A shelf, not a service.

Sixty-six titles: eleven classics, and fifty-five made for this shelf, fifty of them under the Board.game Originals label. Every title has a lesson that teaches it by playing and a rules reference you can open mid-game. Sixty have a computer opponent, with rungs from gentle to unkind. In two co-operative titles the computer plays on your side instead, and four have no computer player at all, by design.

The rules of every game are code, and code with tests: a move the rules would not allow cannot be made, whichever way you are playing. The computer thinks in positions rather than seconds, so it is exactly as strong on a slow phone as on a fast laptop, and the same position at the same rung gets the same reply. Every number on a card — how long a game takes, how often a rung beats the one below it — is printed by a script kept with the code, and the card quotes only what the script printed.

Almost nothing. Your board — games left half-finished, replays, your record, your name at the table — lives in this browser, and My Board will hand it to you as a file. There are no accounts, no analytics and no cookies. What does leave the browser, and when, is set out on the Privacy page.

A rule you think is wrong, a game you think belongs here, a table that did something strange: write from the Contact page.