Random & Fun

Something has to choose, and it should choose fairly. Roll dice, flip a coin, draw a number, pick a name out of a list, split a group into teams, or deal secret roles around a table. Each of these answers the same small question — who, which one, how many — and the point of doing it here is that nobody at the table picked the answer.

Every draw uses the browser’s cryptographic randomness rather than the ordinary kind, and the range is taken without the rounding bias that makes a naive six-sided die land on one more often than six. That sounds like a detail and is the whole product: a dice roller nobody trusts is a dice roller nobody uses.

Nothing is stored between visits and nothing is sent anywhere, so a party game works on a plane and a draw cannot have been logged. Where a setup is worth keeping — a list of names, a set of roles — it lives in the link, so sharing the link shares the setup rather than the result.

Not everything here is a draw. Some of it is a measurement of you: how fast you react, how fast you click, and how fast you type — the last scored in words a minute and accuracy the standard way, on common words or on text you paste yourself.

And some of it is simply a game. 2048 is here with the original rules, undo, bigger boards and a link that deals a friend your game from its first tiles, since a game with no saved scores is best shared; its new tiles come from the game’s own code rather than a fresh draw, which is what lets the link deal the same board twice. Minesweeper is here too, on the three classic boards, with a first click that is always safe and flags by right-click or long-press; like 2048’s tiles, its mines come from a short code, so a link lays the same board for a friend. And Word Guess is the five-letter word game: one word of the day for everyone, practice words without limit, and a result shared as squares that gives nothing away; its words, like those boards, come from a code, so a link sets a friend the same one. For two at one screen there is 3 in a row and 4 in a row — noughts and crosses on a 3 × 3 grid, and discs dropped into a 7 × 6 board — against a friend or the computer at three levels, the hardest of which never loses at 3 in a row. Sudoku rounds them off: easy, medium and hard puzzles, each with exactly one solution and its level set by how it can be solved, with notes, undo, hints and a puzzle of the day. Crowns is the newer kind of daily grid: one crown in every row, column and coloured region, none touching, on a grid made fresh from a seed with exactly one solution — a puzzle of the day for everyone, and practice grids from 5 × 5 to 8 × 8 that a link hands to a friend. For a table of friends there is Undercover, the party word game played on one phone passed round, each player picking a face-down card: Civilians share a word, the Undercover has one close to it and Mr. White has none. A hundred everyday word pairs come ready, from food and animals to jobs and fantasy, or bring your own from a CSV or Excel file. And Mind Dial is the guessing game of clues on a dial: one player sees a hidden target between two ends, such as Cold and Hot, and gives a clue to it — or secretly rates a thing — and the rest turn the dial to find it, together or in two teams. Forehead Charades is the one where the phone goes on the guesser’s forehead, screen out, while the rest describe or act out the word on it against the clock: tip the screen down for got it and up to pass, from ten decks that run from animals and actions to Hindi films for a round of dumb charades. And in Spy at the Location everyone is secretly at the same place — a hospital, a dhaba, a wedding — except the spy, who must work out where from the questions the table asks each other, before the table works out who. Fishbowl fills a bowl with names everyone writes in secret — or from a starter pile — and two teams play the same bowl three times against the clock: describe it, then one word, then mime. Secret Helper is twenty questions with a traitor: the host knows a word and answers yes or no, the table asks its way to it against the clock, and one asker has secretly seen the word all along — once it is found, the table has as long as the finding took to work out who.

For one player, or two across a table, Code Breaker hides a row of coloured pegs — drawn fairly by the page, or chosen by a friend — and answers each guess with how many are the right colour in the right place and how many in the wrong place, never which.

Four Groups sets out sixteen words that make four groups of four — a plain category, one that needs a little knowing, a less obvious link such as a word that joins each of the four, and wordplay — to be found with four mistakes at most; each puzzle is checked to have exactly one answer, decoys and all, with a puzzle of the day and practice puzzles a link hands to a friend. And Checkers is the board game by the English rules — compulsory captures, jumps taken one after another, and kings crowned on the far row — against a friend or the computer at three levels.