Chess
Second ChanceServer-authoritative chess with optional Second Chance mini-games — lose a back-row piece and fight to rewind the board.
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FeaturedOriginal
NEXUS
One beam. Two players. Neither of you can let go.
The platform's own game. You and your opponent are joined by a beam that never breaks its hold — it is the only way either of you scores, the only weapon either of you has, and it snaps if you pull too far apart. Sweep the field, fight over which end of the beam banks it, and hold the tension one step longer than is sensible.
Same keyboardOnlinevs Computer
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YETI
You cannot see each other. The snow remembers everything.
Two yetis share a snowfield and neither can see the other — but every step leaves tracks, and tracks are public. The ground you hold is your score, and it is also the map that leads somebody to you. Hold still and you vanish, and your territory dies under the snow. Roar and you will know exactly where they are; so will they know which way you called from.
Onlinevs Computer
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EMPIRE
Everything you build will turn on you unless you go back to it.
Found provinces and they pay you — while they are young, richly while they are golden, and not at all once they are decadent. Leave one too long and it revolts, and the rebellion spreads to whatever it touches. You never have enough actions to hold it all together, so the real question is always which of the things you can plainly see needs doing you are going to leave undone. And you can only take your rival's ground once they have let it rot.
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MAFIA
You choose what to take. They choose when you pay for it.
Rackets pay while you stand on them — or you can ask a favour, take most of one instantly, and hand the other boss a marker. Every marker against you slows everything you earn, and they may call it in whenever they like: a cut of all you have, and you face down for a moment. A debt is not a bill. It is a threat, sitting in the open, and it does its work long before it is spent.
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LAZERMAZE
The only way to see is to fire. Firing is how you are found.
The maze is pitch dark and the only light in the building is the beam you fire yourself. It lights every cell it passes through — that is your map — and it bends off mirrors, so one good shot can draw you half the floor. It also hangs in the air a moment afterwards and will burn anyone who walks into it, including you. And your muzzle flash tells the other runner exactly where you are. Somewhere in the dark is Room 237. Open it and you will see everything at once, and it will see you back for a very long time.
Onlinevs Computer
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DEATHMATCH
One life, and you are both holding it.
There is a single pool of life in the arena and it is split between the two of you. Nothing is ever destroyed — every slug that lands drags a piece of your opponent's life across to your side, and you win by holding all of it. The catch is that your body is made of what you are carrying: hold most of the pool and you are big and slow and impossible to miss, hold almost nothing and you are small and fast and very hard to hit. The player who is winning is the player who is easiest to shoot. Firing costs life too, and the life it costs is paid straight to the other fighter, so every wild shot funds the person you are shooting at. And below a fifth of the pool you are Cornered, where every exchange in both directions is doubled and the nearly-dead fighter is the most dangerous thing in the room.
Same keyboardOnlinevs Computer
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RACER
There is no racing line. You have to build one.
The circuit starts green, and green is slow. The fast line does not exist when the lights go out — the two of you lay it, lap by lap, because every metre you drive puts rubber into the surface and rubber is the only grip there is. A worked-in line is worth about a third of a lap time over the green beside it. The catch is that a racing line is a commons: you cannot lay one without laying it for the car behind, and a perfect lap is a highway built for your rival. So the question is never simply how to go fastest, it is how to go fast down a line they cannot use. And if a corner has become too good to leave them, the handbrake will burn the rubber straight back off it — which costs you the corner too, and is sometimes worth it anyway.
Same keyboardOnlinevs Computer
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PITBULL
Anyone can bite. The hard part is letting go.
Two dogs, one round pit, and nothing to fight with but your jaw. Lunge, and if you connect you latch on — and from that moment you are attached to the other animal, chewing it down and being dragged wherever it goes. Which is the whole game, because the bitten dog does not hit back. It uses the pit: get its back to a pillar or the wall, throw itself into a spin, and the thing hanging off it gets flung round the outside and meets something solid at three times the speed. Every slam tears at your grip, and two good ones will rip you off and leave you dazed on the floor. So a bite is a commitment, not a hit. Holding on pays by the second, and every one of those seconds is a second they are winding up.
Same keyboardOnlinevs Computer
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COOLMAN
You cannot cool yourself down. Only they can.
Everything you do heats you up — running, dashing, swinging and missing — and there is no vent on this floor, no cold corner, no waiting it out. The only heat sink in the world is the other player: catch them and dump what you are carrying onto them. Heat is also speed, so the one in trouble is the fast one and the one who is comfortable is slow, which means relief is always available and always expensive. Nothing removes heat but a burnout: reach the top and you go down where you stand, reset to nothing, and they are paid handsomely for it. You score every second you are the cooler of the two — not for hits, for being comfortable, which is a thing you can only be by having made somebody else uncomfortable.
Same keyboardOnlinevs Computer
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NINEBOT
Nine bots. One input. Nine sockets.
