Casual games

Casual games are built around one repeated action, a tap, a swipe or a click, and the challenge comes from timing rather than from learning a set of rules. This section holds around 470 of them. Apart from the general casual titles, the biggest groups are clicker games, close to 80 of them, and about 60 ball games in which something bounces, rolls or breaks through blocks. Hyper casual games, which boil play down to a single input, add nearly 50 more, and a smaller set of music games covers rhythm tapping and beat-making.

Nova Hop is a clean example of the one-tap style: each tap sends a small ship from one orbit to the next, and every idle lap counts against you. Boost Balloon keeps a balloon in the air with short bursts while birds and planes cross its path. Lotl Spa is a clicker, where you tap a warm spring for coins, spend them on upgrades and collect different kinds of axolotl as the spa grows.

Choosing is mostly a question of time. A one-tap game fits a short wait, because a run is over quickly and the next begins at once. Clicker and idle games reward a longer sitting, since each upgrade speeds up the next. Plenty of titles here were designed for a phone held upright, and on a computer a mouse click does the work of a tap. Every one of them is free and runs in the browser, so there is nothing to download before you start.