Free online games

Games that play in the browser, with nothing to install

Every game here is a few kilobytes of JavaScript running on your own device. There is no account to create, no app to download, no plugin, and nothing you do is uploaded anywhere. Once a page has loaded it keeps working even if the connection drops, which makes these a dependable way to fill ten minutes on a train, in a waiting room, or at the end of a lesson.

There are eight kinds of game here, each in several editions. Hangman is the classic guess-a-letter game, with a one-line clue on every word so a round is a deduction puzzle rather than a vowel-first grind. Word search hides twelve words in a grid running in all eight directions and deals a completely fresh arrangement whenever you ask. Word scramble shows you every letter and asks only for the order — the same word banks as hangman, a different kind of thinking. And memory match is the old concentration card game: turn two at a time and remember where everything is.

Two families have nothing to do with words. Sudoku generates a grid the moment you ask for one, in three difficulties, and checks while it builds that exactly one solution exists — so no puzzle here can be filled in legally and still called wrong. There is a gentler easy sudoku whose grids can all be finished with the two basic techniques, and a sudoku for kids on four-by-four and six-by-six boards. The board games are the ones to play against somebody: tic tac toe offers a computer opponent that is genuinely unbeatable — it searches every remaining move, and never lost once across every legal line of play we tested it against — alongside easy and medium settings that can be beaten, and connect four puts the same search on a seven-by-six grid where it looks up to seven moves ahead. Both also play two-up on one device, so a game against the computer can become a game against the person next to you without reloading anything.

Two of them are practice rather than pure play. Math games runs ten mixed arithmetic questions a round, with a multiplication-only version and a times tables game that drills one table at a time — which is the order tables are actually learned in. The typing test measures your speed over sixty seconds and reports accuracy beside it, and typing practice drops the clock entirely so you can build accuracy first, which is the half most people skip.

Themed editions swap the content without changing the rules. Movie hangman and movie word scramble both run on eighty film titles from Casablanca to Dune. Animal word search and animal memory cover creatures from land, sea and air. For the holidays there are Halloween and Christmas word searches, plus Halloween and Christmas hangman, a Halloween and a Christmas word scramble, and a Halloween and a Christmas memory game — all of which work particularly well on a classroom projector, since a new puzzle can be generated for every group.

For younger players every game has an easier edition: hangman, word search, word scramble and memory for kids all use short, familiar words or simple pictures, with nothing hidden backwards and no way to lose. So do math games for kids, which stays on adding and taking away up to ten and never produces a negative answer, and typing games for kids, which uses thirty-second rounds of three and four letter words in large type.

If you are choosing something for a classroom or for a child at home, the guide to Halloween games that survive the last week of October covers what to run by age and what collapses with thirty children in the room, educational games that actually teach something covers the rest of the year, and what no-download really means explains how to tell a genuinely free browser game from one with a delayed sign-up wall.

If you would rather something shorter, the trivia quizzes run ten questions a round and explain every answer, and the tools directory has the calculators, converters and generators.