Flash By Night

What it is

Flash By Night is a one-page collection of coffee-break games made by one person: forty-nine tiles on a plain grid, each a small puzzle or word game. Color-flood grids in two versions, a phonetics word game, a cipher puzzle, sliding tiles, fill-the-grid puzzles, a stacking game, rebus puzzles, mental math, word molecules, a chess variant, a flag quiz, a tune game. Despite the name, the games run in plain HTML5 with no plugin.

How to play

Click a tile. The game opens on its own page with one line of instructions and a best score that the page keeps for you. Most take a minute to learn and five to play. There is no menu, no account and no search, because forty-nine tiles do not need one. Come back to the grid with the browser's back button and try the next one.

What makes it different

The scale. Where the giant portals are walls of licensed tiles, this is a single maker's shelf, and every game on it shares a sensibility: small, quiet, logical, a little wordy. The site has one ad banner and a small privacy notice, and nothing else between you and the grid.

Why it is on Bored

At the other end of the scale from the giant game sites sits this one-page grid of forty-nine small puzzles. All share one sensibility, small and a little wordy. Most take a minute to learn and five to play, and the color-flood game alone is worth the click. One note: the site is served over plain http, so your browser may flag it as not secure, and there is nothing personal to type into it anyway.

Tips

• Start with the color-flood puzzle, there are two versions
• The word games assume English, the number games do not
• Best scores are kept per game in your browser
• Do not expect fast-action games here, this is a puzzle shelf

FAQ