About Antics

What this site is for

Antics exists for one specific moment: a group of people are together, there is a lull, and somebody says “shall we play something?” The thing that usually happens next is ten minutes of scrolling through a listicle of thirty games, none of which anybody actually starts.

So every game here opens and plays in the browser on whatever phone is nearest. There is no account to make, no app to download, and no email to hand over. You can be playing about fifteen seconds after you land, which is roughly the length of the lull.

Who makes it

One person, working on it in evenings and at weekends. That is worth saying plainly because it explains both the good and the bad here: the writing on every page is written rather than generated, and the games are ones that have actually been played — but the catalogue grows slowly, and a reply to an email may take a few days.

Antics is not a company, has no investors, and is not a front for a larger publisher. It is a site that hopes to eventually pay for itself through advertising.

How games get chosen

Two filters, applied in this order. First, is it a game a real group would actually play on one phone passed around a table — not a game that only works with a games master, a printer, or a shopping trip beforehand. Second, do people actually look for it? A game nobody searches for is a game nobody finds, and a free site cannot afford to build those on instinct alone.

Several genuinely good games have been measured and then not built for exactly that reason. Several obvious ones have been deliberately left out because the honest version of the page would have been an article pretending to be a tool.

The writing

Every game page carries a section on how to play it well, and that section is the part worth reading. Rules are table stakes — every site has them. What is harder to find is the house rule worth adopting, the mistake groups reliably make, and an honest answer to “is this the same as the game I am actually thinking of?”

Where a recommendation comes with a caveat, the caveat is on the page. The large-group guide says which games stop working above a certain size. The classroom guide argues againstone of the site’s own games for classes. That is deliberate: a recommendation with nothing it will not recommend is an advertisement.

What it costs

Nothing, and there is no paid tier at the moment. The plan is to run ordinary display advertising once the site is big enough for a network to take it — never between a tap and its result, and never on a screen being shared to a room. Until then it costs a domain and a hosting bill and earns nothing, which is a normal stage for a site this young.

Corrections and contact

If a page here is wrong — a rule stated badly, a platform detail that has changed, a game that does not work on your phone — that is worth knowing about, and it will get fixed. Write to hello@playantics.com, or see the contact page.