Games Like Neal.fun

One row per page on Neal.fun, with the game here that comes closest to it. Where nothing here comes close, a section further down says so.

Halfway is the nearest thing here to Draw a Perfect Circle: one movement made by eye, then measured exactly. A paper shape, such as a croissant, a rubber duck or the boot of Italy, lies on a cutting mat, and you drag one straight line across it. The pieces slide apart and show their shares of the area to the decimal, 49.6 against 50.4, and a dashed line marks where the perfect cut along yours would have been. Other rounds ask you to cut off exactly a third or a quarter, or spin the shape. Ten shapes a day come from a library of 755, the same ten for everyone, and a perfect cut is worth 1,000 points.

Loomlarge is about the same wonder as The Size of Space and Size of Life, real things at their real sizes, but it is a game rather than a tour. Each round shows two things, such as a Tyrannosaurus and a London bus or the Titanic and the Eiffel Tower, and asks which is taller, longer or simply bigger. Make your call and a steel tape runs out of its case, both things land on it at true size, and the view pulls back until the bigger one fits. Every size is a published measurement checked against a second source, and a wrong call never ends your day: you still see all ten pairs.

Majority Rules is for anyone who enjoys Let's Settle This. Each day brings ten light, divisive questions, the internet's great debates among them: is a hot dog a sandwich, is cereal a soup, one horse-sized duck or a hundred duck-sized horses? Drop your sugar cube in the jar you agree with, then everyone else's jelly beans pour in, and every one of them is a real answer from someone who played that day. Majority Rules is a poll with no leaderboard: nobody is right or wrong, and what it shows you is how everyone answered.

Older Than You Think is for anyone who liked finding out, in Who Was Alive?, which famous lifetimes overlapped. Each round splits the screen between two things, such as McDonald's and West Side Story or Toy Story and the first iPhone, and you tap the one that came first. Both dates appear with the gap in years and a short fact about why. Every date comes from Wikidata and was checked against Wikipedia, and anything with a disputed date is left out. A run is twelve pairs, once a day, with 16 seconds for each. Whenabouts asks the same question another way: place eight things a day, from bubble wrap to the Oreo, on timelines of dated events.

How Many shows you a bird's-eye photo of beach umbrellas, sheep, boats or a stadium full of fans for a few seconds, and you guess the count, the way you guess a price in The Auction Game. A grease pencil then ticks every item while the true count rolls up, and once your five are in you see everyone's guesses and the crowd's median, which is often uncannily close. Dejahue shows a color for five seconds and has you mix it again from memory, and memory tends to make colors brighter than they really were. Darkroom gives you a time, such as 8.5 seconds, to count in your head with no clock on screen, while the room does its best to throw your count off.

Some pages on Neal.fun have nothing like them here, and we would rather say so: there is no crafting game like Infinite Craft and no password puzzle like The Password Game. For those, Neal.fun itself is the place to go.

Pick Halfway if Draw a Perfect Circle is your favorite, Loomlarge for the scale of things, Majority Rules to vote on debates and see how everyone answered, Older Than You Think for the surprises of history, and How Many, Dejahue or Darkroom to test one sense against everyone else's. Every result can be shared as a short emoji card for a group chat. More in the same spirit is on the estimation games, crowd games and brain games pages, and among our games like Size It Up and games like Dialed.