Free games. For real.
A collection of free, browser-based games. No ads, no payment requirements — just open a link and play.
Everything here is free to play, forever. There are no in-app purchases that unlock content behind a paywall, no ad networks, and no tracking. An account is entirely optional: play as a guest with progress saved only in your browser, or create an account (just a nickname + password — no email, no personal data) to sync your progress across devices and appear on each game's leaderboard. If a game has an in-game currency or "shop", it's just a gameplay mechanic — never a real transaction.
Clean words, everywhere: no game on this site will ever show, ask for or accept a vulgar, obscene or sexually explicit word, a slur against anyone, or a word about sexual violence — in any of the three languages. The word lists the games draw from were built from a real-use corpus and that kind of word came with it; it has been taken out at the source, so it isn't a target, isn't a valid answer, and isn't hidden in a grid. This is a rule for any game added later, not a one-off cleanup.
About accounts: since no email is attached to your account, if you lose both your password and your recovery code, there is no way to recover your account or its progress — save your recovery code somewhere safe when you create an account.
Every game here is written from scratch and is meant to stand on its own. These are old, well-worn genres — falling blocks, brick-breakers, word puzzles — and the rules of a genre belong to everyone, but the way a specific game looks does not. So each of ours gets its own board dimensions, its own palette, its own piece and level design, its own name and its own visual identity, deliberately chosen to be different rather than familiar. No artwork, sound, text or code is taken from anyone else's game.
Where one of our games follows a set of rules that somebody else made popular, we say so out loud and we name them — see Credits at the bottom. That is a thank-you, not a licence: the code, the graphics and the words are still ours, written from scratch.
The full source is right here, so you can check any of that for yourself. If you believe something on this site crosses a line, write to honest.support@freeforreal.app and we'll look at it and fix it.
A word-finding puzzle: spell out all the target words using the letters on a wheel, in Italian, English, or French. The words it asks for are drawn from a curated list per language — real, used words only, no grammar words, no interjections, no acronyms, and the three-letter ones picked by hand one at a time (see wordio/dictionaries/build_targets.py, which is a one-off tool and not part of the site). Every other word in the dictionary still counts as a bonus find. On a computer, Settings holds a dark mode switch — off unless you turn it on, and it dims the game without changing any of its colours. Play it at:
A brick-breaker: bounce the ball off your paddle to clear every brick. 3 lives, falling power-ups (wider paddle, extra life, multi-ball, slower ball), 3 difficulty levels, and levels that get tougher as you go. Small, deliberately rough pixel-art look. Play it at:
A falling-blocks puzzle: rotate and slide the pieces to fill complete rows before the stack reaches the top. 9 piece shapes (two of them our own), 3 difficulty levels, and a neon arcade look of its own. Touch controls: tap to rotate, drag to move, hold to drop fast, swipe down to slam. Come back to a game you left half-played and it waits on "tap to continue" instead of dropping a piece while you're still looking. Play it at:
freeforreal.app/blokko — the game was first published as Blokko and the address keeps that name, so old links and saved progress still work.
A slide-and-add puzzle: swipe and every tile slides as far as it can, and two tiles carrying the same number merge into one worth double. 4×4 board, goal 2048, and 3 undos per game for when a swipe goes wrong. Technical-drawing look of its own: petrol blue, millimetre grid, numbers printed on paper labels. Play it at:
Draughts is a traditional game, centuries old, with no author and no owner — its rules belong to everyone, like those of chess. Ours is the classic 8×8 variant: men capture forwards and backwards, kings fly along the whole diagonal, and capturing is compulsory. Play against the computer — three levels, from a genuinely careless one to a search that looks several moves ahead — or against a friend on the same device, laid flat on the table between you, so the board never rotates. Walnut-and-brass club-table look of its own. Play it at:
A number-placement puzzle on a 9×9 grid: every row, column and box of nine holds each digit from 1 to 9 exactly once. Puzzles are generated in the browser — a random full solution, then cells dug out in symmetric pairs, each removal checked to keep the solution unique — so you never get a grid that can only be guessed at. 3 difficulty levels, pencil notes, 3 hints per puzzle, optional mistake flagging, and a leaderboard per difficulty scored on time, mistakes and hints used. The only light-coloured game on the site: paper and ink, black print for the given digits, blue pen for yours, grey pencil for your notes. Play it at:
