Multiplayer games

Twelve games, and the number is small on purpose. This shelf held thirty-nine until we opened them: most games with a .io on the end are a single player against bots with human-sounding names, and putting one here would be promising you company we cannot deliver. Every game on this page opens a connection to somebody else. We checked the code, not the title.

One of them is ours. Strandbreak Online is a co-op survivors-like for up to four players: you press Online, it puts you with whoever else is looking, and experience is shared while the levels stay yours. It is the only game on this site we can say that about, and it is the reason this paragraph no longer reads "everything we have built is single-player" — which it did for a week after the game went up, on the one shelf where the claim was refuted by a card sitting under it.

The board games are the ones that hold an adult for an hour. Master Chess Multiplayer and Ludo Game Multiplayer both play against a person, against the machine, or against a friend on the same screen — that last one is the reason to open one of these on a phone in a café. Angry Checkers, English Checkers, Turkish draughts and Dominoes classic duel are the same idea with less ceremony.

The rest is the arena half: TonkWars.io, StickWorld.io, SnowWars.io, HappySharks.io and SuperSpin.io. No account, no lobby, no explanation — you are in a match about two seconds after the page loads, which is the entire pitch and the entire appeal.