Every few weeks someone asks: "How do I practice coding without starting another tutorial?"
And someone always answers: play a programming game.
Good advice. So I went looking for a list.
There are plenty. I took 15 of the "best coding games" articles that rank on Google and checked every link in them. All 175.
15 were dead.
2 more pointed to the wrong game. ð
8 of the 15 articles had at least one.
Nobody did anything wrong. Most of those posts are years old, and here's the thing I didn't expect:
Programming games don't die loudly. The domain just quietly expires.
So I did the slightly unreasonable thing. I started my own list, with a script that checks every link every 12 hours. It's at 413 live games now.
Here's what the data says, and what I'd actually play depending on what you want to get better at.
The numbers (short version)
- 413 live programming games
- 65% are completely free
- 64% run in the browser. Nothing to install
- 57% don't even ask you to sign up
- 3,865 link checks in the last week
Two things surprised me.
Security is the biggest topic. 70 games are about hacking, CTFs and wargames. That's more than algorithms (56) and way more than any single language (JavaScript is next, with 31).
Assembly has more games than Python. 17 vs 14.
Real talk: game designers love assembly. Tiny instruction sets make great puzzles. Nobody is shipping a game about configuring webpack.
What I'd actually play
Not a "top 10". It depends on what you're stuck on.
1) "I write CSS, but honestly I'm guessing"
Flexbox Froggy, then Grid Garden. Then CSS Diner for selectors.
All free, all in the browser, no account. You'll stop trial-and-erroring justify-content until something looks right.
More: CSS games
2) "I know SELECT * and that's about it"
SQL Murder Mystery. You query a police database to catch a killer. It's exactly as fun as it sounds.
Then Lost at SQL or SQL Noir for more cases.
More: SQL games
3) "Git scares me a little"
Learn Git Branching. You type real commands and watch the commit tree change in front of you. It's the clearest way I know to see what rebase does.
Prefer cards to typing? Oh My Git!
4) "I want to get comfortable in a terminal"
OverTheWire Bandit. You SSH into a real server. Each level's password is hidden somewhere on the box, and you have to find it.
Free. No account. Just you and a shell.
When you finish, picoCTF is the natural next step.
More: security games
5) "I like puzzles more than tutorials"
Start with Human Resource Machine. It's assembly, but the registers are office workers carrying boxes. Gentle and very charming.
Then the deep end: TIS-100 and Exapunks. Paid desktop games, and the kind that ship with a PDF manual you'll actually read.
Want to go lower? NandGame (free, browser) has you build a computer from NAND gates. Turing Complete goes all the way to a working CPU, and then you program it.
More: assembly games
6) "I want my code to fight someone else's code"
Bot arenas. You write the AI, then watch it play against everyone else's.
- CodinGame: free, browser, lots of languages
- Battlesnake: your snake is a web server you deploy
- Screeps: an MMO where your JavaScript controls every unit, 24/7 (paid)
Fair warning: it's very easy to lose a weekend to this.
More: bot arenas
7) "I write JavaScript all day and want it to be fun again"
- Bitburner: a cyberpunk idle game where you write real JS scripts to hack servers. Free.
- Elevator Saga: program the elevators. It's harder than it looks.
- Untrusted: you escape each level by rewriting the game's own code.
8) "I have 5 minutes a day"
Daily puzzles, Wordle-style:
- Leetle: one short coding problem a day, in Python or JavaScript
- regexle: fill a hexagon so every row matches its regex
- Hexcodle: guess today's colour from its hex code
- 7 Coder Words: seven programming clues a day
More: daily games
9) "It's almost December"
Advent of Code starts on 1 December. You probably know that one.
You might not know there are more than a dozen others. Advent of Cyber (security, free) is a good one for beginners.
All of them: yearly coding events
The graveyard ðŠĶ
I keep a graveyard too. 13 games so far.
The most common cause of death? Not a dramatic shutdown.
The domain lapsed. 5 of the 13.
Some of the bigger names in there:
- Google Code Jam (2003â2023). Twenty years, then Google shut it down.
- Halite (2016â2020). Two Sigma's bot contest. Ended when the contest did.
- Vindinium (2014â2018). Four AI heroes fighting over gold mines.
The median game in the graveyard lasted 6 years.
Two lessons here:
- If you made a game people love, please turn on auto-renew for the domain. ð
- If you're learning: a list from 2019 is a list of links from 2019. Check before you bookmark.
Over to you
What's the game that made programming click for you?
And which one do you miss that's gone now?
Tell me in the comments. If it's still alive and I don't have it, I'll add it.
Disclosure: I run Breakpoint, the directory these numbers come from. The full stats are free to reuse with a link (CC BY 4.0): breakpoint.games/stats.
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