Cross sums: the grid is walls and white squares. Each wall can carry two totals — one for the line of squares running right from it, one for the line running down — and every line takes digits from 1 to 9, never the same one twice, adding up to its total. Puzzles are built in the browser: a wall layout, a filled grid, and then the sums are adjusted one digit at a time until pure reasoning can pin down every single square. That last condition is the whole point — it guarantees at once that the solution is unique and that you can find it without ever guessing. 3 grid sizes (7×7, 9×9, 11×11), pencil notes, 3 hints per puzzle, optional mistake flagging, and — switchable from the settings — the sets of digits that can still make the total of the line you are on (16 in two squares can only be 7+9). Building a big grid takes a moment, so it happens off to the side and the page never freezes. Classroom-blackboard look of its own: green slate, wooden frame, white chalk for the totals and yellow chalk for your digits. Play it at:
A word search: the words listed under the grid are hidden inside it, and you drag from the first letter to the last one to take them (or tap the first letter, then the last). Words run in all eight directions — across, down, diagonally, and backwards — from the very first level. Endless levels, no timer and no difficulty to pick: the grid grows on its own from 8×8 up to 12×12 and the words get more numerous, then it stops there, so it never turns impossible. The words are real, used words of at least four letters, drawn from the same curated lists as Wordio, with one extra sieve of its own: in Italian only words ending in a vowel are kept, because the ones ending in a consonant are almost all foreign (bear, baby, budget) or proper names — fine to stumble upon in Wordio, wrong to be asked for here (see findy/words/build_words.py, a one-off tool that is not part of the site). Italian, English or French, each language keeping its own level and its own leaderboard; three hints per level flash the first letter of a word you are still missing. Its own look: a pale lilac notebook, and every word you find stays under a stroke of highlighter, a different colour each — so where two words cross you see both. On a computer, Settings holds a dark mode switch — off unless you turn it on, and the lilac notebook turns to night while the highlighters stay the same six. Play it at:
A top-down space shooter: your ship sits at the bottom of the screen, the galaxy comes down at you, and the ship fires upwards on its own — you move anywhere across the width and in the lower half of the field, so one finger is always enough. The playfield is measured, not fixed: it takes the whole width of the screen and reaches the bottom of it, and one game pixel is worth about two real ones, which is what makes everything readable on a phone. 50 levels in 10 sectors. Enemies come in waves of three classes — light, medium and heavy, told apart by how much they take to go down and by how each one shoots — and every one of them has to be destroyed or the level will not move on; the waves do not wait, so falling behind means facing them all at once (with a cap of eight on the field, so a level can never become impossible). Clear a wave before the next one lands and you get 10 extra coins. Asteroids, mines and walls of debris are there to be dodged — only the small rocks can be shot to pieces — coins are the score, and a shield bubble, an extra life, a double shot, a spread shot (the two stack) or the rare shockwave drift down every so often. Each sector paints its enemies in colours picked to stay far from that sector's sky, so they can never blend into the background. The last level of every sector is a boss, ten of them, each one drawn differently and each one attacking in its own way. No difficulty to pick: it rises on its own, level after level. Three lives per sector and a sector has to be finished in one go — lose them all and it starts again from its first level, coins included, so nothing can be farmed. One single worldwide leaderboard: the level you reached comes first, and coins break the tie between two players on the same level. Its own look: "orbital sunset", deep night blue with the warm ambers of a sunset seen from orbit, and each sector has its own palette, nebulae and rocks. Play it at:
Scopa is a traditional Italian card game, played for centuries, with no author and no owner — like draughts, its rules belong to everyone. Ours is the two-player game against the computer, with the base rules: 40 cards, 3 in hand each and 4 on the table, a card captures the table cards of equal value or several adding up to it, and a card of equal value on the table makes that capture compulsory. Clear the table and you score a scopa; the last card of the hand never does, since the table would have emptied anyway. At the end of each hand the points are cards (more than 20), coins, the seven of coins and the primiera, plus one per scopa — first to 11 wins. Two things the written rules leave open are settled here and said out loud in the instructions: coins go to whoever holds at least 6 of the ten, and the last card scores no scopa. Two optional aids sit in the settings, off by default: the rebello (an extra point for the ten of coins, a northern Italian custom) and a count of the cards not played yet. Three levels: one that plays at random, one that weighs what a capture is worth against what it leaves on the table, and a Master that remembers every card played and, before each move, deals the unknown cards out a hundred different ways and plays each hand to the end. It never looks at your cards. The cards are drawn from scratch here — four suit symbols of our own, and an emblem for each face card so the deck reads the same in all three languages. Its own look: cobalt-and-cream majolica tiles and a green cloth. Play it at:
