About Lynxy

Lynxy is a small, independent collection of browser games. Each one is a single page: you open it and you are playing. There is no download, no account and no loading screen, and the games run on your own phone or computer, so your progress stays there too.

Why it exists

Most free games on the web come wrapped in things that have nothing to do with playing: sign-up walls, timers that sell you lives, levels you can only finish by paying. Lynxy is an attempt at the opposite. Every game is free in full, nothing in a game is sold, and nothing in a game is unlocked by watching or clicking an ad. Hints in Sudoku, shuffles in Mahjong and continues in Lynx Run are simply there when you need them.

How the games are made

Everything is written from scratch in plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript - no game engine and no framework. The tiles in Mahjong, the cards in Memory Match and the pixel worlds in Maria and the Missing Coder are drawn for this site. That keeps each page light enough to open in about the time it takes to switch tabs, even on a slow connection.

The part we care about most is that a puzzle is always fair. A lot of the work behind the games is checking:

• Sudoku puzzles are generated on your device and checked by a solver to have exactly one solution, so every board can be finished by logic alone.
• Solitaire deals only from a list of deals our solver has actually won, each win replayed move by move under the game's own rules - 600 for Draw 1 and 600 for Draw 3.
• Mahjong layouts are dealt so that every deal can be cleared, and Pipe Flow boards are grown from a working network of pipes before they are scrambled.
• Lily Leap levels are run through a solver that must find a route home on a single life's clock; a level that fails is not published.
• Nova Bricks stages are checked so that no breakable brick is sealed in by steel, and an autopilot plays every stage in a real browser before a release.
• Gem Cascade par scores come from a bot that plays each level forty times; the target is set from how often it finishes.
• Harvest Hollow has its economy simulated: a player who checks in every minute should reach the hen coop in about half an hour and the grape vine in about five and a half hours, not in five minutes and not in a week.
• Maria and the Missing Coder maps are checked with a jump graph built from the game's real jump distances, so every door can be reached and every enemy can be stomped.

The guides explain more of this, along with the strategies that help in each game.

Your data

Lynxy has no accounts and no database of players. Your saved games, points and settings live in your browser's local storage. With your consent, Google Analytics measures how long pages are used so we can see which games people actually play. The site is paid for by ads served by Google AdSense. The details are in the Privacy Policy and the Cookie Policy.

Get in touch

Found a bug, a board that looks impossible, or a game you would like to see here? Write to lynxy.io@protonmail.com - see the contact page for what helps us reproduce a problem quickly.