Frequently Asked Questions

Yes, and we mean free rather than free-to-start. All 20 games are fully playable with no paywalls, no locked difficulty levels, no coins, no energy bars, and no timers pushing you to pay. The site is funded entirely by display advertising. There is no premium tier, so there is nothing we are holding back from you.

No. Every game works immediately as a guest, including all four AI difficulty levels. An account only adds the extras: saved win/loss statistics, appearing on leaderboards under your username, multiplayer matchmaking, daily streak tracking for the Word Guess, and a personal history of replays. Guest games still count toward overall site statistics, they just aren't attached to a name.

No. Everything runs in the browser tab. There is no app, no plugin, and no download. If you want quick access, most browsers let you add the site to your home screen or bookmarks bar.

Any reasonably current version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge, on desktop, tablet, or phone. All games support touch input. One honest caveat: because the AI calculates on your own device, an older phone will search slightly less deeply than a desktop on the hardest setting, so the opponent is marginally weaker there.

Twenty in total. Strategy: Chess, Checkers, Connect 4, Reversi, Mancala, Gomoku, Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe, Dots and Boxes, Nine Men's Morris, Backgammon, Battleship, and Hex. Cards: Crazy Eights, Blackjack, and Solitaire. Puzzle: 2048, Minesweeper, Sudoku, and the daily Word Guess. Arcade: Snake.

Quite possibly - most of the games here exist because somebody asked for them. Send the request to admin@playversusai.com. Games with clear, well-defined rules and a sensible board size are the easiest to add well; anything requiring licensed artwork or trademarked names we have to skip.

Easy searches shallowly and injects deliberate randomness - it blocks immediate threats but misses two-move plans, which makes it right for learning. Medium plays consistently sound moves with no artificial mistakes. Hard searches deeply with full move ordering and punishes loose play straight away. AI Training runs at maximum depth within its time budget with no randomness at all. Full details are in How Our AI Works.

Neither. These are classical game-tree search engines - minimax with alpha-beta pruning, bitboards, transposition tables, and per-game evaluation functions. Nothing is sent to an external AI service. The engines are written in JavaScript and run in your browser.

No. In Battleship the AI does not know where your ships are; it uses a probability-density map to work out the statistically best square to fire at, which is why good play feels uncannily accurate. In card games it only reasons about cards it can legitimately see plus what your play reveals. No engine peeks at hidden state or gets extra dice rolls.

Because on AI Training it is genuinely very strong, and in the case of Connect 4 it is close to perfect. Connect 4 is a mathematically solved game where the first player wins with correct play, so if you let it move first on maximum difficulty, losing is the expected outcome rather than a sign you played badly. Drop to Hard or take the first move, and read the strategy guide for that game.

No. Each engine is stateless between games and does not adapt to your style. A practical upside: if you find a line that beats it, that line will keep working.

In the flagship games you can switch on a coach that evaluates positions as you play and tells you whether your intended move keeps, improves, or throws away your advantage. After the game, the review walks through every move and marks where the evaluation actually swung - usually a quiet move several turns before anything looked wrong. It uses the same evaluation function as the opponent, so it is the engine's genuine opinion.

Go to the multiplayer lobby and create a match. You can make it public, so anyone browsing the lobby can join, or private, which generates a six-letter room code you send to your friend. They enter the code and the game begins. Moves sync live in both directions with no refreshing.

Thirteen of the twenty: Chess, Checkers, Connect 4, Reversi, Mancala, Gomoku, Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe, Dots and Boxes, Nine Men's Morris, Backgammon, Battleship, Hex, and Crazy Eights. The solo titles - 2048, Minesweeper, Sudoku, Solitaire, Snake, Blackjack and Word Guess - are single-player by nature and compete through high-score tables instead.

If the other player disconnects or abandons the room, the match is ended and no result is recorded against you. If you had an optional move timer enabled and your opponent runs out of time, the game is resolved in your favour.

Yes - open the game and choose the local two-player option where available, and you can pass one device back and forth. Room codes are only needed when you are on separate devices.

Versus games rank players by total wins, counting victories against the AI and against human opponents alike. Solo games keep high-score tables instead - highest score for 2048, Snake, Solitaire and Blackjack, and fastest completion time for Minesweeper and Sudoku, where lower is better. See them all on the leaderboard page.

The most common reason is that you were playing as a guest, so there was no username to attach the result to. Scores are also only submitted when a game reaches a genuine finish - abandoning a game partway through does not record anything. If you were logged in and finished the game and it still hasn't appeared, email us.

Completed games in the recorded titles are saved with their full move history so they can be played back move by move with pause, speed control, and step navigation. The recent-games feed is public, so other players can watch your matches - useful for learning, and worth knowing before you play. Replays contain only the moves and the result, nothing else about you.

One five-letter word per day, the same word for every player worldwide, with six guesses and green/yellow/grey feedback. A new puzzle appears at midnight. Solving it on the day extends your streak; missing a day resets it. You need an account for the streak to be saved across devices.

Use the password reset link on the login form and a reset email will be sent to your registered address. If it does not arrive within a few minutes, check your spam folder before contacting us.

For guests, essentially nothing that identifies you - just anonymous game results contributing to site totals. For registered users we store your username, email address, a securely hashed password, and your game statistics. We do not sell personal data. The full detail is in our privacy policy.

Email admin@playversusai.com from the address on the account and ask for deletion. We remove the account, its statistics, and stored games within 30 days and confirm once it is done.

Advertising is what keeps every game free. Ads are placed in side rails on wide desktop screens and are deliberately kept away from boards, buttons, and anything you need to click. They are not shown inside play areas and never overlay a game in progress. If you ever find an ad blocking a control, please report it with a screenshot and we will move it. See the cookie policy for how advertising cookies are handled.

The games themselves are classic board, card and puzzle games with no violent or adult content. Blackjack is included as a card game played with chips for score - there is no real-money gambling, no purchasing, and no cash-out of any kind anywhere on the site. Accounts require a valid email address, and we ask that under-13s do not register, in line with our terms of service.

First try a hard refresh (Ctrl+F5, or Cmd+Shift+R on a Mac) to clear a stale cached file, which fixes it most of the time. If that fails, check that JavaScript is enabled and try a different browser to rule out an extension. Still stuck? Email us with the game name, your browser and device, and a screenshot.

On the hardest settings the engine really is calculating, and on complex positions in Chess or Backgammon that can take a few seconds - more on an older device. If a move never arrives at all, refresh the page and drop the difficulty a level; then let us know which game and position it happened in.

Please tell us - rules errors in particular get fixed quickly. Email admin@playversusai.com with the game, what you expected, and what happened instead. A screenshot or the sequence of moves that caused it helps enormously.