August 9, 2026
It's easy to assume a game this simple must be recent — something built for a phone screen and a spare minute. Most of the games on this site are much older than that, and a couple of them are older than almost anything else people still play.
Tic Tac Toe is the extreme case. Grids with X and O-like marks have been found scratched into Egyptian roofing tiles dating back roughly 3,500 years, and a close variant called Terni Lapilli was popular in the Roman Empire. The rules have barely changed since, mostly because there isn't much left to simplify — three in a row is about as minimal as a win condition gets.
The sliding tile puzzle has a stranger, more recent story. In the early 1870s, a version of it swept the United States as a genuine fad, with people reportedly obsessing over it in offices and on trains, decades before anyone had a word for "viral." It faded, resurfaced in different forms over the following century, and the version here — solved by getting the tiles back in numerical order — is close to how most people encountered it as a physical puzzle.
Repeat the Pattern (often called by the name of a 1978 electronic toy) traces back to one of the first mass-produced games with a microchip in it. Before that, memory-sequence games existed only as things people did with words or gestures around a table. Putting one on a chip — able to generate its own random sequence and never repeat exactly the same game twice — was a small leap that a lot of later electronic games quietly borrowed from.
Reaction Timer is testing something even older than any of these games: mental chronometry, the science of measuring how long thinking takes. Researchers were timing human reaction to a stimulus with mechanical apparatus in the 1860s, decades before the lightbulb was practical, trying to work out how much of a reaction is muscle and how much is the brain deciding to move. The game version is a lot more casual than that research ever was, but it's measuring the same basic thing.