itch.io

Nap! - Free browser card came

Nap! – the classic trick-taking game

Five cards each. Whoever bids highest takes on everyone else.

Play in your browser on desktop or phone. No download, no account and no ads. New to Nap? A short interactive tutorial teaches you in one hand.

Nap (Napoleon) has been a pub and parlour favourite for two hundred years. It’s quick to learn and hard to put down. Every deal is a gamble: bid how many of the five tricks you’ll take, then make good on it alone against the whole table.

Take your seat with history. Play against 2 to 4 opponents drawn from a cast of 16 real people of the Napoleonic age, each a living portrait that watches the game and reacts to it:

Napoleon, Wellington and Nelson

Joséphine and the fortune-teller Lenormand

Sophie Blanchard, who flew balloons over Paris

and the soldiers, surgeons and scouts of the wars: the Cossack Platov, the surgeon Larrey and more

How it plays

Bid 2, 3 or 4 tricks, Misère (take none at all, with no trumps) or go for broke with Nap, all five tricks for double the stake.

You play for counters. Everyone starts with 50, and the bidder wins or pays each opponent.

A game is 12 deals, or play on until one player is left standing.

Three levels of opponent: Conscripts, Veterans and the Old Guard. The Old Guard read the bidding, count the cards and will happily take you to the cleaners.

Play it your way

House rules: bids from 1, Wellington and Blücher above Nap, a Nap pool, “cover your bid”, what happens when everyone passes, and more.

Themes: Napoleonic, Classic or Infernal in one click, or mix your own from tables, card styles, colours and backs.

Tables: inlaid Empire mahogany, the snows of the Retreat, the smoke of Waterloo, casino baize printed with the Imperial eagle, and plenty more.

Cards: four card styles (Napoleonic courts, classic English courts, painted figures, Infernal), with two- or four-colour suits.

Opponents: swap the historical cast for the Infernal cast of demons and the damned.

On a phone, play in landscape.

Nap! Free browser classic card game

Drakeharbour Syndicates - free browser game

Drakeharbour Syndicates is a fantasy card game for one player against up to three computer rivals. Games are short, and a quick tutorial teaches you as you play, so you’re up and running in a few minutes.

Drakeharbour is a harbour town of guilds, taverns and old grudges. You play one of five characters, each with a perk of their own, and race your rivals for renown.

Meld runs and sets from a deck of Dragons, Moons, Ravens and Towers to found guild Charters. They give you stamina and pay you every time anyone lays a card on them. Spend that stamina working the town’s Market, Forge, Temple, Library and Harbour for Gold, Steel, Faith and Lore. Then trade it in at the Tavern for quests worth renown. Spells let you Blink across town, Scry for cards or Haggle down prices, and each round brings a town event that changes the rules for everyone.

Choose Easy, Normal or Hard rivals. A Hint button is there when you’re stuck, and your game saves automatically.

Plays in your browser on desktop. Free.

Artifact

Two alien Artifacts are hidden somewhere in the Solar System. Collect sets of planet cards, steer the probe from Mercury out to Pluto, and be there when it finds them.

Artifact is a rummy card game for 1 player against 1 to 3 computer opponents. It is heavily influenced by the, sadly now out of print, card/board game Bonnie & Clyde, but set in outer space. Every set you play moves the probe, and every lay-off lets you steer it. The game is a variant of rummy  with a tactical layer where, how and when you play your cards can guide the probe round space for greater scoring opportunities. 

There is a short tutorial that will have you playing in no time and hints can help you too as you start. There's a depth to the game that may take a few hands to become apparent and there are 3 levels of opponents to play against. 

Made with layouts suitable for desktop and mobile play.

Froggy Checkers - Free Browser Strategy Boardgame

Are dwarves the new brown pixel art?

Play Froggy Checkers

A free browser-based strategy boardgame, for 1 or 2 players about racing, leaping and planning ahead. No download is required.

Inspired by Halma and Chinese Checkers, Froggy Checkers rebuilds the classic leap-and-race game for focused one-against-one play. Its compact board is designed for active tactical competition, where every move affects the same opponent and careful planning matters more than multiplayer chaos.

The built-in guide quickly explains the controls and gameplay, so no knowledge of the original games is required.

Move all nine of your pieces into your opponent’s home area before they fill yours. Pieces may move one space or leap over any piece into the empty space beyond. Multiple leaps can be chained together. Pieces are never captured, every piece remains on the board.

Choose between a thematic frog pond with frogs and lily pads, or an abstract wooden board with marble counters.

Play against another person on the same device or choose from six AI levels, ranging from relaxed to seriously challenging.

Features

• Free to play in your browser
• Six AI difficulty levels
• Local two-player play
• Built-in controls and gameplay guide
• Frog pond and wooden board themes
• Horizontal and vertical orientations
• Adjustable AI speed
• Undo and redo

A displacement rule prevents deliberate blocking of the final route, allowing every game to reach a proper conclusion.

