TINY DESK GAMES
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.
Free downloads for Windows, each a single small exe in a zip. Tips are welcome, never required.
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.
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.
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. Look in and you catch it mid-stride. Reach somewhere new and it walks into an empty frame first, unhurried, before the postcard rises to meet it and files itself into the album. It walks whether you watch or not.
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.
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.
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.
Soap bubbles drift up your desktop. Pop them mid-air.
Bubbles arrive on their own unhurried schedule and drift up across whatever you are doing. Only so many share the air at once, counted across every monitor rather than per screen, so popping one makes room for the next to come along. The sky is click-through everywhere except the bubbles themselves and never steals keyboard focus. A little wand puffs a handful on demand; goldens, giants, and doubles hide in the mix.
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.
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. Open it late and everything still waiting is already in the air, each balloon sagging by however long it has been asking. Never steals focus and sits at 0% CPU until a signal actually lands.
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.
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. Real local weather is an optional extra, off until you switch it on and type a place: once it's on, actual wind there sets the baseline breeze while your own typing still adds the gusts, and only a city-level rounded coordinate ever goes out, to Open-Meteo, at most once an hour. Bamboo, glass, brass, and shell sets unlock as lifetime listening hours add up.
Your own focus is the burner. Work, and it climbs.
Sustained work lights the burner and lifts the balloon up its lane along the bottom edge of your screen: the flame answers within seconds, and a solid stretch of focus carries it to the top in around seven minutes. 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 deep enough session and once a day you'll break peak altitude for a quiet golden moment; envelope skins unlock as lifetime airtime adds up.
The Steam-bound games you can already play. Bigger than the toys above, free while they grow.
A drill in the corner of your screen that digs one tile deeper on every key you press and every click you make. Sell the ore, climb a deep upgrade tree, and roll crates for hulls, drill bits and trails you can fuse into starred versions. Then leave Earth: a zoomable galaxy of planets, stars and stranger things, each with a real core to reach and crack. Digging listens to your keyboard and mouse globally while it runs; that is the whole game, and nothing leaves your machine.
The same house rules, grown into full games. No downloads here yet.
A pet duck that lives on your desktop, with cosmetics to collect and proper multi-monitor manners.
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.
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.
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.
Every tiny game above obeys all of these laws. They are the whole point. The bigger games headed to Steam keep the spirit, but not every law survives at that size: Drillbit, for one, listens to your typing, because typing is how you dig.
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.
No frame loop. These apps redraw when you touch them and about once a minute otherwise. Your fans will not know they are running.
Nothing dies, decays, or resets. No streaks, no daily caps, no energy. A thirsty plant just waits for you.
Nothing pops up, raises itself, or grabs your keyboard. Popping a bubble mid-sentence never costs you a keystroke.
No startup hooks, no services, no network calls, no accounts, no analytics. Ever.
One small exe and one small save file. Uninstalling means deleting the file.
Any tip opens Ko-fi in a new tab. The download starts either way.