TableNight/Guides/Nothing to download
Guide · How it works
Group games with nothing to download: what you actually need
"It runs in your browser" sounds like a marketing line. It is worth explaining what that means in practice: which devices you need, how much it uses, what is left on your phone afterwards and why the first game of the evening is sometimes slow to start.
Why there is no app
A group game has exactly one enemy, and it is not boredom: it is the friction before you start. If playing with eight people requires eight people to download the same application, wait for it over a shared connection, create an account, verify an email and remember a password, the evening is over before it began. And there is always somebody whose storage is full, somebody who would rather not install anything in another person's home, and somebody whose phone is too old for the required version.
A game that lives in a web page skips all of that. It opens with an address, behaves identically on Android, iPhone, tablet and computer, and leaves nothing installed when the evening ends.
What you need, concretely
| The board | A device with a big screen and a browser: laptop, desktop plugged into the TV, tablet, or a smart TV with a browser. No power required — these are web pages, not 3D games. |
|---|---|
| The players | One phone each in most cases. Cronos needs only one phone per team; Full Moon genuinely needs one per person, because the role is secret. |
| The browser | Any browser from the last few years: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, Samsung Internet. There is no "recommended" browser. |
| The connection | Any. Only a few lines of text travel at a time: it works on mobile data, even with six or seven people on one hotspot. |
| Storage on your phone | None. Nothing is installed. |
| Accounts | None. You join with a name chosen on the spot and a room code. |
How much data it really uses
Less than people expect. During a game your phone exchanges very short messages: the answer you chose, the vote, your name. Most of the traffic is the initial page load, and that is a few hundred kilobytes at most. A whole evening uses far less than two minutes of video.
Battery impact is normal: the screen being on costs more than everything else combined. If the evening is long, the practical advice is not technical — keep a charger in sight.
Adding the site to your home screen
If you play often, it is worth putting an icon on your phone. It installs nothing, takes up no space and never updates in the background: it is a shortcut that opens the site full screen, without the address bar. Visually there is no difference from an app.
- On iPhone and iPad: open the site in Safari, tap the share button (the square with an arrow) and choose Add to Home Screen.
- On Android: open the site in Chrome, tap the three-dot menu and choose Add to Home screen (in some versions it is called Install app).
Hosts should definitely do this: having the icon on the device that acts as the board saves the moment where you hunt for the address while ten people wait.
Why the first launch of the evening is slow
This is the one genuine trade-off of working this way, and we would rather explain it than hide it.
Three games out of four do not run on this site: they run on separate servers, hosted on a service that shuts them down when nobody is using them. That is what keeps costs low and lets us charge nobody. The flip side is that the first person to open a room in the evening has to wake the server up, and that can take up to a minute.
The fourth is Waterbomb, and it is worth explaining because it is the limit case of this whole argument. That game is played on one phone that goes round a circle: there are no rooms to keep alive and nothing to keep in sync between devices. With no shared state to look after, the server has no work to do — so it opens instantly, and from the second time it starts up with no connection at all.
To make the wait less pointless we did two things. First: as soon as you open a game page, the site sends the server an early signal, so it is often already awake by the time you click — the green dot in the corner of the game cards means exactly that. Second: if the server is still asleep, instead of leaving you on a blank page a waiting screen appears with a few tips, and you are taken in automatically as soon as the server answers.
In any case the delay only affects the first person. Everyone who joins afterwards finds the server already running and waits for nothing.
What happens to your data
This is the part where sites usually go vague, so let us be specific.
- There is no account. No email, no password, no profile. The name you type on the way in exists only so the other players in that room can recognise you.
- The game lives in memory. Names, answers and votes last as long as the game and disappear when the room closes. There is no history of past games.
- The site remembers one thing. Your preferred language, stored in your browser. It does not identify you and never leaves your device.
- The advertising is Google's. The site is paid for by the ads shown on these pages; advertising cookies follow your consent choices. The full details are on the privacy page.
One piece of advice that always applies: the name you choose when joining a room is visible to every other player. If you are playing with people you do not know, use a nickname.
The limits, stated honestly
A browser game is not magic and it has three real limits.
- You need a connection. There is no offline play: in a mountain hut with no signal, these games do not work.
- The first launch is slow, as explained above.
- If the browser closes, you rejoin. Just reopen the site and re-enter the room code; the game in progress carries on without you for the time you are away.
In exchange: nothing to install, no accounts, no updates, and anybody can join with what is already in their pocket. For an evening among people, that seems like a good deal.