Pool, the game with stripes and solids and the black last. Like draughts and scopa, it is a sport with no author and no owner: its rules belong to everyone, and the code, graphics and text here are written from scratch. Aiming and shooting are two separate things, deliberately. Drag anywhere on the cloth and the cue swings around the cue ball; lift your finger and the aim stays exactly where you left it, so you can correct it over several goes. When you like it, a short tap arms the cue — it lights up, the aiming line goes solid, and from that moment the aim is locked. Now drag backwards starting from wherever suits you: only the movement along the cue's axis counts, sideways wobble is thrown away, and the line between the tip and the ball grows from green to red. Let go and the cue strikes; another short tap goes back to aiming. The first version put aim and power in one gesture and it could not work: with a finger two centimetres from the ball, three millimetres of wobble is eleven degrees of aim. The aiming line shows where the cue ball will go, cushion bounces included, and which way the ball you hit will set off; it can be switched off in the settings for anyone who would rather do without. One rule is deliberately simplified, and it is said out loud in the instructions: no fouls. You may hit whatever you like — the only thing that costs you is potting the cue ball, and then your opponent puts it back wherever they want. The black on the very first shot goes back on the table instead of losing the game. Underneath it all is a real physics engine — cushions, ball-on-ball impacts, six pockets — and the computer plays by running that same engine: for each of its balls and each pocket it works out where it would have to strike, throws away the shots that are blocked or cut too fine, and then, at Master level, actually plays the best ones out before choosing. Three levels, and the difference between them is one honest number: how far off the contact point they aim. Measured over a few hundred shots each, they pot 25%, 58% and 81% of the time. Two ways to play: against the computer, or two of you around one device lying flat on a table — the table never turns, each player shoots from their own end. Its own look: a pool hall at night, indigo cloth under a low lamp, graphite cushions with aluminium trim. Play it at:
Three marks in a row on nine squares — a game played for centuries on the back of any piece of paper, with no author and no owner, so the rules here are simply the rules. Two ways to play: two of you on one device lying flat on the table (the grid never turns, each plays from their own side) or against the computer at three levels. The three levels are honestly different, not one engine pretending: Dumb plays almost at random and spots a winning square only one time in four, Normal takes the win and blocks the threat but never looks a move further — set up two threats at once and you beat it — and Master runs the full minimax over every position, which at this size costs a fraction of a millisecond and means it plays perfectly and can never be beaten. That is not hidden in the code, it is written in the instructions: against Master a draw is the best result there is. Which is why the leaderboard counts points rather than wins, 3 for a win and 1 for a draw — at Master a draw is a real achievement, and it takes perfect play to get one. Who moves first alternates every game, since the first move is a genuine advantage. Its own look: a mosaic panel on a Pompeian-red plaster wall, travertine squares with dark grouting, and the two marks laid one tessera at a time — the cross in blue glass paste, the circle in gold — with a gilded thread of tesserae running along the winning line. Play it at:
Wordio's word lists were cleaned up using FrequencyWords by Hermit Dave — word-frequency lists built from the OpenSubtitles corpus and published openly. We use them offline, once, to decide which words the game is allowed to ask for: a word has to be one people actually use, or it doesn't get asked. That is how uri, ima and a pile of stray English and French words stopped showing up as Italian answers. None of that data ships with the site — only our own word list, filtered. Thank you.
Addy follows a set of rules made popular by 2048, written by Gabriele Cirulli and released openly under the MIT licence. Addy's code, graphics and text are entirely our own — not a single line is taken from that project, so there is nothing here we are required to credit. We credit it anyway: putting the work out in the open, for free, for anyone to read and build on, is the same thing this whole site is trying to do. Thank you.
Got an idea for a game you'd like to see here? Write to honest.support@freeforreal.app.
There's a home page (index.html at the repo root) listing all the games — playable ones link out, the rest show as "coming soon". The plan is to keep growing this into a small site with a handful of free games to pick from, all built the same way: plain HTML/CSS/JS, no build step, hosted on GitHub Pages at freeforreal.app.