No download · No account · Runs on your device
Share one phone or one laptop, two of you either side of the screen. No opponent around? Bo will take the other seat.
Every game in the catalogue offers the first two of these, and any game can start the third.
Put the phone or the laptop down between you and take a side each. A touch belongs to the side it began on even when a finger crosses the middle, and in games played turn by turn the board turns round so that whoever is to move reads it upright.
Every game has a bot, at three strengths. It sees no more than you can see and moves no faster than a person could; what changes from one strength to the next is how far ahead it looks and how often it slips.
A tournament is seven games drawn at random, one match each, beginning with the game you started it from. Whoever takes four has won it, and the line-up is written down on your device, so it survives closing the tab.
One game from each of twelve categories, so what you meet first is twelve different sorts of game rather than twelve versions of one.
DuelBox is a collection of small games for two people sharing one screen, and nothing else. There is no feed, no levels to work through and no lobby full of strangers: two of you, one device, and a game that finishes soon enough to play another.
Every game is built to the same shape, which is what makes the second one easy. The countdown, the score, the pause, the result and the rematch all come from the site rather than from the game, so they sit in the same place and behave the same way whichever one you opened. Esc pauses, for either player, in all of them.
Rounds run from about 20 seconds to about 7 minutes.
There is no app to download and no store to visit. A link opens a game, and the person you hand the device to needs nothing at all: no account, no invitation, no name typed in.
Nothing you do here is sent anywhere, because there is nowhere to send it. The games, the bots and the physics all run in your own browser, and there is no advertising, no analytics and not one cookie.
What the site remembers, it remembers on your device: your favourites, the games you played last, your settings, and the running head-to-head between the two seats. The settings page shows the lot, writes it out to a file, and erases it in one press.
One limit, stated rather than buried. Your browser keeps a copy of the site and of each game after you open it, so a game you have played before opens and plays with no connection at all — but a game you have never opened is not on the device, and needs one. The catalogue marks which games are here, in words.
Every category has a page of its own that says what its games have in common, names the ones worth starting with, and tells you how long a round of one takes. If you know the sort of game you want before you know which game, that is where to begin.
Nothing needs setting up. Pick a game and it opens, or read the guide first — it is one page, and it covers the seats, the keys, and what to do when there is only one of you.