5 Puzzle Games That You Could Play in Your Browser
List of some browser based puzzle games that you can play right now on any device.
You might not have any games installed on your computer - and if it's the one you're using at the office, well, that's to be expected. Or you might be bored of the ones you've already installed and don't want to wait or go through the steps of installing another one from your vast Steam collection. There's also the possibility you're using an old or underpowered computer or one of those shiny Chromebooks, where everything begins and ends with a browser.
We could go on with multiple reasons for why you might want to check what we'll see in this post, but why waste your time when you could be gaming?
Yes, gaming without paying a dime, installing software, or having the latest ultra-expensive hardware. All you need is a (relatively modern) browser, for, in this article, we'll see the five best games you can play in it. In order to solve a word game, you need time and good vocabulary. It is often challenging and addictive sometimes, but you also learn some new words at the end of the day. Nevertheless, we will focus more on classic board games in this article, you should read this one for word games.
We should warn you: prepare to "burn" the rest of your day. It would be better to postpone any meetings and put everything else on hold. The games we'll see are so addictive they shouldn't be freely available through a browser but banned by law instead! You will lose a significant chunk of time on them. We know. It's the reason this article took a week to write.
Why Play Those Five out of Thousands of Games?
Before we present our selections, we'd better clarify why we chose those particular five games. You might be familiar with some of them. You may have already played a different version of one or two of them. And we admit, they're not the most original selections we could go for.
Still, our priority was to make you happy. That's why the five titles that follow are:
- Addictive
- Smart, creative, and highly original. Or, at least, they were when they first appeared.
- Easy to get into but hard to master
- Already responsible for millions of lost hours across the globe
So, we'll warn one last time: prepare to get hooked. Obsessive fun is imminent.
Some Necessary Technicalities
You can play the following titles in any modern browser, and we should emphasize that: any modern browser. Don't expect them to work correctly -- if at all -- in something like the default Internet Explorer on your Windows 98 installation.
This humble writer loves Firefox and has been using it as his primary browser since its first release. However, we have to admit Google's Chrome, Chromium, Edge, and other alternatives that share the same core will offer you the best gaming experience. Their Javascript engine usually leaves the competition behind, and every game on our list benefits from that.
List of 5 Browser Based Games
Tetris
Why, some might ask, did we include Tetris in our list? Isn't it, like... ancient? And the answer is positive. Yes. Yes, it is. It is when looking at the grand scheme of gaming. But the fact we're still playing it, decades after we first met, should talk volumes about Tetris' gameplay and addictiveness.
Many copycats have followed, iterations on the same core gameplay. Thus, it's almost a given that most people on the whole planet have played Tetris or are familiar with its concept.
In Tetris, you're viewing the equivalent of a well from its side. Variations on how four different blocks can be connected drop from the top of the well. They're shaped like squares, lines, and the letters T and L. You can manipulate them before they reach the bottom by moving them horizontally and rotating them by 90 degrees. When a piece hits the bottom of the well, it "sticks" there, and it's time to move to the next one.
As pieces keep falling, the well fills up, and if they reach the top leaving no space for new blocks, it's game over. So, to keep playing, you have to move and rotate each shape to place it strategically among the rest to create solid lines. Each solid line disappears, making space for more blocks.
How To Play
Visit the game's official site. Click on the "Play Tetris" small banner on the right. When the game loads, click on Play.
- Use the left and right cursor keys to move each falling block.
- Press the Z or cursor up keys to rotate a shape to the left or right, respectively.
- Press C to "hold" a block.
- Press the down cursor key to soft-drop a block to the bottom of the well.
- Press Space to hard-drop a block.
You can also click on the gear on the game's title screen to customize some settings. Among them are the keys used to play if you don't like the defaults.
2048
Nowadays, originality is rare, and most games are incremental iterations of the same mechanics, gameplay styles, and themes. So, according to its creator, 2048 is "conceptually similar" to the popular mobile game Threes.
Like Tetris and most puzzle classics, 2048 looks deceptively easy. All action takes place on a 4x4 grid. On each turn:
- A new numbered tile shows up.
- You can slide all tiles up, down, left, or right.
When slides with the same numbers touch, they merge, with the new tile showing their sum as its number. So...
Two tiles with the number 2 can merge into a tile with the number 4. Two tiles with the number 4 merge into an "8" tile. Two "8" tiles add up into a "16" tile... ..and so on. The goal is to keep merging tiles until you reach the number 2048.
Sudoku
Some would say "it's old", but that's one way to describe Sudoku. We prefer calling it "a classic". After appearing in U.S. newspapers, Sudoku became insanely popular worldwide around two decades ago. Soon it was a mania, a global phenomenon, and you'd have to be living in a cave to miss it.
As is the norm these days, Sudoku also made the jump from pen and paper to various screens. Nowadays, it's available on all platforms, from smartphones to gaming consoles and, of course, modern browsers.
Sudoku presents a 9x9 board, split into smaller 3x3 sections. Some squares already have some numbers in them, and it's up to the player to fill the rest. However, you can't just enter numbers randomly. Each square, horizontal, and vertical line, plays host to the sequence from 1 to 9 without duplicates. So, although it's all about numbers, Sudoku feels like a detective game. You have to find which numbers go where by process of elimination as if trying to find the culprit in one of Agatha Christie's stories.
Mahjong Solitaire
Mahjong is for Asia what Poker is for the rest of the world: a popular and addictive pastime where people test their wits and luck against each other. Despite being based on that game, Mahjong Solitaire is vastly different.
Unlike Mahjong, the Solitaire variant is a single-person affair. In Mahjong, each of the four players starts with 13 tiles, then draws and discards tiles, trying to out-wit their opponents. The Solitaire variant, though, is a perception game. All 144 Mahjong tiles are on the board from the get-go. Most of them overlap.
The player must eliminate the tiles by locating matching pairs, but there's a significant restriction: you can't select overlapping tiles. As the game progresses and tiles disappear, they expose the ones under them, enabling their selection.
Entanglement
If you were old enough to remember Pipemania, you should know precisely what to expect from Entanglement. A new take on the puzzle action popularized eons ago by Pipemania, Entanglement expects you to find the optimal path on its board. The longer the track, the more points you score. Sounds easy, right?
Well, it would be, but each tile offers multiple paths, and you can only see your active tile and the ones you've already placed on the board. To place a new tile, you have to ensure it connects to the existing ones but will also allow the path to go on to the next one. It's easy to get lost among all possible paths - hence the name "Entanglement".
How To Play
Visit the game's official site.You'll be dropped right in the game and see your first tile on the board. You can use the arrows under it to rotate the tile left or right, and click on it to place it on the board.
One of the paths on it, the one that will connect to the path on the starting tile on the center of the board, will become colored. That's your active path. You will have to rotate the following block to find the optimal way that will allow you to then repeat the same action with the next block. So, with each tile, you'll have to twist and turn your path to avoid colliding with the board's "walls".
Remember to Take Breaks
Have you looked at any clock recently? If you've already visited any of the games we've listed, we're sure you've lost a significant amount of your time. Allow us to suggest you don't try the rest, too, except if you don't have anything else scheduled for today. Like eating.
Yes, we know those games are impossibly addictive. At least remember to take a break every hour. It's good for your eyes and blood circulation.
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