TINY DESK GAMES

Tiny games that live on your desk.

Little desktop toys that run on the real clock. A plant grows over real weeks. A candle burns in real hours. A tortoise is still walking to Lisbon while your computer sleeps. They idle at about 0% CPU, never nag, never punish, and never phone home. Close them and they are gone.

one small exe, no installer about 0% CPU no accounts, no network real time is the clock

Browse the games

The games

Free downloads for Windows, each a single small exe in a zip. Tips are welcome, never required.

Window Box: three pixel plants on a sunny windowsill

Window Box

A pixel flower box that grows real plants in real time.

Plant a seed and water it on the real plant's real schedule: basil every two days, a cactus every three weeks. Blooms press into an album, and a Home shelf mirrors your actual houseplants so the droplet doubles as a watering reminder. Nothing ever dies.

Linux soon
Stray Cat: a pixel cat beside a food bowl, with a tipped trinket

Stray Cat

Feed a stray at your screen edge until it moves in.

A cat shows up at the edge of your desktop. Put food out daily and over real weeks it sits closer, then stays, then sleeps curled up nearby. Miss a day and nothing is lost; trust just pauses. When it finally moves in, a new stray with a new coat appears.

Linux soon
Tortoise Post: a tortoise walking through a meadow, day 22 of 42 to Lisbon

Tortoise Post

A tortoise walks real-world-long journeys. Weeks-long ones.

Pick a destination and the tortoise starts walking: two weeks to the lighthouse, six to Lisbon, six months to the Garden of Eden, where a mate is waiting and the next generation begins. Every arrival files a postcard into the album. It walks whether you watch or not.

Linux soon
Candle: a lit pixel candle on a wooden holder

Candle

Light one for someone. It burns in real hours.

Type a one-line dedication and light it: a tealight burns for four hours, a pillar for a full day, even while the app is closed. The candle floats alone on your desktop, no window around it. What remains melts into a small wax sculpture kept on a shelf with its dedication, forever.

Linux soon
Worry Stone: a rose quartz pebble floating on the desktop

Worry Stone

Rub a stone for months until it polishes glassy.

A rough pebble floats bare on your desktop. Stroke it slowly while you think; twenty hours of idle fidgeting takes it from rough to glassy, with a soft stone-on-cloth grain under your hand. Finished stones retire to a shelf. Rarities run from river stone to a one-in-300 opal.

Linux soon
Pop Sheet: a sheet of pixel bubble wrap with a golden bubble

Pop Sheet

Endless bubble wrap. A fresh sheet every morning.

Forty-eight bubbles, one satisfying ASMR pop at a time, synthesized so no two pops sound quite the same. Clear the sheet and a new one appears with your clear time; the all-time fastest is remembered. A golden bubble hides on some sheets, and patterns unlock as lifetime pops add up.

Linux soon
Bubble Drift: soap bubbles drifting up over a starfield desktop

Bubble Drift

Soap bubbles drift up your desktop. Pop them mid-air.

A few times an hour a small wave of bubbles rises across whatever you are doing, then leaves you alone. The sky is click-through everywhere except the bubbles themselves and never steals keyboard focus. A little wand puffs a wave on demand; goldens, giants, and doubles hide in the mix.

Linux soon
Sill: six pixel houseplants on a windowsill

Sill the tool of the family

Your real houseplants, on a pixel windowsill.

Not a game: no unlocks, no points. Put your actual plants on the sill from a glossary of 36 species with real care profiles, tune each pot to your real watering schedule, and the quiet droplet tells you when something needs water. Care cards cover light, misting, and pet safety.

Linux soon
Balloon Strings: three colored balloons on strings wearing name tags, one drooping toward the floor

Balloon Strings the notifier

A balloon floats up when a tool needs you back.

