The games you only ever watched someone play
Film and television are full of invented games that nobody can sit down to. We build them properly: real rules, real opponents, playable in your browser. First up is Strategema.
Now playing
Two games, both finished, both free, with everything you need to learn them.
STRATEGEMA
Four eight-by-eight grids stacked in the air, thirty-nine units a side, and exactly two actions a turn. You win by capturing the enemy Command Core, by holding seventy per cent of the board, or by cutting their Core off from supply entirely.
Play a friend across one screen, or take on two computer opponents: the android who plays not to win but not to lose, and the grandmaster who plays for pure speed.
LATTICE
A jumble of metal rods hangs in the air, and every one of them is an edge of a single perfect solid that has been pulled apart. Move one rod end per turn until the structure resolves.
Nothing is captured, nothing is destroyed, nothing is ever added — the whole game is choosing which rod to move, and where. Four solids, from a four-rod warm-up to a thirty-rod icosahedron.
Learn it in four minutes
Three ways in, depending on how you like to learn. All of them free, none of them require an account.
The tutorial
An animated walkthrough with a recorded voice. Every rule, in order, with the board moving as it is explained.
The walkthrough
Twelve diagrams you can poke at. Switch pieces, toggle the auras, watch a unit lose supply and go dark.
The rulebook
The whole thing in writing, from deployment to the combat arithmetic, plus a one-screen quick reference.
What this is
A game appears on screen for ninety seconds. Two characters play it, someone wins, and the credits roll. Nobody ever writes the rules down, and you can never play it yourself.
That is the gap this arcade fills. Each game here is rebuilt from what the story actually showed, with the missing rules designed properly rather than hand-waved, until the thing is genuinely playable and genuinely good. Then it goes in your browser, free, with no account and no install.
To be clear: these are original recreations, built by fans from what appeared on screen. They are not official, not affiliated with and not endorsed by any rights holder. Where a game's name belongs to someone else, ours carries its own.
Next on the cabinet
What is being built, and roughly in what order.