Best played on desktop or tablet.

If someone said I'm a metalhead or total football fanatic and I'm looking for other developers from inside that culture, would anybody be jumping up an down to object to it. I don't think so. Well I'm neither black nor a woman but I'll wish you luck in connecting with other black female game devs.

I ticked the boxes saying that is uses some AI generated graphics and code, so I am hiding nothing. I would strongly dispute that it is fully AI generated but you are free to go elsewhere if you don't like the smell.

Thanks for the feedback. There were some scaling issues  when I uploaded to itch compared to running locally. I attempted to fix it but inadvertently caused the issue you saw. It's never going to work well if your browser windows is too small but it shouldn't tell you to do something but block you from accessing those controls, I've uploaded version 1.4 with more attention to scaling. I was hoping to avoid scrollbars with accordion controls but I've now implemented a scrollbar of last resort and a text scaling control.

https://bug-victim.itch.io/mechanical-derby

Hi, I’ve just released Mechanical Derby, a short browser-based incremental game inspired by old mechanical horse-racing arcade machines.

You begin with a small bankroll and little information, so the safest route is usually backing short-priced horses and scraping together enough money to improve the machine. As you progress, you can study the runners, identify horses that may be better than their odds suggest, increase your tuning strength, manipulate lane bias, unlock new bet types and eventually automate parts of the operation.

The aim is to go from cautious £5 bets to deliberately forcing unlikely winners and building a billion-pound fortune.

A full playthrough takes roughly 1 to 2 hours. It is free, runs directly in the browser and saves progress automatically. I hope you enjoy it.

If you're new to game dev I think your focus should be asking how to make them good rather than viral.

You say adventure game but you're mention of hunting for resource makes it sound like a survival game too. That's fine if you plan it to work like that but I think you have to ensure that doesn't steal the focus if that is not your plan.

I think it depends on what is motivating you. I make games in my spare time and and a lot of it is for my own enjoyment. I hope people will enjoy them but the reality is there are more chefs than diners around so I put them out there in the knowledge that they are but one game in an ocean of others. I don't realistically think I could find the time to create a proper indie studio. It's true that players demand more but the chances of getting a game to go viral is still low and requires hard work but also a good bit of luck and lot of promotion. As a beginner I would suggest that you focus on getting games finished more than getting them perfect. You can always revisit but so many people start with an idea and allow feature creep to take over until they have a project that never gets to 1.0 and ultimately gets abandioned.

Thank you. I've done a lot of the main animation and layout, but I'm really trying to work on the main game loop and skill tree which is starting to feel a lot more daunting now. I want to make it soething that takes about 1-2 hours to complete and not ridiculously grindy but paced.

I'm not much good at art and as all my games are free to play browser games I will not pay someone for assets that make no money back for me, so I've found myself mostly making games with geometric, more than illustrative styles because they play to the type of art I can do and I also feel like the world doesn't really need any more brown pixel art games .

Mechanical Derby Incremental Game
In Progress - no link yet

Play Paxman

I wasn't really intending to create a Pac-Man homage. I just started experimenting with what it might look like with outline vector shapes.

After trying a few more "what ifs", I arrived at the point where I had little choice but to elevate it from experiment to project, forgetting that "almost looks like a real game" is still many, many hours away from "actually is a real game".

So here it is, after many, many hours: a real game that shouldn't need much explanation.

There is a bit of a joke in here about Newsnight, which will probably bypass most people in the world and is far from cool even if you do understand it, but I'm not apologising, because I needed some way to justify calling it Paxman..

I hope you enjoy it. And if you really want to cheat, the ` key, also known as the grave key to the left of the 1 key, opens the secret cheat menu.

I think you're highlighting that it is a multilayered thing. The immediate in terms of scenery or music and the longer term like progressing the story. I agree the levelling in terms of mechanics is not roleplaying but growth is part of the hero's journey. The meek farmboy follows the call to action and becomes the space martial arts superhero with the ability to face the ultimate challenges.
So yeah a good game doesn't try to bypass straight to the chemical triggers but keeps you wanting to play on by fulfilling your conscious awareness by not focussing on one level of goal while neglecting the other levels. 

Quality matters more than quantity, but if you're selling it then the amount of content should factor into the price.

Some people love story, whereas I'm all about skipping dialog and cutscenes. I still like lore and backstory but huge narrative on rails stuff isn't for me. I enjoy the character progression, unlocking new abilities. They can't all be gamechangers but nothing is worse than a tree of +2% to woodcutting, 4% damage reduction. I like the anticipation of finally being able to get the teleport spell or craft top tier weapons.

You could play one of mine, there's 7 to choose from, They all work in the browser without downloading anything and none of them need long to play.

https://bug-victim.itch.io/
If you want me to pick one for you I think https://bug-victim.itch.io/copycat will make you smile.

