Tooston is a small studio building browser versions of games that have already proven themselves: air hockey, Snake, Ludo, and more to come. Every one is free, opens in a browser, and needs no download and no account.
Why classic games
Classic games have a property modern ones spend enormous effort trying to buy: everybody already knows how to play them. There is no tutorial, no onboarding funnel and no first session where the player is learning instead of enjoying themselves. You look at an air hockey table and you know what to do.
They also happen to be a near-perfect fit for a browser. These games were designed under constraints far tighter than a modern browser imposes. Snake originally ran on a phone with a display of a few thousand pixels, so running them on the web is not a compromised port. It is more room than they were built for.
Why no accounts
Because an account is a tax on wanting to play. Every step between a link and a game loses people: the download, the sign-up, the email verification, the friend code. For a game you want to play for four minutes with someone, that overhead costs more than it could possibly return.
The side effect is that there is nothing about you for us to lose. No email, no password, no profile, no purchase history. Preferences live in your own browser. It is the strongest privacy position available, and we got to it by not building something rather than by building something.
The games
- Play Air Hockey. Real-time 1v1 and a 4-player round table. Published at playairhockey.com.
- Play Snake Online. The classic, plus a multiplayer arena. Published at playsnakeonline.com.
- Play Online Ludo. 2–4 players, dice, and a long memory. Published at playonlineludo.com.
Each game has its own domain so it can be linked to directly and found on its own terms. This site is the hub: it is where the games are collected, compared and written about.
How the multiplayer works
Games that should be real-time are real-time. When you join an online match, your moves are transmitted over a live connection and appear on your opponent's screen as you make them, with no turn timer and no polling. One client simulates the shared physics and distributes the result, which is what keeps the score identical on both screens.
Matchmaking is deliberately simple: you join a queue, and the moment another player is waiting, you are both dropped into a match. There are no lobbies to create, no codes to exchange and no friend lists. If you want to play a specific person, you both open the game at the same time.
Turn-based games like Ludo work differently and better on poor connections, because a dropped moment costs nothing because the game is waiting for a decision, not a position.
How we build
- No ads. Not a business model we want, and it is the main reason browser games have a bad reputation.
- No dark patterns. No fake urgency, no streak guilt, no notification begging. The reject button on our cookie banner is exactly as prominent as the accept button.
- Touch as a first-class input. Not a desktop game with tap handlers added afterwards.
- Fast. Pages are server-rendered and mostly static. A game of Snake should not have a loading bar.
What's next
More classics, built the same way. If there is one you want to see, whether that is chess, checkers, pool or dots and boxes, tell us; that list is genuinely how we decide what to build next.
Contact
Questions, bug reports, feedback or requests: support@velovid.net, or use the contact page.