Not a game: any tool that can write a file, a Claude Code hook, a build script, a cron job, drops a tiny json file into a watched signals folder and a balloon rises in the corner wearing that project's name on a tag. One balloon per waiting file, colored and shaped from the label, drooping lower the longer it waits until you pop it or just delete the file. Never steals focus and sits at 0% CPU until a signal actually lands.

Linux soon
Music Box: an open wooden music box with its brass cylinder and steel comb visible

Music Box

Wind the crank, lift the lid, hear it actually play.

Turn the crank in slow circles and the spring banks real playback seconds; lift the lid and the pinned cylinder plays until the wind runs out, tempo sagging honestly near the end. Public-domain tunes and new comb voices, steel to kalimba to celesta to glass, unlock as lifetime playtime adds up. A pin editor lets you compose cylinders of your own and keep up to eight.

Linux soon
Windchimes: six wooden tubes hanging and swaying from a bracket on the desktop

Windchimes

Chimes that ring to the rhythm of your own typing.

Work normally and a breeze builds over the rack; stop and the air settles back to stillness inside a minute. The only signal is a single yes-or-no timing check twice a second: there are no input hooks of any kind anywhere in this program, so it can prove it never sees a keystroke. Bamboo, glass, brass, and shell sets unlock as lifetime listening hours add up.

Linux soon
Hot Air Balloon: a small striped balloon rising through wisps of cloud

Hot Air Balloon

Your own focus is the burner. Work, and it climbs.

Sustained work lights the burner and the balloon slowly lifts through its lane; stop and it cools, drifting back down with no penalty and nothing lost. Like the rest of the family it only ever reads whether you're active, timing and nothing else, with no input hooks anywhere in the code. Push a long enough session and once a day you'll break above the clouds for a quiet golden moment; envelope skins unlock as lifetime airtime adds up.

Linux soon

Bigger toys, coming to Steam

The same house rules, grown into full games. No downloads here yet.

Waddlings icon: a pixel duck on water

Waddlings Coming to Steam

A pet duck that lives on your desktop, with cosmetics to collect and proper multi-monitor manners.

Unbox Factory: warehouse market panel and conveyor belt

Unbox Factory Coming to Steam

An idle unboxing factory docked to the edge of your screen. Crates ride the conveyor into the shredder for a safe payout, or into your hands for the gamble.

Ant Jar: a walnut cabinet with a colony's tunnel network in sand

Ant Jar Coming to Steam

A walnut ant-farm cabinet. The colony digs a real tunnel network through the sand over days, in wall-clock time. Drop a sugar cube to steer the dig.

Zombie Watchtower icon: a watchtower in a dark forest under the moon

Zombie Watchtower Coming to Steam

An idle survival strip above your taskbar. Zombies cross the desktop, your watchtower holds the line, and the forest evolves in response. It never demands attention and never punishes absence.

Drillbit icon: a yellow pixel drilling rig with a conical bit

Drillbit Coming to Steam

A drill in the corner of your screen that digs one tile deeper on every key you press and every click you make. Ore fills a limited hold you sell off for upgrades, and geodes, rivers and gas seams show in the rock below before you reach them.

The rules these games follow

Every free download on this page obeys the same laws. They are the whole point. The bigger games headed to Steam keep the spirit, but not every law survives at that size.

Real time is the clock

Growth, trust, journeys, and burns run on the wall clock. Closed time counts exactly like open time, so there is nothing to keep open and nothing to babysit.

About 0% CPU

No frame loop. These apps redraw when you touch them and about once a minute otherwise. Your fans will not know they are running.

No punishment

Nothing dies, decays, or resets. No streaks, no daily caps, no energy. A thirsty plant just waits for you.

Never steals focus

Nothing pops up, raises itself, or grabs your keyboard. Popping a bubble mid-sentence never costs you a keystroke.

No background anything

No startup hooks, no services, no network calls, no accounts, no analytics. Ever.

Close it and it is gone

One small exe and one small save file. Uninstalling means deleting the file.