The Wanderer reading room
Idle RPGs, MMOs, browser games and mobile RPGs, taken apart properly. Every review carries a score out of 10, what the game does well, what it does badly, and the kind of player it is actually for.
Nicky Case and Monplaisir's follow-up to Coming Out Simulator casts you as a person's anxiety itself, and dresses its ordinary tap-to-choose dialogue in an HP bar and "special attacks" — a clever costume for a mechanic that, underneath, never gets more demanding than a menu.
7.5 / 10
A full hex-based 4X Civilization-style builder rendered in 3D with Three.js — nation select, city founding, research, and a real production/turn loop confirmed working with real touch events on phone, with genuine multi-touch pinch-zoom and rotate implemented for the map.
8.4 / 10
An 18-level tap-and-swipe puzzle built for the 13-kilobyte js13k 2021 competition, where every square on a 6x6 board is either something you remove, something you push, or the black hole eating whatever falls into it — small, free, and entirely swipe-and-tap to control.
7.2 / 10
A faithful Atari Kaboom homage — a Mad Bomber drops bombs from a rooftop, and a bucket that follows your finger's exact horizontal position is all that stands between you and a miss. The simplest possible touch control on this shelf, confirmed here to track precisely.
7.5 / 10
A from-scratch, MIT-licensed rebuild of the real-time area-denial puzzle Microsoft shipped in its 1990s Entertainment Pack — wall off empty sections of the board to trap bouncing balls before they can wreck an unfinished wall, rebuilt here with dedicated touch controls rather than a mouse-only port.
7.5 / 10
A js13k 2024 entry that turns Minesweeper-style tension into a shared cauldron of arithmetic — you and an opponent throw ingredients into the same pot, and whoever pushes its putridity to 13 or drags it down to 0 first loses, all controlled with nothing but a single tap on a card.
7.5 / 10
A Wordle-style puzzle where you guess a hidden 8-bit binary number by entering it in decimal - built on a plain native number input that triggers the phone's own numeric keyboard, confirmed working correctly by touch - and openly described by its own author as the rougher predecessor to the more polished Hexle.
7.1 / 10
A snake-vs-snake clone that started as university coursework and grew a genuine neuroevolution-trained AI opponent, several multiplayer modes, and a touch d-pad built from a repurposed QR code image.
7.4 / 10
A clean Atari Go (first-capture) variant on a 9x9 board with a genuine AI opponent, whose tap-to-place stone controls were confirmed working by reading the exact board state before and after real touch input.
7.6 / 10
A clean 20x20 Gomoku (five-in-a-row) implementation with local two-player and a working CPU opponent, confirmed to place stones exactly where tapped - though the board runs a touch wider than a phone screen and needs a small scroll to reach its far edge.
7.2 / 10
A Vampire Survivors-style bullet-heaven squeezed into js13k's 13-kilobyte limit, starring a black cat that auto-attacks waves of enemies while you drag it around a flower field — and the drag-to-move touch control genuinely works.
7.5 / 10
A clean, correctly-implemented Checkers built on Frank Force's LittleJS engine, using the same tap-to-select-then-tap-to-move scheme as its Reversi sibling in this collection — confirmed working identically on phone touch and desktop mouse, with a real AI opponent that is noticeably slower to think than Reversi's but does complete every move tested.
7.4 / 10
A clean, fully-featured chess implementation from the LittleJS engine's own author, with tap-to-select-tap-to-move touch controls confirmed working end to end against a real AI opponent.
8 / 10
A seven-day roguelike about lobsterfolk, a stolen jewel, and a randomised deck of one-shot blessings instead of the usual inventory — and, unusually for a 2015 jam game, a touch control scheme that was clearly built rather than bolted on.
7.3 / 10
An ambitious, mostly-complete open-source Civilization-style 4X built on jQuery and Snap.svg — build cities, research technology, and manage diplomacy on a hex grid — with touch-native controls confirmed to advance real game state, though several menu features (Save, Load, Help, Settings) are unfinished stubs.
7.5 / 10
The overall winner of js13k 2025 — a black-cat revenge platformer with instant die-and- retry pacing, silhouette-and-shadow visuals ranked 1st in the competition for graphics, and a fully realised touch control scheme that this review confirmed works, once tested with an actual sustained touch rather than an instantaneous one.
9 / 10
Nicky Case's autobiographical dialogue game reduces every interaction to a single tap — read the next line, or pick what you're about to say — and uses dozens of quietly tracked choices to make that tap carry real weight through to a genuinely different final act.
8 / 10
A bubble-shooter with a real twist — you clear gems by matching them to their complementary color (red to green, orange to blue, yellow to purple) rather than an identical one, and holding the shot before firing grows the gem for a bigger, riskier play.
8 / 10
2048 reimagined as a physics puzzle — drag numbered cushions around a sofa instead of sliding tiles on a grid, and let soft-body physics decide how they settle and merge. A js13k 2016 entry judges called "amazing" for exactly that twist, with a drag control confirmed here to work cleanly on touch.
7 / 10
A gentle, ten-piece picture-matching memory game built by a father for his two-year-old son who struggled with a mouse - and it shows, in the best way, with real button-based cards that were confirmed to flip correctly under a real finger tap.
7.6 / 10
Salvatore Previti's js13k 2022 double winner packs constructive-solid-geometry hell, cascaded shadow maps and a genuinely functioning dual-thumb virtual joystick into 13 kilobytes — wrapped around a fetch-quest loop thin enough to finish in one sitting.
7.5 / 10
A js13k 2022 top-down survival shooter, in the vein of Vampire Survivors, that ships a genuine dual-virtual-stick mobile control scheme alongside WASD-and-mouse — both tested here and both work exactly as the developers' own instructions describe.
7.5 / 10
A faithful, dependency-free take on the Chrome offline dinosaur game, with dedicated on-screen JUMP and DUCK buttons whose collision detection was confirmed working correctly by touch - ducking under a jump-only obstacle produced a genuine, correct game over.
7.8 / 10
A tight, no-frills block dominoes game against a genuine alpha-beta search AI, with tap-to-select-then-tap-to-place touch controls that work correctly on a real phone.
7.6 / 10