About Expedition Games

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Expedition Games is a small, independent studio making original games you can play right in your browser — free, with nothing to install and no console required.

What we make

Every game here is built from scratch: the rules, the art, the writing, the code. We're drawn to games that are simple to start and hard to put down — a daily puzzle you finish over coffee, a sliding-tile board you keep shaving seconds off, a trail west where every choice costs something.

Nothing needs a download. Open a link, and you're playing on whatever you already have — a phone on the bus, a laptop at lunch.

We're deliberately unfashionable about a few things. There are no daily energy meters, no countdowns designed to pull you back, and nothing to buy. A game either earns another go on its own merits or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, that's a design problem for us to fix rather than a habit to engineer around.

How a game gets made here

Most of them start as a rule scribbled down and argued with. If the rule still seems interesting a week later, it becomes a rough playable thing — usually ugly, usually in a single HTML file — and gets played until it's either obviously fun or obviously not. A surprising number don't survive that step, which is the point of taking it early.

What survives then gets built properly: the art drawn, the copy written, the edge cases chased down, the whole thing tested on a phone with one hand on a bus. That last part matters more than it sounds. A puzzle that's elegant on a desktop and fiddly on a phone is just a puzzle that's fiddly, because that's where most people will actually meet it.

Balance gets treated as a real engineering problem rather than a feeling. The larger games have simulation harnesses that play thousands of runs against the rules to find the difficulty cliffs and the dominant strategies before a player has to. It's unglamorous work, and it's the difference between a game that's hard and a game that's unfair.

What we care about

Fair difficulty. A game can be brutal, but it shouldn't cheat. In Flyer, for instance, the obstacle generator is built around an invisible corridor that's always physically flyable — the game gets harder by narrowing your margin, never by placing a gap you couldn't have reached. A run that ends should always be one you could have flown.

Respecting your time. These are games you can finish, put down, and come back to. Progress saves on your own device so a closed tab doesn't cost you anything, and nothing punishes you for missing a day.

Playable by anyone, anywhere. No install, no account, no console. If you have a browser, you have everything you need. Accounts exist only for people who want their results to follow them between devices, and they're entirely optional.

Original work. The classics we build — a sliding-tile puzzle, a paddle game — are public-domain ideas that belong to everybody, but the art, code, writing and feel are made here rather than licensed in.

The games

Each playable game has a full guide — rules, controls and the tactics that genuinely help — on the games page. And the workshop notes behind them — how the encounter deck for the trail game is designed, what four hundred thousand simulated runs said about its difficulty, how the cover art paints itself — are collected in Field Notes.

Who's behind it

Expedition Games is the work of Keegan Faulkner, an independent developer who designs, writes, illustrates and builds each title. It's a one-person shop by choice: small enough that every game gets made the way it should be, and finished only when it's actually fun.

Working this way has obvious costs — things ship slowly, and there's nobody to hand the boring parts to. It also means there's no committee between an idea and the version you play. If a puzzle's third clue is weak, it gets rewritten that afternoon. If a game turns out not to be fun after two months of work, it gets shelved rather than shipped, which is a decision a bigger studio often can't afford to make.

Why the browser

The browser used to be where you found the strangest, most inventive games — the ones made by one person with an idea, that you'd stumble into and play for an hour without ever installing anything. Then that whole world moved behind app stores and download gates, and a lot of it simply stopped being made.

We think a link is still the best distribution a small game can have. Nothing to approve, nothing to update, nothing to uninstall — you send someone a URL and they're playing in seconds, on whatever's in their hand. That constraint shapes the games too: they have to be small enough to load instantly and clear enough to understand without a tutorial, and both of those tend to make a game better rather than worse.

What's next

More games, and more of the ones already here. The last run of small classics — 8 Ball, Ninja Jump and Hangman — has shipped now, so the bench holds the three larger ones above: Westward, Homesteader and Remnant. They'll arrive when they're genuinely good rather than when they're merely finished.

Got a question, a bug, or an idea for a puzzle category? Get in touch — we read everything, and a fair few of the daily boards started as somebody else's suggestion.