Browser games you can install

Chess, and why it suits the format

Lichess is the best argument for installable browser games. The board, the engine, the puzzle set and the analysis all run on your device, so a flight is a good time to use it rather than a dead zone. It is free, open source, and has no tier above it.

The one thing it cannot do offline is play a human opponent — that needs a server relaying moves, and no amount of caching changes it.

Puzzles and logic

PROXX is a minesweeper variant built by Google's own team specifically to demonstrate what the format can do; it is small, fast, and works with no connection. Soodoku and Sudoku Play cover sudoku, 2048 covers the sliding-tile itch.

These games suit installation because they are tiny. A rule-based game often fits in a few hundred kilobytes, so caching the whole thing costs nothing.

Cards and word games

52Cards.app and TrySolitaire cover solitaire, mahjong and the rest of the deck. Wordle is the word game everyone already knows, and it does keep working with the network cut.

One caveat, because it is the kind of thing lists get wrong: of those three, only Wordle showed a working offline cache when we tested it. The two card apps install correctly and then need a connection — fine on a sofa, not on a plane. Card games suit a home screen for other reasons: short sessions, no account, nothing to download.

What will not work offline

Anything real-time and multiplayer. Anything streaming assets as you play. And anything with hundreds of megabytes of textures, which will either refuse to cache or be evicted when the operating system needs the space.

The sequence that does work: install, open once while connected so the cache fills, then it is available. Skipping that second step is why people conclude offline mode is broken — more here.

Frequently asked