Open Recess, a Place for Learning Games
Open Recess is built around games where the learning is how you play. You read a word to win the battle, or work out the math to cast the spell. Every game here is free, and they’re made by parents, teachers and kids.
How Kids Learn by Playing
The best learning games tend to run the same loop, over and over, until a hard thing starts to feel easy.
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1. Want Something
A game starts with a goal a kid actually cares about: catch the monster, feed it, open the next land. In Sparkle Kingdom, it’s making friends with a shy creature.
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2. Try It
The only way forward runs through the skill. In Munch, kids feed a hungry monster the right sound, starting with m, s and a.
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3. See What Happens
The game answers right away, and a miss can teach. A wrong answer in Polymancer tells you what went wrong, so you know what to fix.
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4. Go Again, a Bit Harder
Practice comes back around and the challenge grows. Sparkle Kingdom brings back the words a kid misses, and its words get harder in later lands.
That’s what we hope to see in every game here. Makers list their own games and nobody reviews them first, so please take a look before handing one to a younger kid.
Made Here
We host a few games ourselves too. Two of them were designed by two kids.
Where the Games Come From
Anyone can make a learning game now. A parent describes what their kid is stuck on, an AI writes it, and an hour later there’s a game. Most of those games never leave the family that made them. Open Recess is where they go next.
The Promises
- Free. Every game listed here is free to play. No paywalls, no “premium”.
- No pop-ups, no tracking. We don’t run analytics or ad scripts, and we only set a cookie if you choose to sign in. The only numbers we keep are an anonymous play count per game, a click count per sponsor card, and a daily count of how many times each page was opened and which site linked to it. None of it can tell one visitor from another.
- Sponsors, kept tasteful. A few sponsor cards sit on the shelf, marked “sponsor”. Each one is a picture and a link that a person approved, never an ad network. Get one.
- No account needed. You add a game with a link and a few taps, and you get a private edit link. Favorites and your age filter save on your device. If you’re a grown-up or a teen and want them on every device, you can sign in with an email code. We keep your email, your favorites and that filter, nothing else, and you can delete it all from your account page.
- You host it. Your game lives wherever you put it, and you can change it whenever you like. We only keep the link, a few tags, the thumbnail your page already advertises, and whatever you write about it for its page here.
- Open catalog. The whole list is public at
/catalog.json, released CC0. Build your own front-end, mirror it, fork it.
What Belongs Here
Games that help someone learn something, that are free and kind to kids: no pop-up ads, no sign-up walls, no collecting children’s data. If something slips through, tap ⋯ on its card and report it. It hides after a few reports until a person looks. Vibe-coded or hand-coded, both are welcome. See the FAQ for more.
Want to Make a Game?
Grown-ups can sign in and tell us an idea. An AI asks a few questions and writes it up, and we build a few each week. Your words and voice go to Google’s Gemini AI to run that chat. If you send your idea, we keep the write-up, the chat’s words and your email, never the recording. Your account also notes that you said you’re 18 or older. The terms give Open Recess ownership of the idea, so read them first.
Run Your Own
The whole site is one small Cloudflare Worker, a SQLite table and plain HTML. No framework, no build step. Fork it, point it at your own catalog, or pull in ours from /catalog.json. More shelves is the point.
- Cost
- 💸 Free to play, every game
- Pop-ups
- 🚫 None
- Tracking
- 🙈 None
- Account
- 🔓 Not needed
- Made by
- 🧑🏫 Parents, teachers and kids
- Hosted
- 🏠 By each game’s maker
- Catalog
- 📖 Open, released CC0