge community of photographers, free to download and use. Browse by topic or colour without signing up.
- 2 min
Where teenagers make the quizzes: which sad indie song are you, which Greek deity would pity you. Anyone can build one in minutes.
Upload a file or paste a URL and get verdicts back from seventy-odd antivirus engines at once, along with what the file talks to.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Daily infographics on markets, commodities and demographics, designed to be understood in a single glance.
A dictionary drawn as a spring-loaded graph, with related meanings pulling away from each word you type.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Swap letters around a waffle-shaped grid to fix six words at once, with only fifteen swaps and stars for every one you save.
- 2 min
Upscales artwork and photographs without the usual mush, using a network trained specifically on line work.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Four-panel strips whose punchline usually involves death, drawn by two Germans with impeccable comic timing.
Genuinely baffling real product listings pulled from the big marketplaces and presented with almost no commentary.
- 2 min
The account that rates every dog above ten out of ten and has defended that scale in public for over a decade.
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.