None of these are ours. They are free-to-play browser games by other studios, and they are here because each one measures progress differently: a league table, a rising skyline, a better axe, a map that changed while you slept.
All six open in the browser you are reading this in. Nothing to install, nothing to launch, nothing to patch. Each entry says what the game is, what it does well, how long a normal sitting lasts and what it really costs.
Lists of browser games tend to be long, identical and useless. Six is enough to choose from and few enough that someone actually opened each one. The bar was:
The Second World War handed to a dozen strangers who each think they are the one with the plan. Orders take hours to carry out, so the game is really about guessing what the others will have done by morning.
A football club handed to you at the bottom of the table. Training, transfers, tactics and a fixture list that arrives whether you are ready or not, all in ten minutes a day.
Open water, a ship you keep upgrading and other crews who want what is in your hold. Scrappier and more immediate than the strategy games on this page, and all the better for it.
One city dragged forward through history, from thatch to skyscrapers, with the board-game puzzle of fitting each era's buildings into the same patch of land.
Click-and-kill in the old tradition: a dungeon, a pile of loot, a slightly better axe, and then the same dungeon on a harder setting. It knows exactly what it is.
Ancient Egypt rebuilt brick by brick. Quarries, grain, priests and a slowly rising skyline - the gentlest game on this page and the one most likely to swallow a Sunday.
The third column matters most. What separates these is how often they want you, not what they look like.
| Game | Genre | A typical sitting | Device |
|---|---|---|---|
| Call of War | WW2 Grand Strategy | A couple of visits a day | Desktop and laptop. |
| GoalUnited | Football Manager | About ten minutes a day | Desktop and laptop. |
| Seafight | Pirate MMO | 20 to 40 minutes | Desktop and laptop. |
| Forge of Empires | City Through the Ages | 15 to 30 minutes | Desktop, laptop and tablet. |
| Drakensang Online | Action RPG | 20 to 40 minutes | Desktop and laptop. |
| Anocris | Ancient Strategy | 10 to 20 minutes | Desktop and laptop. |
Every one is free to open and free to keep playing. Every one also sells something: a premium account, a faster timer, a currency, a cosmetic. That is how they are funded, and leaving it at "free" would be the lazy kind of honest.
What we checked is whether each one is still worth playing if you never spend. All six are. Money here mostly buys waiting time back. If you do spend, settle on the amount before you open the shop.
It is the only sort you can start on one machine and finish on another without carrying anything with you. The convenience is not free:
Forge of Empires. It teaches itself, there is something to do every few minutes in the early eras, and watching one city cross a few thousand years is a decent hook. If you would rather have a result tonight, Drakensang Online hands you a dungeon in two minutes.
No. All six run in a browser tab. A couple offer an optional client; none of them needs one.
Free to start and free to continue. Each sells optional extras, which is how it is funded. None of them locks the real game behind a payment.
They load, but most are built for a mouse and a bigger screen. A tablet is fine for a quick look; a laptop is better for a proper session.
Usually, because your progress has to live somewhere. It is a free account on their own site, unconnected to anything here.
Only that the same people wrote it. These six belong to other studios and are here because they are worth an evening.
A short list of free-to-play browser games kept by the people who run this site. None of these games are ours.