About Games Are Free
A site with a narrow goal: browser games that open in under a second, work properly on a phone, and never ask you who you are.
What this is
Games Are Free publishes 26 browser games, all of them written here rather than embedded from somewhere else. Every one opens instantly, runs without a download, and is built to be played with a thumb as readily as with a mouse. There is no account and there is nothing to install — the games run in the browser itself, with no plugin, so there is nothing for a school or office network to approve before a page will open.
6 of them also have a full written guide under how to play: the rules from nothing, every term on the table defined, for somebody who has never dealt the game before.
How a game gets made
Most free-games sites are catalogues of other people's work loaded in an iframe. That is why they are slow, why an advert usually plays before you can start, and why the rules are often subtly wrong with nobody able to fix them. Owning the code removes all three problems at once, and it is why the catalogue grows slowly.
Each game starts as rules rather than as a screen. They are read from a published source — card games against Pagat, John McLeod's rules archive — then written as a rules engine with its own tests, and only then given a board to play on. Where a game has several published variations, the page says which one we chose. Where our version simplifies something, the page says that too.
Nothing on this site invents a number about itself. There are no star ratings, no review counts and no play counts, because there is no mechanism that could produce one honestly. The scores and times you see are the ones your own browser recorded, on the board they were set on.
What it costs and how it is paid for
The games are free and always will be. The site carries no advertising at the moment — there is no ad script on any page, and nothing on this site loads from an ad network. The plan is to pay for it with advertising placed around the game rather than inside it, and when the first unit goes live the privacy policy will say so before it does.
What we will not do
- Publish ratings we did not receive. There is no star-rating markup on this site, because there is no ratings mechanism. Inventing them is a structured-data policy violation and, more simply, a lie about what other people think.
- Interrupt a game in progress with an advert.
- Ask you to register to play something.
- Track who you are. No accounts, no profiles, no advertising identity built out of what you play. Best scores live in your own browser — the privacy page lists exactly what is stored and where.
- Use trademarked game titles. We build the genre, never somebody else's brand.
- Publish a page for a game that does not exist yet.
When something is wrong
A rule that looks wrong, a control that does not work on your device, or anything on a page that is inaccurate — send it over. A rules correction gets a test written for it before the fix ships, so the same mistake cannot come back; that is the one promise on this page that has a mechanism behind it.
Start here
The three most-played kinds of game on the site, if you would rather play than read:
