40 of the best free browser games to kill your productivity

That really important thing that needs doing? Yeah, that’s not going to happen, because we’ve rounded up the finest browser games around – and they’re all free. If you can’t waste an insane number of hours playing these fab games, it must be because you hate fun itself.

1) 10 BULLETS

Button-mashing casual retro shooters abound. But what makes 10 Bullets special is the paucity of ammunition. You have just ten projectiles to take down as many spacecraft as possible. The trick is to time shots so debris from ships you destroy causes chain reactions. BOOM!

2) ABOBO’S BIG ADVENTURE

A glowing, nostalgia-fuelled NES tribute, Abobo’s Big Adventure stars a forgotten face of the 8-bit era: the eponymous Abobo. This muscle-bound hulk from Double Dragon sets out to rescue his son, mostly by punching people in the face. The visuals are suitably old-school and there are loads of cameos from classic titles. It plays well, too.

3) A DARK ROOM

Coming from the same developer as Gridland (also in this list) and supplying a similar ‘thrive ‘n’ survive’ challenge, A Dark Room nevertheless takes a very different tack. It’s a text- and menu-driven adventure in which you build up and maintain a successful community in a harsh wilderness. Logistics and supply management are as important as surviving animal attacks, and the adventure can be long and gruelling.

4) ALTER EGO

Alter Ego isn’t pretty – visually or in terms of content. This browser-based remake of an ancient PC game deals with progress through everyday life. It’s as far from The Sims as you can imagine, too – instead of cute little idiots blundering about, you get stark icons and multiple-choice text. But there’s depth, with a clever (if admittedly slightly conservative) script written by a psychologist.

5) BOULDER DASH JQ

This unofficial tribute to the 1980s 8-bit classic finds Rockford digging through dirt, grabbing diamonds, and trying to avoid getting crushed by the titular boulders or blown up by explosive underground wildlife. It looks crude, but the mix of puzzling and arcade action remains highly compelling.

6) CANDY BOX 2

The beginning of Candy Box 2 is as minimal as can be. A candy counter ticks upwards, and you can eat all your candies, or lob some to the ground. But amass enough sugary treats and Candy Box 2 rapidly goes a bit weird. What started out resembling a pointless clicker transforms into an oddball RPG. You ‘buy’ a status bar, and then some weapons, before scouring a village and beyond.

7) COMBO POOL

Sort of what might happen if you knocked 2048 into pool, Combo Pool finds you firing coloured balls into a tiny arena. If two match, they merge and upgrade to the next colour, until you eventually knock together a pair of explosive pink balls. The twist is you’ve an energy bar – keep smashing balls into the arena without combining them and your life quickly runs dry.

8) CONTRE JOUR

Originally a hit on mobile, Contre Jour loses a little of its tactile qualities and immediacy in the browser — but none of its charm. The aim is to guide cycloptic blob Petit to the exit in each single-screen level, manipulating the local environment to do so. You warp the ground to roll him about, swing Petit around via springy ropes, and catapult him across the screen using tiny trampolines.

It’s hard to know what to make of Cookie Clicker. On one hand, it’s essentially a Skinner box, rewarding players with nothing in particular in return for them clicking like crazy. But it also appears to be an amusing satire on the state of modern ‘idle’ gaming. To what end? We’re not sure – but we currently have 509 billion cookies in a really big plastic box if you fancy one.

10) CUBE SLAM

Cube Slam is Pong with bears. You get a beautiful 3D playfield, with power-ups and satisfyingly meaty sound effects. As ever, the aim is to get the ball (or, in this case, a cube) past your opponent. It’s not sophisticated, but it is fun. And if you tire of Bob the Bear, you can always try your luck against online friends.

11) DOOM

It’s Doom. What more do you need? Oh, all right, then. Here, in your browser, are the original shareware levels of the FPS classic, which means every monster, every power-up, and every map. For old-hands, it’s a nostalgia-fest. For newcomers, it’s a chance to see what ageing gamers are always banging on about. But remember, no matter how much those Cacodemons or Lost Souls surprise you, you can’t jump.

12) ESCAPE GOAT

This platform game feels like a love letter to 1980s gaming, with its retro-infused visuals and decidedly strange backstory that happens to feature a goat. Only, this is no ordinary goat – you see, it’s purple, and also happens to have been imprisoned for witchcraft. What follows is a bunch of single-screen puzzles where you leap about, triggering switches that shift walls, all the while trying to figure out your way to the exit.

13) EXPERIMENTAL SHOOTER

The premise here is straightforward: use your mouse to control a swivelling gun turret, shoot the floating balls, and clear levels. But each stage shakes things up in a totally different way, meaning you’ll have to use your wits about you as much as your trigger finger. Examples? Well, one level is essentially a big pool table, while another only has your shots count once they’ve rebounded off the arena’s walls.

14) FIST OF AWESOME

For some reason, bears have taken over the world, and it falls to a bearded lumberjack to put right what’s clearly gone very wrong. Initially, you punch your way through Bearhattan, in a manner PETA would vehemently disagree with. You’re then hurled back in time, kicking dinosaurs and cavebears to bits, before quite literally going medieval.

15) GAME OF BOMBS

Game of Bombs transforms Bomberman into a massively multiplayer online retro arcade experience. The premise remains the same as ever: amble about, set bombs to take out walls and monsters, get away from the bombs so they don’t blow you to pieces, and collect whatever’s found in the retro carnage. The difference here is in the giant maps, and being able to bomb (or team up with) people from all over the world.

16) GOOD IMPRESSION

This one simulates the sheer panic clean-up that occurs when your mother shows up unannounced, and your flat appears to have had an unfortunate incident involving garbage, laundry and high explosives. You’ve got just three minutes to get everything shipshape – and don’t think you can just hide everything, either: this game’s mum dishes out report cards for cleanliness.

17) GRIDLAND

Gridland resembles a typical match-three puzzler, but is really something else entirely. However, this only becomes clear after a few failed attempts to work through day (building structures with your earnings) and then battle evil horrors in the darkness as night falls.

18) IMPOSSIBLE MISSION

Another visitor! Stay a while! Stay FOREVARRRRR! If you once owned a C64, Professor Elvin Atombender’s deranged rant may well be burned into your brain; even if you’re a newcomer, look past the blocky graphics and you’ll find Impossible Mission is one of the best platform games around.

19) INFINITE MARIO BROS

Apparently originally put together by the bloke that did Minecraft, Infinite Mario Bros is a semi-randomised and theoretically endless Nintendo-lawyer-baiting platformer. As ever, it features everyone’s favourite rotund plumber leaping about, grabbing bling, and doing unspeakably violent things to bipedal turtles who were just minding their own business.

20) INVADER OVERLOAD

The original Space Invaders is a classic, and one of the most important videogames of all time – but it’s also really dull. Taito long ago figured out doddering aliens and sluggish bullets isn’t an exciting combination, hence ramping up the speed and chaos for Space Invaders Extreme. Invader Overload riffs off that, but as if it was on a NES. It’s fast, furious, endless, and welds a basic match game to the mix.

21) JUMP DOPER

Seemingly depicting extreme skipping combined with surrealist torture, one-thumb acton game Jump Doper finds various objects tasked with endlessly leaping over a deadly swinging rope. Duff timing results in a bloody splat as a piece of said object is sliced away, like salami.

22) KINGDOM RUSH

This one’s a tower defence game in which you have to build fortifications to fend off waves of ever-stronger bad guys. There’s a fantasy setting, which means archers, knights, wizards and so on are your staples as you attempt to hold back hordes of goblins, orcs, ogres and bandits. As you progress, you gain stars to upgrade towers and counter the increasing threat levels.

23) LITTLE ALCHEMY 2

Fancy trying your hand at browser-based ‘science’? Then fire up Little Alchemy 2, which charges you with synthesising hundreds of items. You start with the bare basics (air, earth, and so on), but are soon figuring out what you might get by combining any pair for ants, caviar, a puddle and an ostrich. This isn’t exactly Breaking Bad: Instead, the game has you think laterally, whimsically, or even surreally, to find combinations.

24) MOBS, INC.

In Mobs, Inc., there are loads of do-gooder sword-wielding nutters about, and you must kill them all, using your mouse to direct your movement, and a click to satisfyingly slice them in two. Do well and you’re promoted, which means more work – but armed with spells. Die and you get a ticking off from the boss, before being hurled back into the fray. Get killed four times, and you’re fired.

25) MONOLITH

This stylish greyscale shooter finds your ship zooming towards a monolith on the horizon that suspiciously never seems to get any nearer. Naturally, said monolith is heavily armed. You can shoot back, but only after your rubbish missile system has locked on. So begins a ‘hyperkinetic’ game of bullet hell patterns, cunning feints, and locking on to enemies to unleash explosive missile death.

26) MONSIV

Given that a game of chess can last ages, a pared-down browser version seems like a good idea. And that’s Monsiv, which limits you to a five-by-five board and a handful of new pieces. Your army now consists of a skull, two crosses and two imps. Each can move only in specific directions, and only one space at a time. You lose if your skull is captured, or if you repeat a board configuration.

27) PANDEMIC 2

Many games have you play as the bad guy. But Pandemic 2 invites you to eradicate all human life on Earth. You set the parameters of your virus, and let time take its course – and the disease always wins. The aim is to be as efficient as possible. Along the way, as you rack up evolution points, you can make your pathogen even more lethal, shortly before nipping to Amazon for one of those germ masks.

28) PAPER.IO

Sort of Tron meets Painter, Paper.io plonks you in an arena, aiming to secure as much territory as possible. The problem is everyone else is trying to do the same thing. You grab land by zooming away from your plot and encircling a section of the arena. But your tail is a weak spot – if someone runs over it, you die.

29) QUICK, DRAW

Fancy yourself something of an artist? Put your sketching skills to the test in this devilish AI-based take on Pictionary, in which you’re tasked to draw everyday objects (‘fire engine’, ‘clarinet’, ‘frying pan’, and so on) and have them recognised by Google’s deep learning-based judge. If your crude scrawling hits the mark, you get to draw another one, again and again, until you fail.

30) QWOP

The physics of walking on two legs is an astoundingly complex affair. Running is even worse – in essence, a barely-controlled fall. Because we’ve all forgotten when we learned how to do those things, we don’t think about this kind of thing – but QWOP brings it all back. This astoundingly frustrating game gives you control of a runner’s leg muscles using just four keys on your keyboard.

31) SPACEPLAN

A prototype for the more recent PC and mobile release of the same name, Spaceplan is a clicker. You click, click, click, and get to spend generated currency (watts) on things that start doing the clicking for you. Eventually, you’re generating millions of clicks per second. And also everything’s centred around potatoes.

32) SPELUNKY

Originally a tasty slice of PC freeware, Spelunky then became a darling of the PS Vita indie scene. It’s easy to see why: the mix of traps, monsters, route-finding and secrets, and fast-paced classic platforming action across randomly generated maps, is intoxicating stuff. The original was in 2012 reworked for the browser, and remains superb fun.

33) THREES!

For many, Threes! is mobile’s Tetris – a ridiculously compulsive and replayable puzzler ideally suited to smartphones, and that ravenously devours your time. And it’s available online, too, so thanks for that, developers. The game has you swipe numbered tiles around a four-by-four grid, merging pairs to increase their numbers.

34) TREASURE ARENA

Dipping its toes into several retro pools, Treasure Arena is essentially an arena shooter that really wants to be an old-school dungeon crawler on the SNES. It certainly looks the part, with its chunky pixel graphics. And there’s an immediacy that recalls classic arcade fare, with you darting about dungeons, picking up coins and power-ups, before heading into the fray to duff up anyone nearby.

35) TYPESHIFT

This superb word game subverts crosswords, having you drag columns of letters about to colour tiles. When all the tiles are coloured, you can bask in your ability to pick words out of a jumble – or methodically brute-force answers when you can’t find the final word. A trio of themed web-only puzzles is available on the TypeShift website; beyond those, there’s a daily puzzle over at the home of dictionary gurus Merriam-Webster.

36) WAVE RUN

This fast-paced platformer is a smart time-attack challenge that has you sprint and fly through 33 levels, grabbing as many trophies as you can along the way. The gameplay might seem a touch familiar, but everything here is top-notch: chunky retro graphics; jaunty soundtrack; responsive controls and well-judged physics when jetpacking through the air; and tight level design that forces you to pay attention if you don’t want to keep getting impaled on spikes.

37) WIZARD OF WOR

Wizard Of Wor appears to be a browser-based remake of a C64 conversion of an ancient arcade game! Which is a bit weird. It’s a fantastic old-school title, though, where you roam claustrophobic mazes and blast monsters before they tear your face off. Best of all, there’s a simultaneous two-player mode.

38) WONDERPUTT

You’ve probably had your fill of mini-golf games on your PC and handhelds, but give Wonderputt a go anyway, because it’s like someone took the genre, got Escher and Gilliam to bang heads about how to design a course, and filtered the end result through the talents of a first-rate digital artist.

39) WORLD’S BIGGEST PAC MAN

Built to promote the original Pac-Man’s 30th anniversary (they grow up so fast!), World’s Biggest Pac-Man makes two major changes to the original title. First, the two wraparound tunnels are replaced by four doorways, one at each screen edge, enabling you to escape to another maze. Secondly, the creators enabled anyone to submit mazes. Within a week, there were over 10,000.

40) WORM FOOD

In the film Tremors, Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward repel an attack of giant subterranean slug-beasts that rear up out of the earth and devour a selection of citizens from a small American town. In Worm Food, Tremors goes interactive. And you get to be the slug.