About SyphonGames

SyphonGames is a free HTML5 games portal built in Australia. One idea runs through the whole thing: a game should start the moment you want to play it.

Why the site exists

Browser games used to be the easiest thing on the internet. Somewhere along the way they picked up launchers, accounts, newsletters and consent walls. We stripped all of that back out. Click a card, the game loads in an iframe, you play. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to install.

How it works

Every game here is a self-contained HTML5 bundle. Developers or our team upload the game as a ZIP, the server checks the contents, extracts it into its own folder, and serves it from a path of its own. Your browser does the rest. There is no plugin and no Flash emulator. The only games that talk to our server at all are the ones you can play with someone else, and they do it for the reason below.

• Sandboxed. Each game runs in a locked-down iframe. It cannot reach the rest of the site or read anything outside its own storage.
• Checked before it lands. Uploads are validated for structure, file types, and size before a single byte is written to disk.
• Sorted automatically. New games are matched against the category keyword lists, then reviewed by hand.
• Nothing loads until you ask. Game pages hold the iframe back until you press play, so browsing does not eat your data.

Playing with someone else

A growing part of the library can be played with other people: golf, pool, ten-pin bowling, air hockey, blackjack, Texas Hold'em, a combat motorbike race, an air race, car football, fishing, a creature-collecting RPG, a slapping duel, a disaster party game, co-op survival in the woods, a potion-brewing town and a battle royale. Usually one of you opens a room and gets a short code and the others type it in; a few games will also find you a public match. There is nothing to sign up for here either.

These are the games that use our server, and they use it as a referee. When two people play, somebody has to be trusted about whose turn it is, where the balls stopped and what the score is, and letting each player's own browser decide is how two people end up looking at different boards. So the server referees: it checks what each browser reports, decides whose turn it is and keeps the score. In the larger co-op games one player's browser runs the world, and the server carries the messages between you, checking their size and rate. Rooms carry no accounts and no free-text chat, and they are forgotten soon after the last player leaves.

Where the games come from

Almost every game here was designed, built and published by SyphonGames, and made for this site rather than collected from somewhere else.

A few are by independent developers, and each is credited by name on its own page. The rules for those are simple: the developer keeps their game. Their copyright, their code, their art. Hosting a game here does not hand us ownership of it, and any developer can ask us to take theirs down at any time, for any reason, without explaining themselves.

Developers who would rather not be named can say so, and their game is published under the SyphonGames name instead of theirs. That is a credit line, not a transfer. An anonymous game still belongs to whoever made it.

Submitting a game

We take HTML5 bundles that run without a server. Package the whole game as a ZIP with index.html at the top level, keep every path relative, and make sure it works when opened from a plain folder. If it needs an API key, a backend, or a specific domain, it will not run here.

• ZIP under 200 MB, with an index.html entry point
• Relative paths only, no absolute URLs to your own host
• A 480×270 cover image helps, though we will generate one if you skip it
• No trackers, no ads injected into the bundle, no cryptominers
• Everything the game needs inside the ZIP: games by other developers run with no internet access, so an engine loaded from a CDN will not start

Ready to send one? Submit it through the contact form, with the ZIP attached or a link to it, and tell us how you would like to be credited. Every file is checked when it arrives, and a game is only ever tried out in a sealed-off preview before we decide whether to host it. There is nothing to sign in to.

Getting in touch

Takedown requests, submissions, bug reports and complaints all go to the same place: our contact form. Takedowns are actioned first.

If a game is broken, tell us which browser and device you were on. "It doesn't work" is true of everything at some point and helps us find nothing.