Games that work offline
Most of these games fetch something — audio, a photograph, a trailer, a panorama — and without a connection they cannot deal a deck. Eleven of them do not, because their content is written into the site itself. Once the page has loaded, those eleven work on a plane, in a tunnel, or on hotel wifi that has decided today is not the day.
They are also, not coincidentally, the games with the most writing in them.
The eleven
Guess by Emoji, with 145 rebuses across four categories. Guess the Film Line, 46 lines. Guess the Opening Line, 45 novels. Guess the Plot, 52 films described badly on purpose. Guess the Slogan, 50 advertising lines. Guess the Language, 67 languages in their own scripts. Guess the Capital, 124 countries. Guess the Word, 87 definitions. Guess the Recipe, 63 ingredient lists. Guess Who Said It, 73 quotations — this one fetches portraits for the four faces when it can, and is perfectly playable without them.
Guess the Object is the eleventh and the odd one out: it fetches a photograph from Wikipedia when it can, and falls back to zooming into the object's emoji when it cannot. It is a worse game that way and a completely playable one.
Why they are the text games
There is no way to bundle a song, a trailer or a photograph of a shoebill without hosting it, and hosting it is exactly what this project does not do. So the offline set is the set whose content is text: sentences, lists, definitions, emoji.
That turned out to be a feature rather than a compromise. The text games are the ones where the writing is the game — where an ingredient list is ordered from least to most distinctive, or a film is summarised as an administrative event, or a language sentence has to be idiomatic enough that a speaker would recognise it. They are also the fastest to play, because there is nothing to load between rounds.
What still needs a connection
Leaderboards. A global board needs a Supabase project to talk to; without one, or without a connection, scores are written to the device and the board says This device instead of Global. Nothing is lost — a run always saves locally first, and the local board keeps your last fifty.
The remaining twenty games need the network for their media. If a game cannot reach its source it says so plainly and tells you what failed, rather than sitting on a spinner: the iTunes catalog could not be reached, or Wikipedia could not be reached for bird photographs. Individual rounds that lose their image are skippable for free.