How we play, and how we rate

The five marks

Every cabinet is marked on the same five counts. The score at the top of a review is their plain average, rounded to one decimal place — there is no secret weighting and no house favourite.

1. Way in. Click to playing. Downloads, sign-ups, launchers and tutorials all cost marks.
2. Fits the slot. Does one honest session really last as long as the game implies?
3. Thumb test. Played one-handed on a phone screen: controls, text size, accidental taps.
4. Clean stop. What you lose by walking away mid-round — progress, streaks, goodwill.
5. Return trip. A reason to open it again tomorrow that is not a countdown or a nag.

What we test, and for how long

We play each game on a laptop and on a phone, in short sittings rather than one long one, because that is how these games are used. We look at what happens when you close the tab mid-round, what the game does on a small screen, what it asks for before you can start, and what it sells once you are in.

Facts — who made it, when, what it costs, whether an account is required — are checked against the developer's own pages before publication, not against aggregator listings. Where we could not confirm something, the review says so rather than filling the gap with a guess.

What we refuse to score

• Graphics for their own sake. A game that looks plain and behaves well beats a handsome one that punishes you for leaving.
• Popularity. Player counts are not a measure of whether something is worth your ten minutes.
• Anything with a paid random-chance box, a spinner or a crate. Those games do not go on this floor at all, however good they are otherwise — one candidate was dropped during this round of testing for exactly that reason.
• Games that cannot be played free in a browser. If it needs a download, a launcher or a subscription to start, it is not a cabinet on this site.

Editorial independence

This is an independent review desk. Nobody pays for a place on the floor, nobody is given copy approval, and no developer sees a review before it is published. Links to games point at the developer's own site and carry no commercial arrangement — if that ever changes, the change will be written at the top of the page it affects, not buried here.

We are not paid by any of the twelve. The site's running costs are ours. If a review is wrong, or a game has changed since we tested it, tell us and the logbook will record the correction.

Retesting

Free browser games change under you: a shop appears, an advert break gets longer, a mode is retired. Every cabinet carries the date it was last retested, and we work through the floor on a rolling basis. The logbook lists what changed and when.

Who writes this

• Marlow Finch, editor — Twenty years of playing things in tabs when the desktop was busy. Runs the retest calendar and writes the verdicts.
• Priya Rai, tester, handhelds — Tests every cabinet one-handed on a phone before it goes on the floor, usually somewhere between Morden and Camden.