Quick games for a five-minute break

A short break is a funny length for a game. Most games are happy to start in five minutes, and a lot fewer are happy to let you go after five.

The games below are free, they start quickly, and each one has a point where it ends by itself. That last part matters more to me than how fun they are, because a break game that keeps you for half an hour has stopped being a break.

One of them is BattleTabs, which I make. It's at the end, and I'll say up front that I'm biased about it.

Wordle

Wordle is the obvious one, and it's obvious for a good reason. According to Wikipedia, each day there's a new five-letter word and you get six tries to guess it. Green means the right letter in the right spot, yellow means it's in the word somewhere else.

There's only one puzzle a day, so you can't play five in a row even if you want to. The NYT help page says you don't need a subscription for the daily game, and the next word arrives at midnight in your timezone.

It was made by Josh Wardle, and The New York Times bought it in early 2022. It's still the same small game.

Connections

If Wordle is over in two minutes, Connections is a good follow-up. You get 16 words and sort them into four groups of four that share something. The groups are colour-coded by difficulty, yellow easiest and purple the trickiest, as the help page puts it.

Finish with fewer than four mistakes and it counts as a win. The help page also says the daily puzzle is free and you don't have to sign in.

Like Wordle, it's one puzzle a day, so you get it done and you're back at your desk.

A chess puzzle or two on Lichess

You don't need time for a full game of chess to get a bit of chess in. A puzzle is one position and one question: find the best move.

Lichess has a lot of them. Its open database lists more than six million rated and tagged puzzles, so you're not going to run out. Lichess describes itself as completely free, with no registration and no ads.

Six million puzzles does mean the game never tells you to stop. If you only have a few minutes, I'd pick a number before you start, say three, and close the tab when you get there.

The Chrome dinosaur

This one's a bit of a joke, but it counts. If you use Chrome, there's a game hiding in it. Wikipedia notes that members of Chrome's UX team made it in 2014, and it shows up on the "no internet" page.

You don't have to wait for your Wi-Fi to drop. Type chrome://dino into the address bar and press space. The dinosaur runs, you jump over cacti, and the game ends the first time you misjudge one. For a break, that's not a bad thing.

A battle in BattleTabs

This is mine, so take it with that in mind.

BattleTabs is a turn-based sea battle, a bit like Battleship. You each have four ships and try to sink the other fleet first. Ships have special abilities on a cooldown, so there's a little more thinking than "B4, miss".

The reason it fits here is the length. A Normal battle gives you 30 seconds a turn, and our how to play page says most matches are over in 3 to 8 minutes. That's one battle per break, with an actual winner at the end.

There's also a slower way to play that suits breaks even better. Long battles give you up to 24 hours a turn. You can take your turn on one break, close the tab, and see what your opponent did on the next one.

It's free. On desktop it runs in the browser with nothing to install, and on a phone you can get it from the App Store or Google Play.

If you'd rather play against someone you know, I wrote up some two-player games you can play with a friend online too.

If none of these are quite right, the test I'd use for any other game is simple: can you tell, before you start, roughly when it'll be over? If you can, it'll probably fit your break.