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.
A genuinely inventive fusion of Minesweeper's number-deduction logic with roguelike combat and permadeath — the viral 2025 hit that earns its reputation, confirmed here to work cleanly with a tap for its core loop of revealing tiles and fighting whatever's under them.
8.5 / 10
A polished Connect Four with a genuine minimax AI opponent, player-vs-player, and even an AI-vs-AI spectator mode, with tap-to-drop touch controls confirmed working straight out of the box.
7.7 / 10
A js13k 2019 idle-clicker about drafting dwarfs and sending them off for gold that quietly turns into a small, scripted story about ale, hubris and an orbital strike — ranked 8th out of 200 entries that year, let down on phones only by a viewport that never learned to resize itself.
7 / 10
A match-3 puzzle with levels, objectives, and power-ups, whose drag-to-swap touch gesture was confirmed working correctly - after discovering the game requires a genuine held drag rather than two separate taps to swap tiles.
7.4 / 10
A genuinely deep Vampire-Survivors-style bullet-heaven built entirely from emoji — five heroes, five stages, a coin economy and a shop, all requiring nothing from a touchscreen but movement, since every weapon fires itself. Confirmed here by watching the hero's own position update in exact response to a drag, not just by finding a virtual joystick on screen.
8 / 10
A cute ladybug platformer whose real achievement is a genuine multi-touch control scheme — drag to run, drag up to climb, and a second finger tapped mid-hold to jump — built from the ground up for touchscreens rather than retrofitted onto a keyboard game.
7.1 / 10
A clean, actively-maintained implementation of the classic drop-a-piece board game, where the entire touch interface is a single tap on any column — confirmed by testing to drop a piece and trigger a working AI response on both a phone and a desktop mouse.
7.5 / 10
A genuine falling-block puzzle-fighter in the Puzzle Fighter mold — four characters with their own attack patterns and damage multipliers, chain combos that send garbage across to the opponent's board, and a real AI to play against.
7.5 / 10
A tightly-built platformer about jumping on bugs and throwing breakpoints to fix a crashing codebase, runner-up at js13k 2016 — and one of the few platformers on this shelf whose on-screen touch controls were tested and actually move, jump and throw correctly.
7.8 / 10
A proper 9x9 Go implementation — real capture rules, territory scoring, komi, an AI opponent — built on Frank Force's LittleJS engine, and one of the few board-game conversions on this shelf where the touch design was actually thought through rather than bolted on: taps snap to the nearest intersection within half a cell, so near-misses still land correctly.
7.5 / 10
A small, polished isometric cube-sliding puzzle from Global Game Jam 2016 — one tap per move, a strict move limit per level, and 30 levels across three difficulties, confirmed to play identically on a touch phone and a desktop mouse.
7.5 / 10
A Wordle-style puzzle where you guess a hidden 16-bit hexadecimal number instead of a word, with a full on-screen hex keypad confirmed working correctly on a real touchscreen after a hidden third-party hit-counter was stripped out.
7.8 / 10
A 13th-century trading-guild idle game built entirely from plain DOM buttons, dropdowns and text fields — and every single one of them was confirmed working correctly by actually founding a base and building a lumbermill through real touch.
7.1 / 10
A traditional match-3 puzzle whose drag-to-swap mechanic runs through the exact same code for a finger as it does for a mouse — confirmed by triggering a real match through the precise function calls a touchstart-then-touchend gesture invokes, and watching the score move.
7.1 / 10
A dodge-and-auto-fire tube shooter from the very first js13kgames competition in 2013, where a drag of the thumb on either side of the screen steers a low-poly ship through a ring of incoming obstacles — simple by any modern standard, but its touch and desktop controls both still work exactly as described thirteen years later.
7 / 10
A tight little path-finding puzzle built for js13k 2025's 13-kilobyte limit, where a mother cat has to reach her scattered kittens before running out of moves — genuinely good on-screen controls, once you give the buttons a real press rather than a flick.
7.3 / 10
A polished, full-featured Klondike solitaire with undo/redo and a hint solver, whose drag-and-drop touch controls were verified by computing a real legal move from live board state and confirming it landed exactly right.
7.9 / 10
A tap-to-conquer hex strategy game in the mould of Slay, open-sourced by its solo developer as the retired predecessor to the actively developed Konkr — genuinely playable with thumbs once two packaging bugs in the public repo are fixed, but unmaintained since 2022 and explicitly a legacy edition even by its own author's account.
7 / 10
A clean, faithful word-guessing puzzle with an on-screen QWERTY keyboard confirmed to type and submit guesses correctly, letter by letter, when tested against real touch input at exact key positions.
8 / 10
A small, atmospheric WebGL coin-diving game built for js13k 2017 - steer a boat, dive for sunken coins, and watch shadows fall across a rippling sea, with touch controls confirmed working once you find the right side of the screen.
7.1 / 10
A colourful, competently-built Bejeweled-style match-3 whose drag-to-swap touch controls were verified with a real computed winning move, confirmed against the live score and grid state.
7.6 / 10
A snowball rolls down a mountain, day turns to night and back again, and a single tap drops a trampoline to bounce it over kids, bears, foxes and rocks. A js13k 2017 entry that placed 15th of 100 on craft and art alone, with a touch scheme confirmed here to be as simple as the premise promises.
7.5 / 10