You command nine bots and you have exactly one control. Press a direction and all nine step that way at once; any bot with a wall or another body in front of it simply does not move. You can never move one without moving the other eight. The board has nine sockets and you are paid every second for each one you are standing on — so the game is arranging nine bodies into nine specific squares using a single shared input, in real time, while the other player's bots are solid obstacles you can be walled in by. Your swarm deforms as it travels: it strings out through corridors, concertinas into corners, and splits around anything solid. The shape you have is the shape the board has given you, and the shape you need is the one the sockets demand.
Same keyboardOnlinevs Computer
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MATRIX
You never move a piece. You move the rows and columns.
A nine-by-nine grid holds both players' tokens, and your only action is to push a whole row or column one step — everything standing in that line slides along with it and wraps around the far edge, your tokens and theirs. You are paid every second for each line you hold: a row or column with three or more of yours in it and none of theirs. There are eighteen of them and you are both pushing the same grid, so every move is double-edged by construction. The push that drags your third token into a row drags whatever else is in that row along with it, very possibly one of theirs, arriving behind yours and breaking the hold you have just made. You cannot act on the board without acting on them.
Same keyboardOnlinevs Computer
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FUSION
Everything you take, you pay for with something they can use.
Your body is a queue of exactly eight cells. Absorb a loose cell and it joins the back — and the cell that has been in you longest is thrown straight back out into the arena, at speed, where it is worth to your opponent exactly what it was worth to you. You cannot take anything without giving something away, and you do not choose what you give; only the order you took things in. Those eight cells are also your handling: cores are speed, fields widen the pull that drags cells toward you, mass is shove, and slag does nothing at all. A recipe demands a composition and changes every thirteen seconds, and you are paid by the second only for the last two cells of it — so the body that finally matches is usually the slowest body you have had all round, which is the moment they ram you and knock your newest cell straight back onto the floor.
Same keyboardOnlinevs Computer
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SPACECRAFT
You have no engine. Your engine is whatever you throw away.
Your craft carries a hold full of pods and no thruster of any kind. The only way to move is to fire a pod out of the nozzle and take the recoil — so every metre you travel is paid for in cargo, and cargo is the only thing the silo accepts. The pod is doing three jobs at once: it is your fuel, it is your ammunition (fired hard it knocks cargo out of the other craft, though it also sends you the opposite way), and it is your score. The physics does the rest: recoil is momentum over mass and the pods *are* most of your mass, so the emptier you get the harder you accelerate. A full craft is rich, slow and clumsy; an empty one is quick, nimble and worth nothing at all. Four out of every five pods you ever touch end up as exhaust.
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FIFTY
Get to exactly fifty. The closer you get, the more of the board is poison.
Chips lie scattered across the arena with numbers on them. Run over one and its value goes into your hand; land on exactly fifty and you bank it. Go over and you bust — the hand is gone, and every point of it scatters back across the floor as fresh chips for whoever is standing nearby. What makes it a game rather than a sum is what it does to the board as you play: at a hand of nothing every chip is worth taking, and at forty-seven only a one, a two or a three is safe. The same chips, unmoved, have turned into mines. Your hand is public, so the other player can see you need a four — and the shove is a real verb, because barging somebody sitting on forty-eight into a nine is the most direct thing you can do to anyone.
Same keyboardOnlinevs Computer
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1984
Who controls the past controls the future. The one who is losing controls the past.
The arena is a wall of facts. Run over one and it reads true for you, and every fact reading true for you pays, every second, for as long as it says so. Then the Ministry revises the record: a circle of the arena is marked, held up for four seconds, and wiped — every fact inside it unpersoned, whoever it belonged to. And the circle is centred on whichever player is behind, at their position the instant it was announced. There is no button for it. The losing player's feet are the doctrine, so being behind means walking into the middle of everything your opponent has built and standing there while the clock comes round — in full view, with four seconds' warning, and with your own holdings inside the blast if you chose badly.
Same keyboardOnlinevs Computer
Checkers
English draughts: forced captures, multi-jumps, and men that crown into kings when they reach the far side.
Connect Four
Take turns dropping discs into a seven-column grid. Gravity does the rest — first to line up four in any direction wins.
Reflex Arena
A real-time duel: targets flash up on a shared grid and you both race for the same one. Hazards cost you, wild swings lock you out. First to the score wins.
Tron
Light cycles ride the grid leaving solid walls behind them. Ride into a wall, your own trail, or your opponent's and you are out. Cut them off before they cut you off.
Lemmings
The puzzle, played as a duel. Both of you get an identical copy of the level and run it at the same time — dig, build, block and bomb a way to the exit, and save more of them than they do.
Snake
Both snakes move at once, both grow when they eat, and both die on a wall or a body. Reach full length to win outright — or just outlive them.
Space Invaders
The arcade classic as a duel: both of you defend the same line against the same descending formation, competing for every kill. They speed up as they thin out, and if they land it is over for both of you.
Pac-Man
The arcade maze as a race. Two Pac-Men eat from the same dots while Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde hunt with their own original targeting rules — and a power pellet turns the pack blue for both of you at once.
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