Nimble AxeAbout Nimble Axe
Why this exists
Most free game sites want something from you first. An account. An email address. A tolerance for a video ad before a round of checkers. We wanted the opposite: open a page, play immediately, close the tab, owe nothing.
So Nimble Axe is four games and the pages the law requires, and almost nothing else. It loads one stylesheet and one script. Nothing is compiled, nothing is bundled, and while you play, not a single line of code from anyone else is executing in the page.
How the games are actually built
Everything runs on your device. That is not a marketing line — there is no server here to run it on.
- Checkers uses a minimax search six plies deep with alpha-beta pruning. Captures are compulsory, as in the standard rules, and a multi-jump can be played square by square rather than in one leap. A piece that reaches the back rank is crowned and its turn ends there, even if another jump looks available.
- Four in a Row searches five plies. It will take a win when it has one and block yours when you have one, which you can test in about thirty seconds.
- Snake runs on a 17 × 17 grid. It starts at 145 milliseconds per step and takes 3 milliseconds off each time you eat, bottoming out at 73 milliseconds after the twenty-fourth dot. Fill every square and the game ends as a perfect run rather than looping forever looking for somewhere to put the next apple.
- Blocks is a ten-wide, twenty-tall well. Clearing one row scores 100, four at once scores 800, and both are multiplied by your level, which climbs every ten lines.
Your best scores and win counts live in this browser's local storage. We cannot see them. Clearing your browser data erases them for good, and nothing can be restored, since we never held a copy in the first place.
What we deliberately don't do
Nimble Axe takes no payments and awards no prizes. Nothing here is a wager, and winning converts into precisely nothing of cash value. The games exist for entertainment and for the pleasure of getting better at them.
We do not run analytics today. If that ever changes, the Cookie Policy and Privacy Policy get updated in the same edit that adds the tag, and the analytics category in your cookie choices stays off until you switch it on yourself.
Honest about the gaps
Nobody has audited this site for accessibility. Snake and Blocks run on a timer and cannot be played slowly. The checkers opponent is decent but not strong, and a patient player will beat it. We would rather write that down than let you discover it and wonder what else we glossed over.
Reaching a person
Write to [email protected], or use the Contact page, which opens your own email app with the message already drafted. Our operator details and mailing address are on that page. If you found a bug, tell us which game and which browser — that is usually enough for us to reproduce it.