Mood
💡 Clever
You will want to know how they built it.
357 sites · page 8 of 8
Home of a long list of absurd browser games and quizzes, several of which have quietly consumed entire office afternoons.
Upscales artwork and photographs without the usual mush, using a network trained specifically on line work.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Guess where a teammate placed a concept on a spectrum between two extremes. The most reliable argument-starter on this list.
- 10 min
Winamp itself, reimplemented faithfully enough that the equaliser works. It really whips the llama's behind, in a browser tab.
- <1 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
Software-defined radio receivers around the world you can tune through a browser, listening to shortwave through somebody else's aerial.
- 10 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
The planet chopped into three-metre squares, each given a three-word name, which is either brilliant or a licensing trap depending who you ask.
- <1 min
Two portraits side by side, one photographed and one generated. A University of Washington project, and your score keeps falling.
Which record a sample came from, who covered whom and where that drum break originally lived, with the two tracks played side by side.
- 1 hr+
- Sound on
Drag Wikipedia cards onto a timeline in the right order. Three lives, and you will lose one to the invention of the fork.
- 10 min
A working Windows XP desktop in a tab, with Minesweeper, Paint and the startup sound, for pure muscle memory.
- 10 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
Thousands of interactive maths and science notebooks contributed over two decades, each one a single slider-driven idea.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Victorian engravings cut apart and given modern dialogue, producing jokes no other format could quite deliver.
Crazy golf on a floating landscape that unfolds into a new course between shots. Worth playing for the transitions alone.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Renders your text in every font installed on the machine at once, which is the fastest way ever devised to pick one.
- <1 min
- Desktop
Guess the country from its silhouette alone, with each miss handing you the distance and compass bearing to the real answer.
- 2 min
Stick figures on romance, sarcasm, maths and language, with a second joke in the alt text of every single strip.
Widely reckoned the strongest reverse image search for faces, places and heavily cropped photos. Worth trying when TinEye finds nothing.
- <1 min
Unicode styling for places that forbid formatting, so bold and italic survive a paste into a profile bio.
- <1 min
A stubbornly plain German server hosting hundreds of turn-based Euro games, free and ad-free since long before that was a stance.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Draw mirrors and walls, then let a raytracer slowly paint the light bouncing between them until the image resolves.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Feeds your own video call bad audio — echo, crying baby, wind — until everyone agrees the connection is the problem.
- 2 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
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.
Clever websites: questions
How many sites are in clever websites?
357 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off. 8 of them are AltF originals that run right here.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
347 of the 357 are free and need no account. 1 is paid or freemium, and the card says so.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
185 of 357 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 357 are safe for work and 323 work with the sound off.