User friendly web games | Hacker News Reader

User friendly web games

merely.xyz

160 pointsmerelysounds68 comments

The games have no ads, no dark patterns and require no registration. They just work, on both mobile and desktop.

My website tries to be similarly user friendly and minimal. I’m hoping to capture the web 1.0 vibe of personal homepages, where people would put links to their favorite obscure online places.

If you enjoy it, bookmark the page and visit every now and then. Also, maybe skip this post if you have a deadline today.

> The games have no ads, no dark patterns and require no registration. They just work, on both mobile and desktop.

Except for mobile support, WebLiero [1] matches those criteria. It's a multiplayer clone of a DOS classic indie game (Liero). It requires getting familiar with controls and other players to be online to play though.

Full disclosure: I'm a contributor.

[1] https://www.webliero.com

Wow, thank you for sharing WebLiero. I haven't played that game in ages--so excited to try it out.

Thanks! I have a couple of games that I like which also miss mobile support, I'll have to add a desktop only category one day and show it for people visiting on desktop.

Nice collection, thanks for putting this together!

I was thinking of submitting my jigsaw site Puzzle Panda [1] if it fits the requirements. Registration is not necessary and there’s no ads.

[1]: https://puzzlepanda.com

A bit of feedback: please don't rotate the puzzle piece for me! A huge part of sorting out where a piece goes is figuring out its orientation in space and if you tell em automatically, I miss out on that whole part of the process, and suddenly all the pieces are sorted for me.

Great feedback, others have mentioned this as well! I’ll try to add this as an option soon.

This looks fun! One question, your terms mention payments, but I couldn't find any paid content in my short session. What is the business model? Is there a pricing page?

Good question and sorry for the confusion! I originally launched with an optional paid tier which I have since removed. Currently there is no business model. I happily run this at a loss as my costs are very low.

The first game I opened (Saloon Panic) has ads and isn't mobile friendly.

Huh, I didn't see any ads (Firefox on Android), and it was mobile friendly (instructions were to "tap here" and the screen fit fine).

If you are using Firefox on Android, did you check if you have an ad blocker enabled? And if you don't, why not?

pounce.sh

Not my game but recently announced on HN.

Coming back from Hawaii I was playing a solitaire on the in flight entertainment system and it was terribly buggy and hard to use and I was thinking I could do better than this! So I started writing one on the plane. I have not made any games in many years (decades actually) but it was a fun experience and I used it as an opportunity to try out webasm/emscripten which was pretty easy to get working actually. It is here: https://github.com/seiferteric/JustSolitaire and playable in the browser here: https://eric.seifert.casa/solitaire/

For my first foray into Javascript I wrote kardland.com

I was adamant not to add a timer though because I felt that made me enjoy the game less.

You got double-click working to put away cards. If the card double-clicked can not be put up though, see if there is a tableau it can be put on. I prefer that to dragging if I can avoid it.

I went back and forth on the timer, I purposely didn't put any score like MS solitaire at least. As for double clicking to move down to the tableau, I chose not to add it since I felt it sort of encourages spam clicking every card to see if it can be moved.

I don't know if I was playing solitaire incorrectly, but I think there may be a bug when moving cards along the "tableau" piles - I can't move cards of the same suit. for example 5 hearts onto 6 hearts on a tableau pile. Is this against the rules?

the piles on top or bottom? On top you move cards of the same suite in ascending order, starting with Ace, 2, 3 etc. On bottom only color matters and you go in descending order. I kept dealing until I had a 5 and 6 of hearts in the bottom piles and I am not able to move one on top of the other so I don't see a problem, but there may be bugs!

You're supposed to alternate colors on the tableau in the traditional Klondike solitaire.

Got it, didn’t know that!

Nice, I lost but nice :), also maybe a loading screen would help

It's truly mind-boggling how terrible most in-flight games are. Both the implementation and the lagging/bugginess of them.

The touch screen was so bad you could not even click along the sides and made some games unplayable... do they even test these things?

I would also recommend Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection:

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

Which is playable on the web and also has been ported to various platforms.

Thanks for the link, this is an amazing list! I especially like the "Map", though I haven't checked all of them yet; I'll make sure to do that later. Unfortunately these not always work on mobile; I'll have to add a "desktop only" section one day.

There are native mobile versions of those games linked near the bottom of the page, too.

Indeed, and in case someone wants to access them directly, here are some more direct links:

- Simon Tatham's Puzzles on Google Play for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=name.boyle.chr...

- Simon Tatham's Puzzles on Apple store for iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/simon-tathams-portable-puzzl...

We just released a free web game. It has free to play monetization mechanics so maybe it doesnt fit into this category, but check it out, its highly polished and really fun:

https://rocketbotroyale.winterpixel.io/

I have really enjoyed the dev streams + YouTube videos. As someone learning Godot on the side it’s been very informative.

Thanks for the feedback. I want to try to make my dev streams more interesting. It's pretty hard to look cool when your debugging some busted button. Check out this blog post if you liked the dev streams:

https://blog.winterpixel.com/the-tech-stack-behind-a-wasm-an...

Unfortunately this doesn't feel like a good fit for this list, it's hard to put it into words but I'm looking for more lightweight, minimal and immediate games.

Thank you for sending the link anyway, the game still looks very fun, I may download the mobile version later.

Well polished indeed!