Paxman - free browser gamer

Hi, I'm BugVictim.

As of this post, I have 7 games published on itch.io, so it is probably time I said hello to the community. Writing games is fun. Self-promotion is not.

So far, they are all free browser games made in pure HTML and JavaScript, mainly to make them as easy as possible to play, with no downloads or installation. This is just a hobby in my spare time. I’m not trying to turn this into a grand indie studio operation any time soon. I experiment with a lot of little projects, not all of them games, but some of the games get taken far enough to release on itch.io.

Brief summary of published games:

Paxman

A Pac-Man homage. Originally just an experiment in what a Pac-Man-type game might look like with outline vector graphics, which is a common theme I seem to be drawn to. It reached the point where I thought I really had to take it to a full working release.

Offslaught '81

Back in 2008, this was my entry to the TIGSource Retro Demakes competition. It is a tower defence game as if running on an old ZX81 computer. Recently, I converted the original Python code to HTML5 and added a few retro VFX touches.

Plasmatron

At its heart, this is an animated plasma visualisation toy, with an optional brief 5 to 10 minute story mode that acts as a tutorial, showing you how to make very varied psychedelic visuals with a handful of controls.

Copycat

The name came first, then I thought up the game. It is a rapid-fire game where you are shown a cat and then have to quickly identify the duplicate cat in an identity parade of other cats. You get nine lives, obviously. Playable on desktop or phone.

German Whist

Play the classic trick-taking card game against the computer. Great for fans of Windows Hearts, or if you want to learn a proper two-player card game where your tactical choices actually require thought.

Generic Space Rock Shooter Game

My homage to the great arcade game Asteroids. I kept the outline vector look and play style of the original, but rebuilt it as a modern browser implementation with a little more graphical finesse.

Terminal Velocity

More outline vector style. A synthwave lane-changer game where you speed along a neon road, trying to match the correct sequences and avoid going so fast that you overheat and disintegrate the whole neon-cyber world. This one also works on phone or desktop.

Anyway, that is me. I'll get back to other stuff and thanks for reading.

Play Offslaught '81

The Concept

This project started as an entry for the 2008 TIGSource Retro Demake competition, originally written in Python. I have recently rebuilt it  in HTML5, largely unchanged except for the addition of retro VFX for the old black and white tv feel and it now scales rather than having a fixed size.

The Aesthetic: A Love Letter to the ZX-81 

The Sinclair ZX-81 was an iconic, ultra-cheap 8-bit machine from the early 1980s, the forerunner to the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. To capture its spirit, this game recreates its unique visual limitations:

• Character-Based Graphics: Rather than standard pixel-plotting, the ZX-81 used a 32x24 character grid. I have utilized the original internal "block graphics" tileset, where pre-defined shapes (quarters, halves, and checkerboard squares) are arranged to form lines, solid forms, and sprites.
• Authentic Visual Quirks: You may notice occasional "clashing" where tiles meet—this is a genuine limitation of the original system’s "fake" graphics.
• The "Speed" Disclaimer: While the graphics are authentic, I have intentionally ignored the ZX-81's original CPU speed limitations. You get the 1981 aesthetic without the 1981 crawl!

Secret Options: Pressing "#" opens up the secret retro vfx option window.

Hi, it's been a while but I finally finished it off and released it here https://bug-victim.itch.io/plasmatron  I hope you enjoy it.

Here's my new game Plasmatron. It has a story mode where you try to beguile funding for scientific research with pretty visuals, which acts a tutorial for how to operate the psychedelic animated plasma generator. Or just play around in freeform mode for a chill time experimenting or flicking though presets.

https://bug-victim.itch.io/plasmatron

Plasmatron - Free Browser Game

Copycat - Free Browser Game

Copycat - Free Browser Game

Copycat is a game where I took the word copycat and made a game out of it.

Memorise the cat.
Find the copy.
Don’t hesitate.

Short, intense, and over quickly.
Playable in the browser. Suitable for phone and desktop.

German Whist - Free Browser Game

I’ve just published a playable browser version of German Whist, a two-player trick-taking card game. If you enjoyed the old Windows Hearts then this might remind you of it.

This version focuses on:

• Clear, readable card play

• Smooth dealing and trick resolution

• A single-player mode against AI opponents

• A traditional table-top feel.

It’s playable on desktop in the browser and works ok on tablet. I was originally hoping I could get it work on phone as well but I just can't see a way to produce a common interface that suits both so I am releasing as is now and may return later with a phone interface

If you enjoy classic card games or trick-taking games, I’d be interested in any feedback - especially around pacing, clarity, or AI behaviour.

Thanks for taking a look.

BugVictim

Credit to Pucky as the royal portrait artist

German Whist - Free Browser Game