Arcade Noir is eight original browser games that reset at midnight, made by Amit Sharma. There is no app to install, no account to create, and nothing to pay.
The idea
The best daily games have one thing in common: everybody plays the same puzzle on the same day, so the result is worth talking about. That is the whole design here. Eight games, deliberately unlike each other — a pure logic grid, a data quiz, a card game and five arcade runs — because the person who loves one of those often cannot stand the others. If you are not sure where to start, the guide to which game to play sorts them by what you want from the next two minutes.
Who makes it
One person. I build and run a small group of reference data sites — activity energy costs, food nutrition and flight distances — and Outrank started as a way to make those tables argue with each other. The other seven games followed because a single daily game is a habit that lasts about a week, and eight is a habit that lasts.
Every game here was written from scratch for this site: the generators, the solvers, the physics, the artwork and the sound. Nothing is licensed, embedded or bought in, which is also why the whole site loads without a single external request.
How the puzzles are made
Every puzzle is generated from the date itself using a deterministic pseudo-random sequence. That means your browser and mine build the identical puzzle independently, with no server involved at all. It also means nobody can be served an easier board than anybody else.
Two of the games carry a guarantee that costs real computation to make:
- Starlock grids are run through an exact solver that counts solutions. Any grid with more than one valid arrangement is discarded and regenerated. Every published grid has exactly one answer, reachable by deduction alone.
- Summit deals are run through a search that looks for a complete winning line. Deals that cannot be cleared are thrown away. If you get stuck, a route existed.
The five arcade games — Updraft, Perimeter, Ricochet, Blitz and Dash — cannot be "verified" in the same sense, because there is no solution to check. What they get instead is a fixed course: the gate sequence, the wave composition, the block stacks, the target order and the obstacle layout are all derived from the date, so nobody is handed an easier run than anybody else and a score is a genuine comparison.
Why there is no leaderboard
A global leaderboard on an anonymous browser game is a scoreboard of whoever cheats hardest, and it would require accounts, a database and somewhere to store your results. None of those exist here. The comparison that does work is the one against a specific person you know: a challenge link carries the exact run and your score, so they play what you played and see the head-to-head the moment they finish. That is the whole social layer, and it fits in a message.
How the site is paid for
Advertising, through Google AdSense, at a density chosen to keep the games playable: nothing sits within touching distance of a playfield, nothing appears in a result screen, and no game is gated behind an ad or an interstitial. There is no paid tier, no cosmetic shop and nothing to buy. The privacy page covers what advertising means for your data, which is: your gameplay never leaves your device either way.
Where the numbers in Outrank come from
Nothing in Outrank is invented, estimated or scraped from a commercial source. Every figure is reproduced from a public-domain reference dataset:
- 2024 Adult Compendium of Physical Activities — metabolic equivalent values for physical activity, converted to kilocalories for 30 minutes at 75 kg.
- USDA FoodData Central, SR Legacy release — food energy, sugar and protein per 100 g. Published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and in the public domain.
- OurAirports — airport coordinates, released to the public domain, used to compute great-circle distances.
Those same datasets sit behind our reference sites for activity energy costs, food nutrition and flight distances, which is where to go if you want the tables rather than the game.
What "multiplayer" means here
There is no lobby and no server. When you finish a puzzle, the result screen builds a link that contains the exact puzzle and your score, encoded into the link itself. Whoever opens it plays the identical board and sees the head-to-head the moment they finish. It works in any chat app, it works offline afterwards, and it never sends your result to us — because there is no "us" to send it to.
Accessibility
Game feedback never depends on colour alone: every state also carries a shape, symbol or label, and the palette avoids the red/green pairing that causes trouble for the most common forms of colour blindness. Starlock is fully playable with a keyboard. Motion respects your system's reduced-motion setting, and there is a toggle for effects and sound on every game.
Contact
Found a broken puzzle, or want to tell me a strategy I missed? Reach me through amit.marketing.