I felt the urge to add a game I did : https://maxwellito.github.io/breaklock/

I find it amazing that there are still developers making little games without ads or shady practices behind, just for fun. But we need a good catalog to list them all.

> A hybrid of Mastermind and the Android pattern lock.

Neat idea, great implementation.

I love the style of your game. Thanks for sharing it!

Thank you for the opportunity to submit! We need something like this as it's hard to distinguish commercial games and ones that require downloads from those that aren't and don't!

I submitted my two inventions, Hexxed[0] and Mathtown Alley[1].

[0] https://hexxedgame.com

[1] https://makecode.com/_T6tJRFfsaTRW

I recently put up https://neonarcade.games where I put my own hobby project games; an astroid-like game, infinite hexagonal minesweeper, and a game where you have to play two arcade classics at the same time. There are a few more games in the pipeline that should be added soon.

They are not of the highest quality, but I continue to work on them. They are all built from scratch with only a (my own) math library that I reuse. If something's broken and you bug me about it, I should fix it soon. Same story for adding mobile support where it's not there yet.

I decided I am not going to do ads or tracking. I have fun making these, so I just hope someone else can have fun playing. There might still be some google font references, but I'm planning to take those out too. The same should go for https://masterpieces.app, where you can do jigsaws with the Rijksmuseum collection.

Would you want to include some word games such as my Changelist game (Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31160447 / https://changelist.rocks/)?

This looks like a daily game, which is not what I’m after at the moment. I wanted to list games that put the user in control as much as possible. I would add it if the user could go through different challenges at their own pace. Still, this is looks like a really fun game; nicely done!

I'm considering adding an "unlimited" bank of puzzles that you can play once you've solved the daily games (or instead of the dailies). I'll let you know if I do!

If so, I have a similar game as well Lexery! https://adamsanderson.github.io/lexery-js/

I had a lot of fun checking these out today!

I’m not sure if PICO-8 games would fit with this list, but there are a lot of fun quick ones such as:

Snowfight: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=mb_advent2019

Sonic16x16: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=97365

U Dead: https://eggnog.itch.io/u-dead

And several others (I have a curated list here[1]).

They work on mobile and desktop, don’t require registration, etc. But maybe you wouldn’t want the list to get overwhelmed with PICO-8 games.

[1] https://memalign.github.io/p/pico8.html

https://geoquest.wout.space/

Thanks for sharing, since yesterday I practised and I finally got all achievements

I posted this recently

https://greggman.github.io/rockfall/

It's a kind of clone of the early 80s game, "Boulderdash". My friend, John Alvarado, wrote the original clone in Action! on the Atari 800 in the early 80s when we were in high school.

Because the core code is pretty small I've ported it multiple times (PC, Gameboy, some 2004 java based feature phone)

So recently I ported it to JavaScript and I found it fun to play for a while. I added level import via Tiled, and made a few levels.

So far its more playable on laptops/desktops with keyboard or joypad. I'm not sure if it can be made playable on mobile as it requires relatively precise movements so it's much more difficult with touch controls but it can still be a fun challenge on mobile

Love this! Such a fun and immediate way to build and play games.

I submitted https://squareword.org , my daily word game in two dimensions, which works like a combination of Wordle, Sudoku and crosswords. No ads or registration.

Give Lichess some love. Absolutely my favorite.

Submitted my game https://www.tripodsgame.com. Nae registration, ads or dark patterns; works on mobile and desktop.

Would it make sense to add A Dark Room? [0]

[0]: https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/

A Dark Room is an idle/clicker game, so far I intentionally avoided this genere, I was looking for something more appropriate for short gaming sessions and also something less casual. I also find these games too addictive and not relaxing enough; perhaps the clicker game genre didn't click for me... What do others think, do you enjoy idle/clicker games? Do you return to them often?

the idle/clicker genre is full of games that use ads, IAPs, and dark patterns. A curated list that avoids those would be nice, although they are a little more addicting and designed for longer play than the other games on your list.

This is great!

I just added my little trivia game to the list using the Google Form

https://trivia-16.vercel.app/

Is it just my eyes or this link / background combination really difficult to read?

It's not just your eyes. My vision is usually pretty good, but it is hard to read the dark text on dark background.

I have spent WAY too much time playing orb.farm already. Thank you for a great list.

Cool idea! Submitted my game https://classic-mahjong.com/ It's a classic version of mahjong with pretty design and 100 layouts.

Suggesting Tough Love Arena: https://toughlovearena.com

Brilliantly simple fighting game that runs in the browser with online and offline features.

The old Orisinal Games by Ferry Halim would fit perfectly into this category, but unfortunately, they died along with Flash Player (AFAIK - I'd love to learn otherwise).

Damn, that reminds me. Wow, I adored Orisinal Games back in the day. Did the creator make anything else?

I've found these to also be pretty good, and work with mobile or desktop:

https://gamesnacks.com/

I recently have enjoyed playing Battleship [0].

[0]: http://en.battleship-game.org

Also see https://quickparty.games for the multiplayer version.

TagPro https://tagpro.koalabeast.com/

I like this! Thanks for sharing it!

("Quantum childminding" is hard yo -- the park level has me completely stumped)

Quantum Childminding is too real.

Squirts is quite excellent.

Free to play, no registration, no install, no gimmicks, just pure game.

Works on mobile and desktop.

If you like multiplayer RTS games, try it out. It’s similar to the board game Risk, but real time and with planets.

(You can play with your friends multiplayer)

https://bitplanets.com/

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