Want something fun and thinky to spice up the middle of your work day? We've picked a batch of small games you can play right in your browser which are perfect for short play sessions on your break. None of these cost any money or require any downloads, and they're all good for bite-sized quick thinking.
Almost every one of these games has been featured as a pick in our "Thinky Games Club": if you sign up for our newsletter, every two weeks you'll get a hand-picked small, free webgame just like these delivered right to your inbox. Join up and then you can join our discord where we have a channel to discuss the current Club game.
Daily Akari
Akari is a type of Japanese logic puzzle that involves lighting up all the spaces in a grid by placing lightbulbs — there are many more types than just the typical sudoku and picross you might be familiar with, and akari is very enjoyable. Daily Akari is a site constructed to give you that Wordle-like fix of one new puzzle every day, and features very cute graphics and animations as well as the ability to share and compare your scores.
Cavern Sweeper
Coming from Hempuli of Baba Is You fame, Cavern Sweeper is a riff on the classic Minesweeper which asks the simple question "what if mines didn't only change the numbers directly around them?" You'll be scouring the caves for all manners of creatures (you can choose how many you'd like to include, which allows a great steady learning-curve) and locating them by their signature behavior: slimes create numbers all around themselves, ghosts affect numbers in a cross pattern, and the deadly serpents can only be detected via diagonals. Playing one puzzle at a time and ramping up the difficulty slowly is great fun.
Geode
The ocean of little push-block puzzle games made in PuzzleScript are an interesting batch to choose from for a list like this: they all play in browser, and most of them are broken into levels and can save your progress, meaning lots of them would be good choices for a quick break. But I'm choosing Geode out of personal affection and because of the game's dedication to staying small and compact: one of the things I like most about the game is how tight everything is. You'll find no wasted space at all in this clever little gemstone-mining puzzle.
TeenyShire
TeenyShire is a charming little emoji-fueled strategy game that gives you a tile-placement boardgame feel in quick daily bursts. You'll be dealt two random tiles at a time and you need to choose one and place it somewhere in your miniature kingdom. Deer want to be next to grass, forests want to be in big groups, and you're also trying to make the longest path from houses to castle that you can. These overlapping constraints make for a pleasant and light puzzle, and there's a unique one generated every day.
A Frog's Guide to Eating Flies
Perhaps the cutest game on this list, A Frog's Guide pretty much tells you what's going on in the title: hop around little grassy islands to catch and eat flies, which will allow your tongue to stretch farther to catch even more yummy flies. It's a great bite-sized puzzle game that gets surprisingly tricky when the shape of the islands and the distance to your prey start getting in your way. Very playful graphics and music give this one a leg up over lots of similar games.
Magpie
A Magpie is a type of bird known for collecting little shiny trinkets — and trinkets you will definitely be collecting. This is a "broughlike", a pocket-sized roguelike that keeps things very compact and puzzly, styled and named after the designer Michael Brough who broke the genre open. Make your way through garden-fence levels collecting coins, trading them in for various objects you can use to help you on your way, and slowly coming to understand the lovely systems at play here. This is a wonderful "deeper than it looks on the surface" kind of experience, and it plays great in short runs.
Dordle
This daily game doesn't hide its direct Wordle inspiration — and it's my personal pick for the sweet spot of the word-guessing formula. As far as I know, Dordle was the originator of the fad of "solve many Wordles at once" games, and I think bouncing back and forth between two words, with your guesses overlapping between them, is where the idea shines best. It's a step up from the original in difficulty, but not at all impossible. A great daily challenge if you like to test and stretch your vocab knowledge.
Cipher
I wanted to include at least one game on this list that was explicitly about cryptic rule-discovery: Cipher shows you logic puzzle grids, but doesn't literally tell you much else. It's through playing the puzzles, experimenting and reacting to visual feedback, that you'll learn the rules at play and discover how to make progress. Games that encourage you to teach yourself in this way are some of my favorites, and if you enjoy Cipher, you can get excited that a big new expanded version is coming to Steam next month.
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