PaperArcade

Issue No. 01 — Fall 2026 — Free circulation

Games printed fresh daily

Five small games, built by hand, set in a 1960s print shop. No downloads, no accounts, no ads. Your scores are pressed into your own browser and nobody else's.

Pull a game from the press Check your record

The lineup

Five presses, each printing one game. Pick a machine and it starts immediately.

Lexicon

A daily five-letter word, six guesses, printed letter by letter. The word changes at midnight, free play opens whenever.

Word game~5 minDifficulty: steady

Play Lexicon

Drift

Slide numbered plates across the bed and merge the ones that match. Every press doubles a tile. Stop at 2048 if you can.

Puzzle~10 minDifficulty: quiet creep

Play Drift

Minefield

Three sizes of paper, each seeded with hidden mines. Numbers count what touches them. One wrong tap and the whole sheet goes.

Logic~7 minDifficulty: your pick

Play Minefield

Pairs

Printer's stamps are shuffled face down. Flip two at a time and clear the sheet in as few moves as you can spare.

Memory~4 minDifficulty: easy to hard

Play Pairs

Signal

The machine taps a tone, then asks you to echo it back. Each round the sequence grows one note longer and the tempo climbs.

Memory~3 minDifficulty: rising

Play Signal

House rules

Short, boring, and worth reading once.

  1. Nothing is collected

    Every score, streak, and best time is written to your browser's local storage. There is no server holding a copy, and clearing your browser data clears the record.

  2. Nothing is sold

    No ads, no popups, no "premium" tier. The games end when you stop playing them, which is the correct behavior for games and, frankly, for most things.

  3. Everything is readable

    Full keyboard support on every game, visible focus states, screen reader labels, and a reduced-motion mode that stills the whole press room when your OS asks for it.

  4. Everything is inspectable

    Hand-written HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, no frameworks, no build step. The source is public, the comments are real, and the colophon lists the whole toolkit.

From the colophon

Paper Arcade is one portfolio project among several, but the only one that answers back when you poke it. The design language is borrowed from job printers and riso studios: two inks, one paper, thick rules, and type that does the talking. The motion is a single kinetic headline and a lot of small, honest presses.

Read the full colophon