Sports games

Free sports games in your browser: the table, the rules and the shot, with nothing to download and no signup. They work with a mouse and with a finger, which for a game about aiming matters more than it sounds.

What a sports game is here

Not a simulation of a season, and not a licensed team. A sports game on this site is the one gesture the sport is built on, taken seriously: the aim, the strike, the way the ball behaves afterwards. That gesture is the whole difference between a game you play twice and one you come back to, because it is the part you get better at.

This category opens with one game. That is a deliberate change of mind: for most of this catalogue a category waits until it has two games worth filtering to, and a chip that leads to a single game helps nobody. But the alternative was filing a pool table under "arcade", where nobody would look for it and where it would sit beside shooters and platform games with nothing in common. A wrong label costs more than a thin one.

What you can play here

• Pool is a pool table seen from above, played on your own against the table: fifteen balls, and you clear them before the shots run out. You pull back from the cue ball and let go, the way a catapult works, so one gesture carries both the direction and the power. While you aim, the game shows you where the cue ball will arrive, where it will touch and where the ball it touches will set off — the three things a player of a real table works out by eye.

What is coming

The backlog for this category is the list of sports that are one clean gesture: darts, air hockey, a shooting gallery. Each of them is a table, a lane or a board seen from the one angle that makes the gesture readable, and each of them is only worth building if that gesture is worth repeating. When the second arrives, this page stops being an exception and starts being a category.

Every game page explains the full rules, the scoring and a few tips that actually help.