Games you can play with no internet, straight from the browser

Short answer

Yes, browser games can work entirely offline — once installed, a game with a service worker caches its code and assets and runs with no connection at all. That covers puzzle games, chess, and anything that does not need a live opponent. What cannot work offline is real-time multiplayer, since it depends on a server relaying moves. Install from the browser, load once while connected, and the game is available on a plane or in a tunnel.

What makes a game genuinely offline

The game logic must run on your device rather than a server. Chess puzzles, sudoku, minesweeper variants and most single-player games qualify naturally: the rules are code, and the code is cached.

Live multiplayer cannot. A game that relays your move to an opponent needs a connection by definition — no amount of caching changes that. Some games handle this gracefully by offering a local mode against the computer, which does keep working.

Mentioned here: ♟️ Lichess, 🕳️ PROXX, ✏️ Excalidraw

The install step people skip

Installing does not by itself make a game work offline — it gives it a window and an icon. The offline capability comes from the service worker, and the worker fills its cache on your first visit.

So the sequence that works is: install, open once while connected, let it load fully, then it is available offline. Skipping the second step is the reason people conclude that offline mode does not work. It is the same rule as for any installed web app.

Where browser games hold up

Chess is the strongest case: the board, the engine and the puzzle set are all local, so a full chess platform works on a flight with analysis included.

Puzzle and logic games do well because they are small and rule-based — the entire game often fits in a few hundred kilobytes.

Where they struggle is anything with large assets: a game with hundreds of megabytes of textures will either refuse to cache or evict itself when the operating system needs space.