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 opened with one game, and that was a deliberate change of mind: the alternative was filing a pool table under "arcade", where nobody would look for it. A wrong label costs more than a thin one. With darts it had two, with air hockey three, with the shooting gallery four, and with mini golf it has five.

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.
• Darts is darts on a regulation board: 501 against the computer, finishing on a double, and round the clock on your own. You throw with a sight that sways like a real arm and has to be steadied at the right moment, or with a flick; with 170 or less to go the game tells you the checkout.
• Air Hockey is the arcade table seen from above: move your mallet with a finger or the mouse and send the puck into the other goal, first to 7. Play the computer at three levels, or two players on one phone or tablet, each in their own half.
• Shooting Gallery is a shooting gallery with three stands: the fairground with tin ducks, cans and balloons, the range with paper targets at three distances, and archery, where the wind carries the arrow and you aim into it. Aim with a sight that sways like a real hand, or tap the target.
• Mini Golf is eighteen holes seen from above, par 45: pull back and let go, and play the walls as much as the line. Sand, a hill, a bridge over water, a tunnel, turning mills and a sliding gate, with a scorecard at the end.

How they were chosen

This category had a list: the sports that are one clean gesture, pool, darts, air hockey and 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 is only worth building if that gesture is worth repeating. With the shooting gallery the list was complete. Mini golf came after it, from what people search for: "mini golf" is typed five times as often as "golf game", and a putt is the cleanest gesture golf has.

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