About Bored Zone

Bored Zone is a small collection of free browser games, made as a hobby project by one person. Everything runs in your own browser: there is no account to create, nothing to download, and nothing to install.

It exists because most places to play these games online are heavy with trackers, gated behind sign-ups, or so buried in advertising that the game is the smallest thing on the page. This is an attempt at the opposite — the game first, and everything else out of the way.

What is here

Eighteen games, all of them free and all playable on a phone: a memory match, 2048, a daily five-letter word game, a mini crossword and a bigger quick crossword, Crowns, FreeCell, Flow, the Whodunit murder mystery, mahjong solitaire, Minesweeper, nonograms, Quartets, Snake, Klondike solitaire, Sudoku, Sun & Moon and a word search.

Eleven of them — the word game, both crosswords, Quartets, the word search, Crowns, Sun & Moon, Sudoku, nonograms, Flow and Whodunit — have a daily puzzle: one board a day, the same for every player, with a streak to keep. The day's puzzle is worked out arithmetically from the date itself, so every player's browser arrives at the same one without anything being fetched from a server. A new puzzle arrives at midnight where you are, rather than at some hour set somewhere else.

Puzzles that are actually fair

A lot of care goes into the thing you cannot see: whether the board you have been given can be finished at all.

  • Sudoku puzzles are generated by removing digits from a complete grid and checking after each removal that exactly one solution remains. Uniqueness is enforced while the puzzle is made, not hoped for afterwards.
  • Nonograms are only accepted if a solver can finish them using pure deduction — never by trying a square to see what happens. So you never have to guess, and a single solution comes free with that.
  • Mahjong boards are built backwards from a finished game, recording pairs as they are removed from an empty layout. Every board can be cleared, and that is a property of how it is built rather than the result of a search.
  • Flow boards are cut out of a path that already covers every square, so a way through always exists.
  • Solitaire offers winnable deals: a solver searches each board for a win before you ever see it, so you are never handed one of the many Klondike deals that cannot be won by anybody. Easier deals go further and pick boards where a wrong guess about the hidden cards is less likely to sink you.
  • Whodunit cases are generated around a hidden answer, then clues are taken away one at a time for as long as a solver can still finish the grid by reasoning alone. What is left has exactly one answer and never needs a guess.
  • FreeCell plays the 32,000 classic numbered deals, made the same way as the original Microsoft version. Only one of them, game #11982, cannot be won, and a random game never gives you that one.
  • Quartets boards are checked to have exactly one way to split the sixteen words into four groups, counting every word that could be argued into a second group. A board with two answers is never dealt.
  • Word search boards are read back in all eight directions once they are filled, and thrown away if any hidden word can be found in two places.
  • Crowns boards are grown around a hidden answer, then adjusted square by square until that answer is the only one.
  • Sun & Moon puzzles are only kept if the three rules alone finish them, so there is one answer and never a need to guess.
  • Minesweeper places its mines after your first tap and never underneath it, so the opening move cannot lose the game.

How it is built

A small React application, built with Vite, served as static files. There is no backend at all — no database, no API and no server doing anything clever — which is why daily puzzles are computed from the date rather than handed out, and why your scores are in your browser rather than in an account.

Everything is tested. The generators in particular are held to their promises by the test suite: that every mahjong layout can be cleared by replaying its own construction, that every nonogram falls to pure deduction, that a daily puzzle is the same puzzle every time it is asked for.

Your data

Best scores, streaks and games in progress are kept in your browser's local storage, on your own device. They are never uploaded, and clearing your browser data clears them.

The site uses Google Analytics to count visits and Google AdSense to pay for itself. Both are described in the privacy policy, which is worth a read if you would like the detail.