Fifty-seven games, built one file at a time
Hi!!! I'm Mohammed Tauheed, and I build and manage everything at Cliko Games. Born in Mysuru, India, I currently live and work from Toronto, Canada. Every game here is a single HTML file — no engine, no framework, no build step. I wanted games to be accessible and help people learn, that is why each game is designed this way. That sounds like a developer's detail, but it is the player's experience: nothing to download, no loading bar, because the rules, the board and the opponent arrived with the page. Each game carries seven difficulty steps, Beginner through Cyborg.
What I have decided not to build
No account. No install. No paywall, no locked difficulty, no energy timer. Your best times and streaks are written into your own browser and never leave your machine — I do not collect them, and there is no server to send them to. That costs me the global leaderboard every portal has, and I have made peace with it; I explain why on the studio page.
I do take customer feedback seriously: the promise to make a website for the people who play and enjoy it. So if you need anything changed — or even a new game, let me know — I will start working on it.
The daily challenge is the spine of the site
Every game has one: a seeded board that is identical for every player in the world that day, so a time set in Mysuru and one set in Toronto measure the same puzzle, not two lucky deals. It turns over on your own device's date. That is the reason to come back tomorrow.
Genres, and what Global Games actually means
The catalogue is sorted by genre — puzzle, card, word, math, strategy and the rest. Global Games is the shelf I would defend hardest: Basra, Cuarenta, Klaverjas, Schnapsen, Scopa, Briscola, Dou Di Zhu — each written to the rules people actually play at home in their city, not one card engine wearing seven costumes. In Basra, a Jack sweeps the entire table, because that is what a Jack does in Beirut. I write up where they came from on the blog.
Where the writing lives
When a game raises a question worth more than a rules panel — why Minesweeper's first click is never a mine, why an Italian forty-card deck ranks the three above the king, what actually separates five solitaires that look identical — I write it up properly in the guides. They are the closest thing this site has to a workshop notebook: what I found in the source, what I got wrong the first time, and the card history I had to go and learn before I could build the game at all.