Feature
When the signal drops
Half of this floor is live multiplayer, which means a tunnel ends your round. Here is which cabinets carry on regardless, which forgive a stutter, and which will simply stop.
There is a particular disappointment in getting three minutes into a round and watching the screen freeze because the train went underground. It is worth knowing in advance which games can survive that and which cannot, because it is not obvious from the outside — plenty of games that look single-player are quietly talking to a server the whole time.
Three categories, not two
Runs on your device. Once the page has loaded, nothing else is needed. 2048 and QWOP fall into this group, and they are the only two here we would open on purpose before going underground.
Forgives a stutter. The game talks to a server, but a brief gap costs you a beat rather than the round: Bad Ice Cream 3, Jstris.
Needs a steady line. Everything else. These are live multiplayer games, and a dead spot means you have left the match, whatever you had built in it.
| Cabinet | Connection | What happens | Session |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2048 | Works offline | Loads once, then runs on your device | Runs of three to eight minutes |
| Bad Ice Cream 3 | Survives a wobble | Forgiving if the connection stutters | Five to fifteen minutes of levels |
| QWOP | Works offline | Loads once, then runs on your device | Runs of ten seconds to a minute |
| Territorial.io | Needs a steady line | Live multiplayer: a dead spot ends the round | Matches of three to ten minutes |
| Narrow One | Needs a steady line | Live multiplayer: a dead spot ends the round | Rounds of six to ten minutes |
| Jstris | Survives a wobble | Forgiving if the connection stutters | A 40-line sprint takes one to three minutes |
| Diep.io | Needs a steady line | Live multiplayer: a dead spot ends the round | Eight to twenty minutes per tank |
| Deeeep.io | Needs a steady line | Live multiplayer: a dead spot ends the round | Ten to twenty minutes per life |
| Gartic Phone | Needs a steady line | Live multiplayer: a dead spot ends the round | A full game runs ten to twenty minutes |
| Starblast.io | Needs a steady line | Live multiplayer: a dead spot ends the round | Servers run to an endgame about half an hour in |
| Drednot.io | Needs a steady line | Live multiplayer: a dead spot ends the round | Open-ended; an hour disappears quickly |
| The Password Game | Needs a steady line | Live multiplayer: a dead spot ends the round | Twenty minutes, or the rest of your evening |
A practical rule for a commute
Open the device-side games before you go down the escalator and the live ones when you are back above ground. If your journey is mostly tunnels, the short shelf is where you should be looking: a run that fits between stations cannot be ruined by the bit in between.
One thing worth checking
A game that loads on your device still needs the page to load in the first place. Open the tab while you have signal, and leave it open — reloading in a dead spot gets you nothing but a blank page.