A Shelf, Not a Store.

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 and a click count per sponsor card.
• 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, and the thumbnail your page already advertises.
• 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.

Making Your Thumbnail

When you add a game we look for your page’s og:image tag, the same one that makes link previews in messages. No tag? We take a few screenshots of your game and you pick one, or you upload your own picture. To add the tag, put a 1200×630 picture next to your game and this line in your <head>:

<meta property="og:image" content="https://your-site/thumbnail.png">

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.

Made Here

We host a few games ourselves too: Munch, a phonics game that teaches reading one sound at a time, and Jack & Rafa’s Cards, a jump-and-catch reading game designed by two kids.