The Tavern Arcade is a solo passion project. No account, no launcher, no newsletter, no “sign up to continue”. You click a cabinet and you are playing. That is the whole thing.
Just me
I grew up on the browser game portals of the 2000s. You would find one at school or at a friend’s house, click something with a stupid name, and lose an hour to it. Nobody asked who you were. Those sites mostly went away, so I have wanted to have somewhere to relive those days.
What is on the shelves
There are 33 games in the arcade right now, all made in-house. Nothing here is licensed, bought in or reskinned from a template. Roughly what you will find:
- Retro action and platformers — Super Stuber, an eight-stage boss rush with wall climbs and charge shots, and PieGar, a side-scrolling brawler.
- Survivors-likes — Ashelon’s Survivors, Starblaze Survivors, Larry vs the Aliens. Short runs, long upgrade trees.
- Sandbox and survival — Voxel Frontier, a procedurally generated world with mining, skills, barrow dungeons and warden bosses.
- Score chasers — Stratos, Hyperdrift, Astro Hop, Chicken Long Surfing, Galaxanoids. The one-more-go shelf.
- Puzzles, racers, RPGs and oddities — Lexisphere, Croc and Roll Racing, Chimera Wilds, Meridian Thief, and a few things that do not sort neatly into anything.
You can filter the whole library by genre on the home page, or pull the lever and let the arcade pick something at random.
Desktop, phone and headset
Different games suit different screens, so the arcade has three shelves. 28 games run on desktop, 13 work properly on a phone with touch controls, and 11 are playable in VR straight from a headset browser — Quest, Pico, whatever you have. No store, no sideloading, no app.
Two games are online multiplayer: Starblaze Survivors and S.C.R.U.B.G. Both are drop-in, and neither asks you to register anything.
Leaderboards
Eleven of the games keep a public leaderboard. Type a nickname into the box on the home page and your scores start landing on the boards. That is the entire sign-up process, and the name is just a label — there is no password and no account behind it. Pick something you would not mind strangers reading.
The arcade also remembers your best score locally, so a game will tell you what to beat before you start.
All of it is free
Every game, every shelf, forever. Nothing is locked, there is no premium tier, and nothing costs money.
Hosting, domains and multiplayer servers do cost money though. Some of that will eventually come from ads on the site — kept out of the games themselves, so no pre-roll before a session and no interstitials between lives.
The rest comes from people who decide to chip in. There is a Ko-fi button in the bottom-left corner of the arcade. It is entirely optional, it unlocks nothing, and nothing is gated behind it. But it is genuinely appreciated, and it is a big part of how I get to keep doing this.
Say hello
Found a bug, want to suggest a game, think a boss is unfair, or just want to tell me something is broken on your phone? I read everything: tavernentertainmentgames@gmail.com, or through the contact page.