Free online games for seniors that play in your browser. You don't need to download anything or sign up. Large-print Sudoku, Solitaire, Word Search, Mahjong and more.

9 points•xmasdong•1 day ago•1 comment•

1 comment

xmasdong1 day ago
I noticed that the sites hosting the games older people love most (solitaire, sudoku, word search) are the most hostile to them: tiny text, drag-and-drop that punishes tremor, surprise timers, sign-up walls, and ads that cover the board. So I built the opposite.

Design decisions that turned out to matter:

- 22px base font, one-tap scaling to ~35px, everything reflows. High-contrast mode is a real palette, not a filter. - No dragging anywhere. Solitaire is click-to-pick, click-to-place. Arthritis and touchpads killed drag. - No timers, no "game over", unlimited undo/hints. The audience doesn't want pressure; they want to finish. - No accounts. Game state and preferences live in localStorage. There's nothing to log into and nothing for me to leak. - Every puzzle has a "Print this" button. Ad-supported competitors will never do this (print = user leaves the page), but this audience genuinely solves on paper. The fun part: browsers drop box-shadows and backgrounds when printing, so the sudoku grid lines had to become real borders. - The "Cat Sudoku" puzzles (the LinkedIn-Queens genre) are generated with a solver that guarantees exactly one solution reachable by pure deduction — it rejects boards that require guessing. - The mini crosswords are 5×5 double word squares — every row AND column is a common word. A backtracking search over a curated 1,087-word list yields exactly 8 of them. - Static Astro site, vanilla JS, no framework on the client. Lighthouse 100/100/100 on the home page.

There's also a "set it up for a parent" flow: you pick their games and text size, send one link, and everything's pre-configured when they open it — no account on either side.

Happy to answer anything. Especially interested in accessibility feedback from people who've watched a parent fight a tablet.

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

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