🏆 Competitive

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

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.

Rhythm platformer in which a cube jumps in time with the music, and every death teaches you exactly one frame of timing.

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

The same cruelty as QWOP, applied to climbing: every handhold is a different letter key and you have to hold several at once.

Castle building and siege warfare with the exact aesthetics of an advert you have definitely been served, and better strategy underneath.

A daily video game identified from progressively less obscure screenshots, with six guesses and a genuinely cruel first frame.

Football management one week at a time since 1997, with a transfer market and an economy run entirely by other managers.

Shoot the alien whose colour matches the hex code shown. Learning to read hex by sight is an accidental side effect.

Falling blocks rotated onto a hexagon and sped up, which sounds like a novelty and turns out to be genuinely hard.

Reaction time, sequence memory, the chimp test and verbal memory, each scored against millions of other people's attempts.

Spot the serif among the sans-serifs before the timer runs out. Ten seconds long and disproportionately stressful.

Numbers-heavy tower defence with endless mode, research trees and the general energy of a very well-kept spreadsheet.

Home of BombParty, where a bomb passes round the room and you type a word containing the given letters before it goes off.

Bare-bones stacking practice with sprint, cheese race and replays, used by people who take block placement very seriously.

The quiz platform from every classroom and every away-day, with a free tier and a room code that anybody can join in seconds.

Dice-based territory conquest at a table of five strangers, where what happens in the chat matters more than the actual odds.

Space the letters of a word by eye, then see the typographer's answer laid over the top of yours. Reliably humbling.

A typing test built from book passages, with detailed statistics on which keys are quietly costing you whole seconds.

One golf hole a day, built to look trivial and then take nine attempts, with a score everybody can compare.

The one most people name as the best tower defence: four tower types, hero units and levels that reward replanning.

Blocky arena shooter with skins, ranked play and lobbies that fill in under ten seconds at any hour.

What remains of the great Flash portal, plus a badge system that once made people finish games out of pure spite.

Hex-based territory war where every unit costs upkeep, so overextending will kill you considerably faster than the enemy does.

Class-based arena shooter with grenades and blocky maps, running smoothly on a work laptop that struggles with spreadsheets.

A voxel arena shooter that holds a high frame rate in a browser tab, with custom lobbies, a map editor and no install.

Free chess with no adverts, no account required and an analysis engine better than the paid ones, funded entirely by donations.

Millions of chess tactics pulled from real games and served at exactly your rating, entirely free and with no account required.

A full WarCraft-style real-time strategy game running in a browser tab, complete with multiplayer, a map editor and a scripting API.

Virtual trading contests running on live market data, playable against colleagues without anybody risking actual money.

The one free IQ test people actually cite: thirty-five matrix puzzles, twenty-five minutes, no email address demanded at the end.

The 2000s browser giant, now mostly a mobile publisher but still hosting 8 Ball Pool and a shelf of its own history.

Decades of archived puzzle hunts from the hardest annual competition of its kind, all of it still playable.

The typing test that made typing tests beautiful — endlessly configurable, instantly readable and quietly addictive.

Chop wood, raise windmills, then defend them from players who would much rather take yours than build their own.

Time-trial motorbike stunts across levels engineered to kill you in a slightly funnier way on each attempt.

The bike stunt series relocated to a water park, where the traps are inflatable and no less lethal for it.

Thousands of DOS games, each booting in the browser on click. No download, no configuration, no floppy disk swapping.

Capture the flag with bows and low-poly castles, where arcing a shot over a wall beats raw reflexes almost every time.

Racing where the accelerator is your typing speed, making it the only competitive driving game that leaves you better at something.

The 2007 build of RuneScape, still updated by player vote and still fully playable in a browser tab you should not have open.

The English-speaking world's Go server, where correspondence games run for weeks and somebody always explains why your move was bad.

Open-source successor to Territorial.io: push borders across a world map, form alliances and break them at precisely the right moment.

A free street-view guessing game with unlimited rounds, built for people unwilling to pay a monthly subscription to look at roads.

Claim territory by driving loops around it while everyone else tries to clip your tail before you make it home.

Noughts and crosses, gomoku and Connect Four against a real stranger, matched in about four seconds with no signup.

Race a crowd of runners up a rooftop obstacle course where the only real skill is jumping at the right half-second.