About Brainy Bunch

An independent project · Last updated 26 July 2026

Brainy Bunch is a free arcade of 23 short brain-training games that runs entirely in your browser. There's no download, no install, no account requirement and nothing to buy. It was built by one person, by hand, in plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Why it exists

Most "brain training" sites are either a thin wrapper around a handful of Flash-era games, or a subscription funnel that locks the interesting part behind a paywall. The goal here was different: a genuinely large set of small, well-made games that a child or an adult can pick up for two minutes, that gets meaningfully harder as you improve, and that never asks for money or personal details.

Each game targets one specific mental skill rather than being generically "brainy" — mental arithmetic, digit span, visual search, response inhibition, spatial planning, spelling, foreign vocabulary recognition. The how-to-play guide names the skill each game exercises and gives a real strategy tip for it, because knowing why a game is hard is part of getting better at it.

How it was built

There is no game engine, no framework and no build step. Every game is a single JavaScript file that registers itself with a small shared engine, which handles state, saving, progression, levels, badges, pausing and the per-game API. The whole front end is a few hundred kilobytes of code.

A few decisions worth mentioning, because they shape how the site feels:

• Everything is procedurally generated. No game ships a fixed list of levels — mazes, arithmetic problems, card layouts, scrambles and patterns are all created fresh each round, so nothing can be memorised or looked up.
• Difficulty follows your level. Math Sprint starts with addition and works up to two-digit multiplication and division. Echo Pads begins at a later round and flashes faster. Snake starts quicker and accelerates harder. Memory Match grows from eight pairs to twelve. The games you played at level 1 are not the games you'll play at level 15.
• Rewards are tied to time and skill, not to which game you pick. Each game declares roughly how long an honest run takes, and payouts are scaled so every game earns about the same coins per minute. This matters more than it sounds: without it, the fastest game is always the most efficient one to grind, and players end up ignoring the other twenty-two.
• It works offline. After your first visit the entire arcade is cached on your device via a service worker, and you can install it as an app. Only the optional online features need a connection.

How progression works

Finishing a game earns coins and XP. Coins unlock new games and cosmetic colour themes. XP raises your level, which increases the difficulty of every game. Spending coins in the theme shop never re-locks anything, because unlocks are based on what you've earned in total rather than your current balance.

Later games also ask you to have tried a few different categories — logic, memory, math, language, reflex — rather than purely to have earned more coins. That's deliberate: exploring the arcade should be the way forward, not grinding one favourite.

Once you've tried every game, you can Rebirth: your coins, XP and unlocks reset, but you keep your badges and themes and every future reward is permanently boosted. Your leaderboard position is safe when you do this, because the board ranks lifetime coins earned — a number that never resets — so prestiging raises your ceiling instead of costing you your rank.

Playing with other people

An optional free account adds cloud saving across devices, a place on the global leaderboard, per-game Mini Records, and live head-to-head battles where two players race through the same game. Battles stake a small number of coins, so entering one is a real risk rather than free upside.

There is deliberately no chat and no user-generated content of any kind. Players cannot send each other messages, names, images or text. The only thing that passes between two players is the outcome of a race. For a site that children use, that felt like the right trade.

Design principles

• No dark patterns. No streak-loss warnings, no notifications nagging you back, no countdown timers on rewards, no pay-to-win.
• Nothing to buy. Coins are earned only by playing and spent only on cosmetics. There is no shop with real money in it.
• Minimal data. Playing needs no personal information at all. Even with an account, we ask for a username and password and nothing else — no email, no name, no age, no location. See the privacy policy.
• Fast and light. The whole site is a fraction of the size of a typical web page, which matters if you're on phone data.
• Accessible where possible. Every game works with touch, and the keyboard-driven ones support both arrow keys and WASD.

How it's funded

Brainy Bunch is free and is supported by advertising. That's the whole business model — there are no subscriptions, no in-app purchases and no premium tier. Advertising lets the games stay free for everyone, including people who would never pay for a puzzle app.

Get in touch

Found a bug, want to suggest a game, or spotted something wrong in one of the guides? I'd genuinely like to hear about it — see the contact page.