PLAYHUB

How these games are made

Every game here was written for this site rather than licensed from a game portal, which is why the collection is small and why no two games share a template. Twenty-five of them run on a bare HTML canvas with no game engine at all — 2048, Snake, Minesweeper and the other classics are a few hundred lines of plain JavaScript each. Four of the 3D games are built on Three.js, where the meshes are assembled from primitives in code at load time instead of being downloaded as model files. The remaining five use a trimmed-down Phaser build for their physics. All of it together is about 800 KB of game code.

That constraint is deliberate. A game that loads in a second gets played; a game behind a loading bar does not.

Picking a game

The sections above are ordered rather than alphabetical. New games is what has been added most recently. Popular now is the handful that people actually come back to. Classroom & touch screen picks is a narrower list: games that work with nothing but taps, so they survive a finger on an electronic whiteboard, and that make sense with two people at one screen.

Four games exist in both a 2D and a 3D version — Dino Dash, Tower Defense, Slice Tower and Blob Arena. The 3D versions need WebGL and a little more from the device; the 2D versions play fine on an old phone. Each links to the other, so you can switch without hunting through the list again.

Records, accounts and ads

There is no sign-up. Your best score for each game is kept in your browser's local storage, which means it survives a reload but stays on that device and that browser. If you want to put a score on the shared board, that is a separate, deliberate action and asks only for a nickname — no email, no account, and entries can never be edited or removed afterwards.

Ads pay for the hosting, and they are kept out of the way: none inside a game while you are playing, and the ad script does not even load until you touch the page or a couple of seconds have passed, so it never competes with the game for that first second.

Playing offline

The site installs a small service worker on your first visit. After that the shell and any game you have opened are served from your own device, so a flaky connection does not stop a round. You can also add PlayHub to a phone home screen and it opens like an app.