Back to the arcade
About

About Arcade76

Arcade76 is a small pile of browser games. Most of them are games you already know with one rule changed. Connect Four where the bottom row keeps sliding out from under you, blackjack where the target isn't always 21, tic-tac-toe played on several boards at once. A few are originals.

The twist is the point

A game you already know teaches itself in about five seconds. No tutorial, no rules screen, no "press any key to continue." Change one rule and everything you know stops working, which is a lot more interesting than learning a whole new game from scratch.

That constraint also keeps things small. If the idea can't be explained in one sentence, it doesn't get built.

How they get made

Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with Claude doing most of the typing. I handle the concept, the rules and the feel of the thing, plus the endless rounds of "no, slower", "no, bigger", "no, put it back." The AI handles the implementation.

The practical effect is that a game can go from idea to playable in an evening.

Also a lab

The games are only half the point. The other half is practice. Each one is a quick-ship exercise: how fast can an idea get from a sentence to something playable, and what actually has to happen in between.

Most of it turns out to be communication. Saying what you mean, spotting when the answer is confidently wrong, knowing which corrections matter and which are noise. AI hands you an endless stream of output and plausible suggestions, and a good part of the skill is deciding what to ignore. Small games are a useful place to learn that, because the feedback is immediate. It either plays well or it doesn't.

The novelty of building this way wore off a while ago. Everyone does it now. What's left is the craft of doing it well, and that only comes from reps.

What to expect

Small games, a few minutes each. No accounts, no ads, no cookie banner, nothing to install and nothing to buy. Some are better than others. They run in a tab and they don't phone home.

New ones show up when an idea survives the one-sentence test. Have a look around.