For the past few months I've been running a small experiment: how far can one person get shipping a complete little games site with nothing but HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript?
The result is Pop Recall — a collection of 25 tiny browser games, live at https://poprecallgames.com. No downloads, no sign-ups, no build step. Every game is a static page; you open it and you're playing in seconds.
Why vanilla?
Mostly constraints I chose on purpose:
- Instant load. No engine runtime, no bundles. A game page is just HTML + a script.
- It runs anywhere. Desktop, phone, an old laptop — if it has a browser, it plays.
- It ages well. No dependencies to rot. The pages I shipped in October will still work in five years.
What's in the collection
Memory games (the namesake Moon Pairs — balloons light up, fade, and you tap the ones you saw), word games (Word Search), quiet classics (Tic Tac Toe, Brick Break, Mini Pool), and small oddballs like Potion Pour, Rail Switch and Slide Eight. Each game lives in its own folder with one index.html, wrapped in a shared shell: navigation, one ad slot, and stats kept in localStorage.
A tiny Node build script assembles the static output, and a test suite (155 checks at last count) verifies every page — links, meta tags, canonical URLs, the ad slot, even an "English-only content" rule.
The embarrassing part
For the first two weeks the whole site shipped with noindex,nofollow and a robots.txt that blocked everything — a leftover from playtesting that nobody remembered to switch off. Zero search traffic, and the data agreed. I fixed that this week: real domain, canonicals, a sitemap, Search Console, the works. Distribution, not code, turned out to be the hard part. The games are also listed on a few browser-game directories (Foundplay, SlowDen, and counting).
Full disclosure
This is a solo, learn-in-public project built with heavy AI assistance — code, copy and a lot of the grunt work. That's part of the experiment: can an AI-assisted one-person project run a small games site end to end? So far the honest answer is "the site, yes; the audience is still loading."
Try it
I'd genuinely love feedback from other builders and players: which game keeps you longest, and what would you add as game #26?
Top comments (1)
Same path here: I build pass-and-play board games as plain static pages. Two things bit me once the collection passed about 20 games. First, small shared bits (settings, sound, dark mode) had been copied into every game, so one fix meant 20 edits; moving just those into one tiny shared script was worth it even without a framework. Second, iOS Safari can clear saved data for sites you haven't visited in a while, so if any games keep progress it's worth suggesting "add to home screen". Which of the 25 gets played the most? My guess is Moon Pairs.